Heather Mac Donald - The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture

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Thank you to the Thomas W. Smith Foundation for its generous support of my fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, as well as for its support of this volume. I am also indebted to the Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation, Peter Farrell, Randy Kendrick, the Dian Graves Owen Foundation, and the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation for helping to make The Diversity Delusion possible.

In 1903, during Americas darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization. I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.

Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the eighteenth-century British orators whom, at age twelve, he had discovered in a collection of political speeches. Every opportunity afforded me, for a time, was spent in diligently perusing [ The Columbian Orator ], Douglass recalled in his autobiography. This volume was, indeed, a rich treasure, he wrote, for the speechesby Richard Sheridan, Charles James Fox, and William Pittgave tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance.

How much things have changed.

In 2016, a student petition at Yale University called for dismantling the colleges decades-long requirement that English majors take a course covering Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth. Reading these authors creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color, complained the students. Sadly, there was by then nothing remarkable in this demand. Attacks on the canon as an instrument of exclusivity and oppression have flourished since the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson famously joined Stanford students in chanting, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. But in the past few years the worldview behind such antagonism has become even more militant, transforming not just universities but the world at large. The demand for safe spaces, reflexive accusations of racism and sexism, and contempt for Enlightenment values of reason and due process are no longer an arcane species of academic self-involvementthey increasingly infuse business, government, and civil society. The Diversity Delusion is an attempt to investigate how this transformation happened and why.

The roots lie in a charged set of ideas that now dominate higher education: that human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference; that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western civilization; and that America remains a profoundly bigoted place, where heterosexual white males continue to deny opportunity to everyone else.

These ideas, which may be subsumed under the categories of diversity and identity politics, have remade the university. Entire fields have sprung up around race, ethnicity, sex, and gender identity. Coursework in traditional departments also views the past and present through that same self-engrossed lens. A vast administrative apparatusthe diversity bureaucracypromotes the notion that to be a college student from an ever-growing number of victim groups is to experience daily bigotry from your professors and peers. In fall 2015, black Princeton students chanted: Were sick and tired of being sick and tireda phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist from the deep South who was beaten in the 1950s for trying to vote. Hamer had grounds aplenty to be sick and tired, but any Princeton student who thinks of himself as downtrodden is in the grip of a terrible delusion. That delusion, however, is actively encouraged by Princetons administrators, including the vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, who in early 2018 erected posters throughout campus inviting students to report problematic experiences based on identity. In 2016, Brown students occupied their provosts office to demand exemption from traditional academic requirements such as class attendance because they were so focused, they said, on staying alive at Brown. Fact-check : No Brown student is at risk of his life from going to classes and trying to learn.

This victimology fuels the sometimes violent efforts to shut down speech that challenges campus orthodoxies. Taught to believe that they are at existential threat from circumambient bias, students equate nonconforming ideas with hate speech, and hate speech with life-threatening conduct that should be punished, censored, and repelled with force if necessary. In March 2017, a mob of Middlebury College students assaulted a professor, giving her a concussion and whiplash, following their successful effort to prevent social scientist Charles Murray from speaking to a live audience by shouting, pounding on walls, and activating fire alarms. Murray just missed being knocked down and beaten himself.

In May 2017 students from Evergreen State College in Washington state stormed into a class taught by biology professor Bret Weinstein and began cursing and hurling racial epithets. Fuck you, you piece of shit, screamed one student. Get the fuck out of here, screamed another. Weinstein, a lifelong progressive, had refused to obey an edict from Evergreens Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services that all white faculty cancel their courses for a day and stay off campus. White students were also ordered to absent themselves from the school, to show solidarity with the supposed struggles of Evergreens minority students. Weinstein told the mob that he did not believe that science professors at Evergreen were targeting students of color, contrary to the premises of a newly announced equity initiative. Fuck what you have to say, a student responded. This is not a discussion. Evergreens president, after being subjected to a similar expletive-filled mob tirade, expressed his gratitude for the [students] passion and courage. In September 2017, Weinstein and his wife, also an Evergreen biology professor, accepted a $500,000 settlement to resign from the college.

Universities should be the place where students encounter the greatest works of mankind and learn to understand what makes them touchstones of human experience. History should convey the hard work it took over centuries to carve stability and prosperity out of violence, tyranny, and corruption. Instead, victim ideology encourages ignorant young adults to hate the monuments of Western civilization without bothering even to study them. (Bruce Bawer and Roger Kimball previously called out these trends in The Victims Revolution and Tenured Radicals, respectively.) Faculty respond to students know-nothing tantrums with silencewhen they are not actively colluding in the destruction of humanistic learning.