The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture
St. Martin’s Press, 2018

Excerpt: In 1903, during America’s darkest point 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 moved 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 or condescension.”

Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the eighteenth-century British orators whom, at age 12, 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 speeches—by Richard Sheridan, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt— “gave 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 college’s 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 colors,” 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-involvement—they increasingly infused business, government, and civil society. The Diversity Delusion is an attempt to investigate how this transformation happened and why.

Praise: “With no less vigor than [William F.] Buckley, MacDonald charges higher education with corrupting the youth and endangering Western culture.”

—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Universities justify their privileged position by claiming to be forums for the promotion of clarity, logic, and evidence. Yet their own policies, affecting millions, are too often defended with factual howlers, logical non-sequiturs, and mindless boilerplate. Heather MacDonald may not persuade you on every point, but with her spitfire writing and scorn for nonsense she is forcing universities to live up to their own principles.”

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now