After being introduced to a series of campus controversies over the last few years involving jargon like “safe spaces” and “microaggressions,” it seems the country is wondering what exactly is going on at its universities. So much so, there is a market for two books to be released on the same day that try to provide an explanation.
In one of these books, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business, expand upon their 2015 piece of the same name, published in the Atlantic, which attributes the recent trend of campus illiberalism to the psychological makeup of students: With a prioritization of mental health, universities are insulating students from ideas that challenge their world view.
Heather Mac Donald’s recent book, The Diversity Delusion, which also comes out on Sept. 4, puts forth a different explanation: rather than being the result of a psychological phenomenon, the recent trend of campus illiberalism is driven by ideology. Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute fellow and author of the 2016 book The War on Cops, argues that universities are gripped by an ideological fixation, operating on the base assumptions 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.”
These ideas provide the basis for ‘diversity’ bureaucracies, which are permanent administrative departments tasked with institutionalizing the identities of students, bestowing benefits and punishments based on these identities to address the ever-present threat of discrimination. By abandoning a color-blind and universal view of education, universities are embracing identity politics and social justice at the expense of their commitments to meritocracy, individual rights, and due process.
Mac Donald illustrates this shift in priorities by pointing to universities that abdicate their responsibility to uphold free speech. Freedom of expression, a cornerstone for academic inquiry, is encountering more and more pushback on college campuses—something Mac Donald speaks to from personal experience. After receiving an invitation to speak at Claremont McKenna College in 2017, students tried shutting down her speech by preventing attendees from entering the building and banging upon the venue’s glass windows to disrupt the talk. Students claimed her speech about the benefits of pro-active policing posed a direct threat to minority students and constituted verboten speech.
In response to these claims, Claremont McKenna President Hiram Chodosh explicitly withheld police intervention in the mob protest and Vice President for Academic Affairs Peter Uvin released a statement following the event supporting claims that Mac Donald’s speech could have harmed students with a “history of exclusion.”
Mac Donald notes that similar reasons were used to justify violent demonstrations at Milo Yiannopoulos’s planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley in February 2017, and Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury College in March 2017.
While these acts of violence undermine our foundational Enlightenment values, Mac Donald also points out that discarding free speech hurts the people it supposedly helps. Responding to a manifesto from students at the Claremont Colleges which called the pursuit of truth a “construct of the Euro-West” and an “attempt to silence oppressed peoples,” Mac Donald outlines the absurdity of this line of thought: “Free speech is the best tool for challenging hegemonic power. Absolute rulers seek to crush nonconforming opinion; the censor is the essential bulwark of tyrants.”
One would be mistaken, though, to think this is just an issue of university administrations bowing to student demands; many universities use a focus on identity, and specifically on accounting for past harms inflicted on different identity groups, as their guiding ethos.
Universities increasingly use this standard in their admissions process, where underrepresented minorities receive preferential treatment in their college applications. Under the banner of diversity, colleges aim to reconfigure their demographic makeup by applying different admissions criteria to students who wouldn’t gain admission on their academic merit alone.
While Mac Donald makes a compelling case that this approach to admissions threatens the meritocratic standards of a given university, the practice of prioritizing certain racial groups produces its own reprehensible outcomes. In one specific case from 2002, UCLA admitted a Hispanic student with an SAT score of 940 (out of a scale of 1600) while turning down a Korean student with a score in the 1500s. Using race as a proxy for disadvantage, UCLA hardly cared that the Korean applicant had to tutor other students to support his family’s rent.
Although Mac Donald provides ample evidence that racial preferences in college admissions hurt both the admitted students, who vastly underperform relative to their peers, and qualified applicants, I do find it odd that a book dealing with admission standards and mediocrity would omit any discussion of legacy preferences, where elite institutions like Harvard increase the admission rate for the children of alumni by 500 percent. Clearly, universities also face incentives to set aside their meritocratic standards to homogenize their student bodies.
Throughout the book, Mac Donald challenges other university policies that are justified with the lens of oppression and identity: the cult of microaggressions and the policing of potentially offensive language; the dubious use of implicit bias to explain any disparities between identity groups; and the “Neo-Victorian” ethic that governs sexual relations between college students, where reckless sexual encounters become sexual assault investigations, and men are assigned sole responsibility for the encounters.
Perhaps the most alarming development has been the focus on identity politics in the educational curriculum at elite universities. Humanities departments at universities like UCLA are swapping studies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, who are insufficiently “diverse,” for “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.” Of course, the transformation cheapens the education for all students.
As Mac Donald writes, “The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.”
Mac Donald rightly points out that the foundational purpose of a university, the transmission of knowledge to broaden our view of the human experience, is being lost to an ideological fixation on identity.
Ultimately, Mac Donald identifies the choice schools must make as they confront these issues: continue with the corrosive pathology of identity, or commit to academic excellence, individual responsibility, and the humanistic goal of education through unfettered academic inquiry. While we have much to lose by abandoning the purpose of higher education, like all bureaucracies, diversity administrations have little reason to resolve the issues that justify their existence.
Cole Carnick is a senior at the University of Michigan and a former commentary intern with the Washington Examiner.
