The Diversity Delusion | Heather Mac Donald

Heather McDonald: 5:17: Any Princeton student, I don't care if he's purple orange or blue, who thinks of himself as oppressed is in the grip of a terrible delusion that will encumber him for the rest of his life. Well perhaps you're thinking at least the adults on campus are trying to give these students a firmer grip of reality. To the contrary, the adults actively encourage this hysteria.

A massive diversity bureaucracy is devoted to cultivating in students ever more arcane species of self involvement and ever more preposterous forms of self-pity. You want to know the reason for astronomical tuition, look no further than this bureaucratic bloat. Students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity Deanlets and vice Provo of equity and inclusion who used the occasion to expand their Dominion.

Many campuses have created bias response teams, modeled presumably on active shooter response teams, on the assumption that discrimination is so rampant and lethal on campus that a rapid defence forces needed. Freshman orientations and dorm sessions invariably features seminars on toxic masculinity and white privilege. Students are taught that they are either the oppressed or the oppressors.

If you are not female black Hispanic gay or any one of the 116 and still metastasizing categories of gender, the only way that you can escape being an oppressor is by becoming a quote ally.

Allies are something usually associated with war and indeed the reigning thinking is that female students and students of color are literally in a war zone on college campuses and need allies from the opposing side to survive. Am I exaggerating, I am NOT.

UC Berkeley's division of equity and inclusion hung banners throughout campus reminding students of the University of California's paramount mission assigning guilt and innocence in the ruthlessly competitive totem pole of victimhood.

One banner featured a female black student and a male Hispanic student allegedly pleading, allow people other than yourself to exist. A message directed to Berkeley's white students and faculty.

This is not hyperbole, they meant it literally. College presidents are the worst offenders in encouraging this delusional victimology. After the three-hour expletive filled tirade against the Yale sociologist Yales President Peter Salovey actually thanked the boorish thugs for making him proud of his student body. Yale subsequently conferred a race justice prize on two of the most aggressive participants.

The Dean of the Harvard Medical School recently removed the portraits of its greatest physician scientists from the entrance hall to the school. You can guess the reason they were all male and thus looking on them would make Harvard's wilting medical students feel uncomfortable and unsafe. We can only wish these budding doctors luck in the operating room.

Narcissistic identity politics has destroyed the serious pursuit of knowledge throughout the humanities and most of the social sciences. Students are being given a license for ignorance. All they need to be told about a book is the melanin content and gonads of its author to know whether they can dismiss its contents as thoroughly repugnant and not worth reading.

Shakespeare Milton Plato Kant & Locke have been variously defenestrated by students who have not the slightest clue about Periclean Athens the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

A Columbia undergraduate groused about Columbia's beleaguered core curriculum quote who is this Mozart this Hyden these superior white men the core she said upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism.

No professor has ever defended our intellectual patrimony against such shameful outbreaks of ecstatic no nothing-ism without appending some pooling qualification about respect for diversity.

Academic identity politics are now rapidly spreading throughout the culture at large. Every non academic institution no matter how previously meritocratic is now vulnerable and that means above all the STEM fields. Exhibit A into our culture's descent into identity driven mediocrity and thought control is the firing of computer engineer James d'amour from Google in August 2017. D'amour had written a carefully reasoned fact-based memo suggesting that the average career preferences of males and females may explain why there's not 50/50 gender parity at Google and other tech firms.

The language that Google's CEO used in firing Mr. D'amour was a direct import from academic victimology Google's employees were quote hurting he said because D'amour had dared to challenge the reigning feminist orthodoxy. What followed D'amour firing was even scarier. A regional branch of the National Labor Relations Board upheld Google's actions on the same bathos drenched victim grounds. D'amour memo had made Google's employees feel quote unsafe at work. According to the NLRB associate general counsel, the memo thus constituted quote discrimination and sexual harassment. Consider for a moment what this NLRB ruling means for science. Any evolutionary biologist psychologist or economist who studies the different risk preferences and appetite for competition among males and females is now at risk of his job. These branches of science could shut down completely, no matter that their findings are true.

The thinking that got Mr. D'amour fired is now the dominant characteristic of our time. It holds that the absence of exact proportional representation of various racial ethnic and sexual groups in any institution is by definition a result of discrimination. To suggest that different groups have different capacities cultures skills and behaviors that explain the lack of proportional representation is not just taboo it can get you fired.

And so the mad rage for race and gender proportionality in the workplace is accelerating especially in the #MeToo movement. From here on out, everything you read, everything you watch in the mainstream media will have been calculated in conformity with the demands of diversity. If you are a white male, no matter how talented you're gonna have to meet a higher standard to get hired or promoted. This summer California Polytechnic Institute's proudly announced that it's crusade to lower the number of whites on campus was succeeding.

Every college is in essence doing the same thing if not as publicly. Newsrooms are under enormous pressure to find reporters, select sources and originate stories that improve their diversity profile. Book publishers are obsessively engineering their lists to prioritize quote diverse authors and themes. Thanks to media pressure and their own human resources departments corporate boardrooms have made a fetish of gender proportionality. Even before California mandated female board hires, I routinely voted against every female who shows up on a proxy ballot since I assume that she is there because of her sex and not her business experience.

A case in point Drew Gilpin Faust, the outgoing president of Harvard, recently accepted a position on the board of Goldman Sachs. Now who knew that left-wing history professors were experts in Investment Banking. University administrators and faculty may hate capitalism but they love capitalist dollars.

Even classical music is being poisoned by identity politics New Yorker music critic Alex Ross triggered outrage against the Chicago and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra's this spring by tweeting that they had programmed no female composers in their upcoming seasons. Never mind that at that very moment the Chicago Symphony was at Carnegie Hall performing Jennifer Higdon's concerto for low brass. A work commissioned by the Chicago and Philadelphia orchestras at doubt greatly inflated cost. It is absurd to expect gender parity in the concert hall the reality is this the greatest composers of all time, whether Bach Mozart Beethoven Schubert Chopin or Brahms were male, get over it and simply be grateful for the beauty that they gave us unworthy mortals.

But classical music boards are also under enormous pressure to hire by gender and race for conducting positions and everything else. a classical music music agent told me wistfully quote if only I had a trans conductor I'd be rich.

Now it is an unalloyed pleasure that Hollywood is being forced to sacrifice its best box-office judgements to meet the demands of the race and gender bean-counters. But it is in the sciences where the diversity imperative becomes actually dangerous. Every academic science department whether physics mathematics or chemistry is in the victimology crosshairs. The federal government is demanding that scientific departments hire based on gender and race rather than scientific merit. Science education is being slowed down and watered down in the hope of graduating more females and underrepresented minorities.

An oncologist in an Ivy Lee at an Ivy League medical school was berated by his Dean for an exam in pharmacology that was quote too fact-based. Well I don't know about you but if I have cancer I want my doctor to know the facts about drug interactions. The National Science Foundation is spending billions of your taxpayer dollars on programs to boost diversity in science arguing that only a diverse laboratory can achieve scientific breakthroughs. Well that's funny because somehow the 200 now Science Foundation grantees who won Nobel Prizes managed to discover dark matter and the genetics of viruses among other breakthroughs without conforming to today's diversity metrics and of course this mania for gender and race parity and science continues into the private sector.

After James d'amour was fired, a human resources manager sued YouTube and Google for firing him because he had refused to go along with the mandate to interview only females and underrepresented minorities for incoming engineering jobs. Potentially groundbreaking scientists are being passed over today because they are of the wrong race and gender. Guess who does not care about diversity, China. The best thing that Trump could do to level the playing field would be to airlift a few cargo planes of gender theorists from American universities and dump them on Beijing University and China's research labs. Until that happens China will inexorably pull out ahead of us since in science it cares only about one thing scientific achievement. Academic identity politics is tearing our society apart. It is teaching young people to hate, to hate the greatest thinkers and creators of the past and to hate their fellow Americans.

The diversity delusion therefore has to be nipped in the bud. The next time self engrossed students occupy a campus building demanding reparations here is what their college president should say. Are you kidding me, you're the most privileged individuals in human history. You have at your fingertips the thing that Faust sold his soul for, knowledge. You're surrounded by libraries that would have driven the Renaissance humanists wild with envy and desire. You can read any book that has ever been written. You have access to scientific laboratories that are the most advanced in the world. You can pursue languages literature and history, everything is available.

Far from discriminating against minorities and females in hiring every faculty search here is one desperate effort at finding remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female candidates who have not already been scooped up by better endowed schools.

Far from discriminating against underrepresented minorities and admissions we employ double standards in order to engineer so-called diversity. I can assure you that my faculty are not bigots they have nothing but good will for history's oppressed groups and want all their students to succeed. At this very moment millions of Asian students abroad are studying night and day for the privilege of experiencing this alleged maelstrom of hatred. If you feel so oppressed step aside and let them take your place. But a college president never says any of these things of course instead he is silent before these outbreaks of narcissistic delusion, happy to sell out his faculty as alleged racists and penitently promising to make further amends for so mistreating the oppressed students. It becomes imperative then for the rest of us to rebut the victimology narrative head-on. It is not enough to call for freedom of expression that is if I may borrow a term a relatively safe stance to take even some liberals will back you up.

No if we're going to restore sanity and civil harmony we're gonna have to take on the victimology narrative directly and assert that racism and oppression are not the predominant characteristics of American society today. For all our historical sins and they were real and terrible there has never been a more tolerant opportunity filled polity than our present one. The preservation of free requires knowledge of and gratitude for the extraordinary richness of Western civilization with its patient development of the rule of law, the scientific method and the concept of individual rights. until the majority of universities returned to their proper mission of passing on such institution Hillsdale and the Kirby Center will be ever more essential thank you for your attention 22:13