The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine our Culture

One of my most frustrating regrets has to do with a conversation a few years ago with a high-ranking and quite sensible academic administrator. The topic was how a number of students were complaining unreasonably about something and how my administrator friend was unable to make them happy. With a certain exasperation he asked me and a few others, “But what can I tell them?” I forget what tepid thing I said but immediately kicked myself for not saying what I should have said, and have been kicking myself ever since: “Tell them to grow up!”

Which leads to p. 58 of “The Diversity Delusion” and just one of a galaxy of reasons it’s a vitally important book — and a great read, too. “[N]o college administration in recent history,” Heather Mac Donald writes, “has ever said to whining students of any race or gender: “Are you joking? We’ve kowtowed to your demands long enough, now go study!” I don’t know how much satisfaction Heather got from writing that passage, but I sure enjoyed it.

I’ve been reading Heather Mac Donald for a long time and don’t recall a single instance in which I wasn’t impressed as well as grateful. No one has been more persistent, on-target, and braver in challenging politically correct nonsense. Yet as excellent as those works have been, I started sensing early in “The Diversity Delusion” that no matter the depth as well as breadth of her previous works this one dug even deeper, with a passion somehow even more ceaseless.

This is a pivotal book which will be read, I’m pretty sure, by at least seven or eight members of the crowds she critiques (putting matters diplomatically). But that doesn’t mean a couple hundred million other Americans shouldn’t order copies pronto, as they very much should.