Heather Mac Donald's The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture tackles our society's obsession with “diversity,” which is led by the university and has resulted in an extreme case of delusion for all. Mac Donald is clear-eyed, thorough, and relentless, using logic and common sense to dismantle the deception that reigns in the university and the culture. She argues deftly, and her book is replete with studies, data, and arresting correspondence with interview subjects.
Mac Donald's book is right on point, but it is also biting in tone, brimming with exasperation and anger. Of course, the topic is a frustrating one, and Mac Donald has good reason to be angry after having been a target of campus hysteria—twice. But her tone may define and confine her audience. Those who are already inclined to pick up her book will be enriched in knowledge and fortified in conviction, but those not so inclined may only double down.
Mac Donald is at her finest when she offers an ode to the humanities, reminding the reader of the wonder and sublimity in Shakespeare and Bach, the truth and timelessness in Homer and Plato. In so doing, she sounds a clarion call for the university to disabuse itself and all of us of delusion and return to “the search for objective knowledge that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.”
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