The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of nonacademic transgender activism began in the spring of 2015, when The New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring the oppression of the transgendered one of our most pressing civil rights struggles. The Times then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the plight of the “trans community.”13 Now, a few years later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a fourteen-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a short time ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot. (In February 2017, Trump’s Education and Justice Departments rescinded the Obama transgender bathroom rule on the ground that it went beyond the scope of Title IX and had not complied with administrative rule-making procedure.)

  How short are the memories of the politically righteous! In the 1970s, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg pooh-poohed as sheer demagoguery the idea that the Equal Rights Amendment would require co-ed bathrooms, her implicit assumption being that such an arrangement would, of course, be preposterous. In 1991, the Michigan Women’s Festival expelled a transsexual woman on the ground that she was, in biological fact, a male. The First International Conference on Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender at California State University at Northridge in 1995 maintained separate bathroom facilities for males and females, causing a protest by trans activists. Gay-rights activist and historian Martin Duberman stormed out of a gender-theory presentation. Now those early advocates for gay and women’s rights would be lumped into the same category as segregationists.

  There are several corollary takeaways to the present day. First, we have learned that the trans movement trumps feminism, just as Europe’s reaction to the mass Muslim sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve, 2015, revealed that multiculturalism trumps feminism. Given the constant caterwauling about “rape culture” by campus feminists, one would have thought that feminists would have opposed allowing males’ use of facilities frequented by unclothed or otherwise vulnerable females. But apparently, the claim that college campuses are awash in serial “rapists” waxes and wanes in salience, depending on context. It now becomes merely another sign of redneck bigotry to suggest that a heterosexual male (i.e., a rapist in waiting) or a sexual pervert may take advantage of the new trans rules. Wellesley and Smith Colleges have twisted themselves into knots deciding whether the “trans” category trumps the favored status of females. They concluded that being trans cancels the disability of being male and, in fact, elevates the trans “female” to the highest rank on the victim totem pole.

  Second, we have learned that all academic high theory bears watching. The conceptual roots of gender theory lie in 1970s-era deconstruction and poststructuralism, with their pretense to having obliterated the traditional categories of Western epistemology and metaphysics. From Jacques Derrida’s purported “deconstruction” of the privileging of the spoken word over the written sign, and of presence over absence, it turned out to be not so big a step to the alleged dismantling of the biological difference between male and female.

  Third, we notice that all colleges matter when it comes to the generation of corrosive high theory—not just the Ivy League. The University of Iowa, for example, jump-started the field of queer studies in 1994 with a conference on queerness.

  Finally, we see that narcissistic students are now coequal drivers with their professors when it comes to rapidly evolving victim theory. By one count, there are now 117 categories of gender identity, many of those developed by students struggling to find some last way to be transgressive in an environment where their every self-involved claim of victimhood is met with tender attention and apologies from the campus diversity bureaucracy. How those 117 categories will play out for public policy remains to be seen.

  The ultimate agenda here, however, is to destroy any last shred of female modesty that might stand in the way of the total normalization of casual promiscuity, in obedience to the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s. Many girls are embarrassed to be seen naked by other girls. Now, however, they are being told to swallow their inhibitions if a boy is in their bathroom or locker room. This can be achieved only by adopting a stance of utter indifference to the powerful, primal taboos around nakedness and sex—in other words, to adopt the sad sexual crudeness of the stars of Sex and the City or of Lena Dunham. And according to progressive elites, any parent or school official who disagrees is standing in the way of moral progress. One shrinks to contemplate what the academy is cooking up next.

  * * *

  PART III

  THE BUREAUCRACY

  10

  MULTICULTI U.

  In 2012, as the University of California reeled from one piece of bad budget news to another—California was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis—a veteran political columnist sounded an alarm. Cuts in state funding were jeopardizing the university’s mission of preserving the “cultural legacy essential to any great society,” Peter Schrag warned in The Sacramento Bee:

  Would we know who we are without knowing our common history and culture, without knowing Madison and Jefferson and Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne; without Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer; without Dante and Cervantes; without Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen; without Goethe and Molière; without Confucius, Buddha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; without Mozart, Rembrandt and Michelangelo; without the Old Testament; without the Gospels; without Plato and Aristotle, without Homer and Sophocles and Euripides, without Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; without Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison?

  Schrag’s appeal to the value of humanistic study was unimpeachable. It just happened to be laughably ignorant about the condition of such study at the University of California. Stingy state taxpayers aren’t endangering the transmission of great literature, philosophy, and art; the university itself is. No UC administrator would dare to invoke Schrag’s list of mostly white, mostly male thinkers as an essential element of a UC education; no UC campus has sought to ensure that its undergraduates get any exposure to even one of Schrag’s seminal thinkers (with the possible exception of Toni Morrison), much less to America’s founding ideas or history (see chapter 13).

  Schrag isn’t the only Californian ignorant about UC’s priorities. The public is told that the university needs more state money—its current budget is $34 billion—to stay competitive in the sciences but not that the greatest threat to scientific excellence comes from the university’s obsession with “diversity” hiring. The public knows about tuition increases but not about the unstoppable growth in the university’s bureaucracy. Taxpayers may have heard about larger class sizes but not about the sacrosanct status of faculty teaching loads. Before the public decides how much more money to pour into the system, it needs a far better understanding of how UC spends the large sums it already commands. The surrender of this once-great university system to the diversity delusion is a story repeated at schools across America.

  The first University of California campus opened in Berkeley in 1873, fulfilling a mandate of California’s 1849 constitution that the state establish a public university for the “promotion of literature, the arts and sciences.” Expectations for this new endeavor were high; Governor Henry Haight had predicted that the campus would “soon become a great light-house of education and learning on this Coast, and a pride and glory” of the state.

  He was right. Over the next 140 years, as nine more campuses were added, the university would prove an engine for economic growth and a source of human progress. UC owns more research patents than any other university system in the country. Its engineers helped achieve California’s mid-century dominance in aerospace and electronics; its agronomists aided the state’s fecund farms and vineyards. The nuclear technology developed by UC
scientists and their students secured America’s Cold War preeminence (while provoking one of the country’s most cataclysmic student protest movements). UC’s physical infrastructure is a precious asset in its own right. Anyone can wander its trellised gardens and groves of native and exotic trees, or browse its library stacks and superb research collections.

  But by the early 1960s, UC was already exhibiting many of the problems that afflict it today. The bureaucracy had mushroomed, both at the flagship Berkeley campus and at the Office of the President, the central administrative unit that oversees the entire UC system. Nathan Glazer, who taught sociology at Berkeley at the time, wrote in Commentary in 1965: “Everyone—arriving faculty members, arriving deans, visiting authorities—is astonished by the size” of the two administrations. Glazer noted the emergence of a new professional class: full-time college administrators who specialized in student affairs, had never taught, and had little contact with the faculty.

  The result of this bureaucratic explosion reminded Glazer of the federal government: “Organization piled upon organization, reaching to a mysterious empyrean height.”

  At Berkeley, as federal research money flooded into the campus, the faculty were losing interest in undergraduate teaching, observed Clark Kerr, UC’s president and a former Berkeley chancellor. (Kerr once famously quipped that a chancellor’s job was to provide “parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni.”)1 Back in the 1930s, responsibility for introductory freshman courses had been the highest honor that a Berkeley professor could receive, Kerr wrote in his memoirs; thirty years later, the faculty shunted off such obligations whenever possible to teaching assistants, who, by 1964, made up nearly half the Berkeley teaching corps.

  Most presciently, Kerr noted that Berkeley had split into two parts: Berkeley One, an important academic institution with a continuous lineage back to the nineteenth century; and Berkeley Two, a recent political upstart centered on the antiwar, antiauthority Free Speech Movement that had occupied Sproul Plaza in 1964. Berkeley Two was as connected to the city’s left-wing political class and to its growing colony of “street people” as it was to the traditional academic life of the campus. In fact, the two Berkeleys had few points of overlap.

  Today, echoing Kerr, we can say that there are two Universities of California: UC One, a still-serious university system centered on the sciences (though with representatives throughout the disciplines) and UC Two, a profoundly unserious institution dedicated to the all-consuming crusade against phantom racism and sexism. Unlike Berkeley Two in Kerr’s Day, UC Two reaches to the topmost echelon of the university, where it poses a real threat to the integrity of its high-achieving counterpart.

  It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which the diversity ideology has encroached upon UC’s collective psyche and mission. No administrator, no regent, no academic dean or chair can open his mouth for long without professing fealty to diversity. It is the one constant in every university endeavor; it impinges on hiring, distorts the curriculum, and sucks up vast amounts of faculty time and taxpayer resources. The university’s budget problems over the last decade have not touched it. In September 2012, for instance, in the midst of California’s then-budget crisis, as the university system faced the threat of another $250 million in state funding cuts on top of the $1 billion lost since 2007, UC San Diego hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion, who would pull in a starting salary of $250,000, plus a relocation allowance of $60,000, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, and the reimbursement of all moving expenses. (A pricey but appropriately “diverse” female-owned executive search firm had found this latest diversity accretion.) This new diversocrat position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which included the Chancellor’s Diversity Office; the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity; the assistant vice chancellor for diversity; the faculty equity advisers; the graduate diversity coordinators; the staff diversity liaison; the undergraduate student diversity liaison; the graduate student diversity liaison; the chief diversity officer; the director of development for diversity initiatives; the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity; the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues; the Committee on the Status of Women; the Campus Council on Climate, Culture, and Inclusion; the Diversity Council; and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

  The previous year, UCLA named a professional bureaucrat with a master’s degree in student-affairs administration as its first assistant dean for “campus climate,” tasked with “maintaining the campus as a safe, welcoming, respectful place,” in the words of UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor and dean of students.2 The year before that, UC San Francisco appointed its first vice chancellor of diversity and outreach—with a starting salary of $270,000—to create a “diverse and inclusive environment,” in the words of UC San Francisco chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann.3 Each of these new posts was wildly redundant with the armies of diversity functionaries already larding UC’s bloated bureaucracy. In 2015, in an improved budgeting climate, UCLA appointed Jerry Kang, whom we met in chapter 5, as its first and royally remunerated chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

  UC Two’s worldview rests on the belief that certain racial and ethnic groups face ongoing bias, both in America and throughout the university. UCLA encapsulated this conviction in 2010, in a “Principle of Community” (one of eight) approved by the Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Diversity (since renamed the UCLA Council on Diversity and Inclusion, in the usual churn of rebranding to which such bodies are subject). Principle Eight reads: “We acknowledge that modern societies carry historical and divisive biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation and religion, and we seek to promote awareness and understanding through education and research and to mediate and resolve conflicts that arise from these biases in our communities.”4

  The idea that a salient—if not the most salient—feature of “modern societies” is their “divisive biases” is ludicrously unhistorical. No culture has been more blandly indifferent than modern Western society to the individual and group characteristics that can still lead to death and warfare elsewhere. There is also no place that more actively celebrates the characteristics that still handicap people outside the West than the modern American campus. Yet when UC Two’s administrators and professors survey their domains, they see a landscape riven by the discrimination that it is their duty to extirpate.

  Thus it was that UC San Diego’s electrical and computer engineering department a few years later found itself facing a mandate from campus administrators to hire a fourth female professor. The possibility of a new hire had opened up—a rare opportunity in that budget climate—and after winnowing down hundreds of applicants, the department put forward its top candidates for on-campus interviews. Scandalously, all were male. Word came down from on high that a female applicant who hadn’t even been close to making the initial cut must be interviewed. She was duly brought to campus for an interview, but she got mediocre reviews. The powers-that-be then spoke again: Her candidacy must be brought to a departmental vote. In an unprecedented assertion of secrecy, the department chair refused to disclose the vote’s outcome and insisted on a second ballot. After that second vote, the authorities finally gave up and dropped her candidacy. Both vote counts remained secret.

  An electrical and computer engineering professor explained what was at stake. “We pride ourselves on being the best,” he said. “The faculty know that absolute ranking is critical. No one had ever considered this woman a star.”5 You would think that UC’s administrators would value this fierce desire for excellence. Thanks to its commitment to hiring only “the best,” San Diego’s electrical and computer engineering department has made leading contributions to circuit design, digital coding, and information theory.

  Maria Herrera Sobek, UC Santa Barbara’s
associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and academic policy and a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies, provided a window into how UC Two thinks about its mission. If a faculty hiring committee selects only white male finalists for an opening, the dean will suggest “bringing in some women to look them over,” Sobek said. These female candidates, she noted, “may be borderline, but they are all qualified.” And what do you know! “It turns out [the hiring committees] really like the candidates and hire them, even if they may not have looked so good on paper.”6 This process has “energized” the faculty to hire more women, Sobek explained. She added that diversity interventions get “more positive responses” from humanities and social-sciences professors than from scientists.

  Leave aside Sobek’s amusing suggestion that the faculty just happen to discover that they “really like” the diversity candidate whom the administration has forced on them. More disturbing is the subversion of the usual hiring standard from “most qualified” to “borderline but qualified.” UC Two sets the hiring bar low enough to scoop in some female or minority candidates, and then declares that anyone above that bar is qualified enough to trump the most qualified candidate, if that candidate is a white or an Asian male. This is a formula for mediocrity.

  Sometimes, UC Two can’t manage to lower hiring standards enough to scoop in a “diverse” candidate. In that case, it simply creates a special hiring category outside the normal channels. In September 2012, after the meritocratic revolt in UC San Diego’s electrical and computer engineering department, the engineering school announced that it would hire an “excellence” candidate, the school’s Orwellian term for faculty who, it claims, will contribute to diversity and who, by some odd coincidence, always happen to be female or an underrepresented minority.