Heather Mac Donald | The Diversity Delusion

Everyone welcome to the Allen P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, where we are the outpost for Hillsdale College here in our nation's capital. As many of you know, we host numerous educational programs on the liberal arts tradition and on the first principles of our country. So, as is our tradition, we were going to have one of our students introduce our special guest for this evening.

Reagan Cool is a junior studying political philosophy and religion and is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan. This semester she's interning at the American Principles Project while studying on the Washington Hillsdale internship program here in D.C.

Reagan: Good evening. Tonight I have the pleasure of introducing Miss Heather McDonald. Heather McDonald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University, a Master of Arts in English at Cambridge University, and a Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Public Interest. She's also the author of several books, including The War on Cops and The Burden of Bad Ideas. Tonight she will discuss her latest publication, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Miss Heather McDonald.

Thank you so much. I mean, I've been on the road. Get my little secret water glass here before I start, I don't have a cough attack. Thank you so much. Thank you, Reagan, and thank you for Hillsdale. This is—get back to normalcy. I've been—I've been speaking a lot on college campuses recently. You know what that means? I've received the walk-out, the storm the stage strategy, and at Claremont McKenna College in California, the blockade, which prevented anyone from actually entering to hear my talk. So-called students of color at nearby Pomona College announced that I was a “fascist white supremacist Warhawk, trans-folk, queer-folk, lacist, and ignorant of ignorance ystem zuv domination that produced the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.” End quote. So to actually have an audience still in its seats and apparently willing to listen is an unusual experience outside of a Hillsdale crowd. That may take me a few minutes to adjust to.

Now, we've been hearing a lot of late about the crisis of free speech on college campuses, but not much about its root cause: the narcissistic victimology that is rapidly spreading from academia to the rest of our culture. In a word, the American University—and again, all of this applies to everything other than Hillsdale, fortunately—so we can at least remember there's some sanity left. But in general, the American University is in the grips of a mass hysteria. Students actually believe that they are victims of oppression, at risk of their lives from circumambulate-ism and sexism. The degree of maudlin caterwauling is impossible to overstate. At Brown, students of color occupied the president's office and complained about having to meet such academic expectations as going to class when they were so focused on “staying alive.” At Brown, at Yale, a mob of minority students surrounded a highly respected sociologist and cursed and screamed at him for three hours because his wife had sent an email suggesting that students can choose their own Halloween costumes, free from the ministrations of Yale's diversity bureaucrats. Among the shouts of “Shut the eff up!” and “You are disgusting!” that were directed at this mild-mannered left-wing professor was a cry of “or dying!” from one of the ranters, referring to the allegedly endangered status of Yale's minority students. But my favorite moment in this parade of narcissism comes from Princeton in 2015. Princeton's black students chanted, “We're sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Now, this was a phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who was beaten in the 1950s for trying to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer had grounds aplenty for being sick and tired of being sick and tired, but 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 deans and vice provosts of equity and inclusion, who use 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 defense force is needed. Freshman orientations and dorm sessions invariably feature 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—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, Yale's 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, Condorcet, 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: “Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, 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-nothingism 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 Damore from Google in August 2017. Damore 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. Damore was a direct import from academic victimology. Google's employees were “hurting,” he said, because Damore had dared to challenge the reigning feminist orthodoxy. What followed Mr. Damore's firing was even scarier: a regional branch of the National Labor Relations Board upheld Google's actions on the same basis—drenched victim grounds. Mr. Damore's memo had made Google's employees feel “unsafe at work,” according to the NLRB associate general counsel. The memo thus constituted “discrimination and sexual harassment.” Consider for a moment what this NLRB ruling means for science. Any evolutionary biologist, social psychologist, or econometrician who studies the different risk preferences and appetite for competition among males and females is now at risk of his job. These branches of—of science could shut down completely, no matter that their findings are true. The thinking that got Mr. Damore 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 moment. 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 going to have to meet a higher standard to get hired or promoted. This summer, California Polytechnic Institute's crusade to lower the number of whites on campus is 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 “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 Orchestras 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 agent told me wistfully, “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 judgments 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 at an Ivy League medical school was berated by his dean for an exam in pharmacology that was “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-odd National 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 in science continues into the private sector. After James Damore 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 in 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 going to have to take on the victim—knowledge 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 freedom 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 return to their proper mission of passing on such institutions, Hillsdale and the Kirby Center will be ever more essential. Thank you for your attention. [Applause] Okay. [Applause] Questions? Yes.

Sure. You know, this puts the left in a very difficult position. It's—it's—are always the fal—ready to fact-open the case that Asians don't really count as students of color because it turns out the—the actual operational definition of students of color is students who are not academically competitive. Since Asians are whooping everybody else's ass out there, they don't count as students of color. Nevertheless, you know, it's been traditional on the part of the proponents of racial preferences to play it as a Black-white issue and to play off of—of white guilt. But it's been the case for quite some time now that the real victims of reverse discrimination and racial preferences are Asians because, again, they outscore everybody; they outscore Jews; they outscore general white—Whites in general. And so when schools are setting aside places so that they can improve their diversity profile with students that are basically—it's Black and Hispanic—it's always zero-sum. I mean, they will try to persuade you that preferences are not zero-sum; that's simply wrong. I mean, the—the—the—the number of spots that are available in these selective schools are extremely finite, and so every student you admit with a standard deviation or two below the competitive norm is taking a place away for somebody else, and it's Asians who are the most severely impacted by this. So what's been going on for many years—I actually think, to my mind, the strongest criticism of racial preferences—which is really—don't use the term affirmative action; that still has sort of a halo of good intentions and do-gooder-ism—what we're really talking about here are simply preferences. The best argument against them, as far as I'm concerned, is not the traditional constitutional one, however valid that is. The constitutional argument just says this is unfair; it's unconstitutional for a government body or a government-funded college to make distinctions on the basis of race; it violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, and—and that's how the Supreme Court jurisprudence about racial preferences has played out and continues to be played out. As far as I'm concerned, though, the—the stronger, more persuasive argument is that racial preferences do not do their alleged beneficiaries any good. There's a theory that has been most empirically fleshed out by a UCLA law professor named Richard Sander, called mismatch theory, that holds that if you bring students into an academic environment for which they are not academically competitive—if their academic preparedness is much below that of their peers—they're going to struggle in their classes, and they're not going to learn as much. And we see in law schools—every—virtually every law school employs huge racial preferences—and the Black students in law school end up overwhelmingly—almost without exception—at the bottom half of their class and in the bottom decile of their class. Blacks fail the bar—bar—at magnitudes more times—five or six times a higher rate than Whites because they haven't learned as much because they're in an environment that is pitched above their heads. Richard Sander has gotten as much data as he can get to try and—you want to show the outcome of students that are admitted with racial preferences and those few Blacks who are not—who are actually competitive with their school—to trace their course in school and their bar passage rates. He and other proponents of the mismatch theory have had to fight tooth and nail to get data. Harvard, as you may know, just—has put up roadblock after roadblock to releasing its admissions data. It's finally—they finally got access to it, but with—they had to be dragged through several rounds of litigation. And Richard Sander has asked the California Bar Association to provide an amazed data on its students who have taken the buckets. It has a very complete data set that has students' college GPAs, their LSATs, their law school GPA, and their bar scores, and sadly a California appellate court just denied his request on grounds that it was not justified under California's public documents record law, which is very, very tragic because the data that does exist is—has not been refuted in improving that the mismatch effect, but more data the better. But these colleges are absolutely opaque, and you know, if they were so confident that racial—been preferences would—were good for their recipients, they wouldn't mind sharing the data, but they keep it under complete lock and key. Yes?

Administrations' to these preposterous outcries and demands, do you think it's due to cowardice, or do you think it's that after 40 years of the whole neo-Marxist Graham Shand project shoved through the universities that they basically bought into that narrative as well? I think it's absolutely both. I think—I think that they've—they believe it, and it's just—it's bizarre. But we know that human beings are capable of believing very strange things that their daily experience would seem to—to contradict. Because again, for college presidents to say, “I'm sending all my faculty through implicit bias training at enormous time expense on the theory that they are discriminating against qualified females and underrepresented minorities in the hiring process,” is contradicted every single day on a college campus. You cannot go to a faculty search committee where that's all that they talk about, and I have asked college administrators—okay, and proponents of implicit bias theory—if this is so ubiquitous, give me just one name of a female faculty candidate or an underrepresented minority who was not given a job for which he or she was superior quality or qualifications for, or I'll make it easy on—

You, we simply overlooked in a job search because they weren't trying hard enough. They've ducked that question every time, so it's—it just perverse, but they—I think you're absolute—they believe this, and because it makes them feel superior to red-state America. That they think that they are the places of of succor and and safety for these ever-growing victim groups who would otherwise be at absolute risk of oppression out in the great unwashed masses—you know, who voted for Trump. So it's a combination, but there's also cowardice. I mean, there's people who I think should know better, and they just, you know, there's nothing that's more lethal to somebody's career today than being called a racist, and they don't want to stand up to that.

Yes. Since the situation on many college campuses is deteriorating during a time when tuition is skyrocketing, do you see the higher education bubble bursting, where lots of people just won't go to college or seek out alternative forms of instruction instead of four-year colleges and universities? It may start happening, and I know that Peter Thiel is thinking about alternatives. You know, there was the big hope for the MOOCs—the massive online—what's the O—second O—I don't know—something—courses—that didn't really materialize, you know that. And ironically, it turns out that the most challenged students are the ones who do least well in online learning. Everybody was sort of hoping that this would be a way to help the underrepresented minorities do it, but they—they need the hands-on. But frankly, for status-obsessed post-baby boomer parents that purport to be so equity-minded and yet are the most fanatically, you know, social-ladder-climbing people in the world, they are extremely eager to credentialize their children with the mark of an Amherst or a Williams or a Stanford. And that's going to be a very hard thing to break—to break that lock on credentializing. And you know, there's a lot of conservative libertarian voices that are also saying, "Don't go to college." I'm a mixed mind about that. Brian Kaplan, an economist at George Mason University, has written a book called, "Is It Not the End of Education," or "Does Education Matter," or something. And part of it I agree with; he says, you know, too far too many people are going to college, which is absolutely true. And he addresses the paradox that employers put such a high premium on a college degree. I mean, the numbers are sort of clear that you really do get a very big boost in earnings with a college degree, but his point is, but these students, they don't learn anything. So what the heck is an employer doing, paying an extra 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 in salary? But the book is also laced through with utter contempt for learning for its own sake, and and Kaplan has various disclaimers to these intends to do that, but it's—it's unmistakably there, and I'm not willing to go that far. I still—I still, to me, the pursuit of knowledge and the ability to study literature and art and music is—is the highest privilege one can have. And so I think we need to still try and reconstitute universities as places that pass on the inheritance of Western civilization.

Yes. It'd be great to see, and I imagine it's gotta be available because the professorial staff is listed online—data on the trends on these things. Because if you're going towards equity, then you've got to be hiring underrepresented minorities at a dramatic rate in order to—in order to shift what is already the institutional norm. So if men—white men are over-represented, then in order to shift the direction, you have to hire two or three times as many under-represented minorities as you are men, right? So do we have data on that? Well, no, the—I can tell you that in some science fields like computer engineering and economics, there's a slight creeping up of women—minorities—that blacks and Hispanics—'cause again, Asians, they—they're very competitive. It may be improving a little bit, but really the problem is the pipeline, and this is what it just drives me nuts. You know, you can talk about the composition of the faculty without seeing who's getting PhDs. Blacks have gotten—been concentrated—black PhDs concentrated traditionally in education. In 2016, there were sixteen PhDs granted to blacks in computer engineering; that's 1 percent of the total. So to expect that every computer engineering department in the country is going to have what—13 percent blacks, which is what their percentage of the U.S. population is, is simply absurd. And there's many fields—physics, you know, astrophysicists—that have no black graduates, so they're just not available. But your question, I mean, it seems to presuppose possibly that, well, there has been a problem, or that there's some discrimination at work, or you're just asking empirically, are they even available to be hired? They're not available to be hired. And I would also say it's—it doesn't matter. The only thing—the only thing that matters is if you're the most qualified person in your field. And if we have a lab that is exclusively females that are all the best nuclear engineers there are, that's great—fine, let it be. But if they're also all Asian males because they're the best, who cares? The only thing that matters is what they are capable of producing. The New York Times just this week had a story about—oh, that the K through 12 teaching body is still largely white females. This means that black students can't learn—oh, please. You know, I was lucky to be in college in the 70s before multiculturalism hit. Nobody thought to complain that I was reading Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, and Wordsworth. Thank God—this is before feminism—I got to read the greatest writers without anybody whining about what was between their legs, and it didn't matter to me that the professors who I revered were males. The idea that you can't learn from somebody who's different from you is ridiculous, but that's, you know, the idea. And so now you have UCLA requiring every faculty applicant to make a statement about his contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion. So you have to ideally say that I'm researching the problems of underrepresented minorities, or I have the ability to attract and mentor females and under-represent minorities, which is basically code in California because you can't use explicit racial preferences anymore—I am a female or minority. But you know, I—you have to wonder whether Albert Einstein could be hired at UC-Berkeley tomorrow because he's not working on equity, diversity, and inclusion; he's working on the theory of general relativity, and I submit that that's more important.

Yes. [Music] Mom, great schools in it. Not—do you think that a great school mace is a trade school, a community college, or a for-profit college? What's a trade school? Community colleges are definitely getting hit by this; they're the last holdouts, but they're getting hit. I was interviewed recently by the Chronicle of Higher Education about a community college in the San Diego area of Southern California, MiraCosta, that has just gone bonkers for diversity. It's all completely ethnic studies hiring, you know; they've—they've destroyed whatever traditional literature requirements they had, so that Chicano students only need to read Chicano authors. As far as trade schools, if we're talking about like a degree in auto mechanics, that would really be something if that gets it with gender and race. I don't know. And the for-profits, you know, they've been on the news recently with DeVos and the various rules on accreditation. I don't know about them, actually—that—that's an interesting question. There—for one thing, I believe that they are all commuter schools. I mean, is there any campuses there? I think campuses tend to sort of let this insanity fester and stews, so maybe a—if it's all just like correspondence course or something, it wouldn't be quite as bad.

Yes. Why do you think basketball courts and football fields are exempt from diversity and doesn't doubt the fact that there are, you know, such 90% African-American accentuate the stereotypes that they don't want? Yeah, because Americans think sports are important—academics not so much, ya know. It's—it's amazing, but I also think, you know, it's incredible that we are pushing females into combat units, introducing not only double standards and physical qualifications, but eros—the most destructive force in human existence is eros; it drives people insane. We're putting this into combat units, but again, we will not force women onto the—unto the National Football League because football is important—war less so. So, you know, people are quite capable of holding two separate ideas, and and they're willing to have meritocracy when it works in favor of the victim groups—just not when it—it creates a bar that for now does not lead to proportional representation.

Yes. Has the Trump administration, in the less than two years that it's been an office, done anything to reverse the flow of funds, or have there been decisions from the Justice Department trying to push back against this stuff, or are they just not touching it? They're proceeding with deliberate speed, I guess. They've been very good in some things, as you may have followed. Betsy DeVos is—is holding notice and comment on the campus rape due process problems. They are—they joined the—or had a statement of interest in the Harvard lawsuit, so they have signaled that they are not going to—they withdrew a bunch of Obama-era guidances to colleges that basically laid out the path for racial preferences. What they really need to do, and this would take a lot—somebody that really knows the regs—the Code of Federal Regulations—is get rid of in its entirety the disparate impact concept wherever it exists. This is the idea that facially neutral standards are nevertheless deemed discriminatory if they have a disparate impact. So if you have a requirement that firefighters know how to read at a twelfth-grade level, if that requirement, which is facially neutral, has the effect of disqualifying blacks at a higher rate than whites, even though the intention of the twelfth-grade reading rule was not to exclude blacks, it was to have people who know how to read—chemists—you know, the chemicals that they are using—that—that's nevertheless going to be deemed a discriminatory violation. So this disparate impact idea is really at the core of a lot of madness, and that's—that's what Trump should get on, but he should also—I mean, it's really the National Science Foundation is completely out of control; it's just—it's unbelievable what they're doing. I cannot tell you the nonsense that they're funding; they're funding gender studies professors to study intersectionality in the STEM fields; it's madness. So you know, NSF is a congressional creation, whether then that means that only Congress could rein it in—I'm not sure—but there certainly is a lot that can be done, and that remains to be done. Jeff Sessions, obviously—I mean, he's a hero, and I'm just gonna say this is totally unrelated—I think Trump's treatment of him is abysmal and grotesque and appalling. He has done so much in the area of law enforcement and immigration enforcement, but you know, it's a lot to also—turn—turn to the Justice Department; that's also for Betsy DeVos to do.

Yes. City and Oklahoma Wesleyan for standing fast. But the question is, this looks like a systemic change—how do you go against the systemic change and pull it back? This is so deep. I know—I know you're like, you know, I agree with you, and probably the whole class here—I mean, the audience's—is right—right with you, and what do we do? I'm not—I'm not in a university setting, so I have no—I have no influence there. It's—it's—I have to say, I mean, I know that as a speaker there's sort of a mandate to be optimistic and think we're gonna win. I'm by constitution a pessimist, so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But I mean, people like me—conservatives—have been writing about the universities for the past 30 years, using all of our rhetorical guns to mock them, and it does get worse and worse. I would just say again, the more voices that can be brought to bear to push back on this idea of endemic racism and sexism—that's really what the problem is. The free speech problem that gets a lot of attention is an epiphenomenon of the victimology. As long as the victimology is in place, you're gonna have the demands to silence speech on campus that has deemed hate speech because it is viewed as literally an existential threat to these poor female and minority students. So, you know, people like me or Sessions—anybody can invoke John Stuart Mill till we're blue in the face and talk about the need for open debate—it's not going to make a damn bit of difference as long as the ideology of victimhood is—is the dominant one. So all I can say is, if it comes up in conversation, people just have to start fighting back and say, "We are not a racist society." You know, I don't know a single mainstream institution that is not tying itself into knots to be fair and to hire females and minorities. The other thing, obviously, is that my lung—I need to stop giving money to their colleges; they're fueling the beast. These endowments are huge, and you know, it's an—it's a—it's a wonderful instinct of giving back and generosity, but you have to do your due diligence. You wouldn't buy a stock without doing due diligence; don't send money into these colleges unless you're really confident that it's not going into the victimology machine.

Do you think it could be considered deeper than victimology—maybe a movement—a socialistic movement perhaps? Somebody—Jordan Peterson—sent around a video that the—some Democratic committee has made about their sort of message for America, and it's very much class politics—not identity politics. And you know, it's the—all of a sudden the rich took over, and they're gaming the system. And ironically, there's a lot similar with Steve Bannon's message, which he made a film about the 2008 financial meltdown. Frankly, at this point—and it may be because I was not really politically aware during the Cold War—I take class politics over identity politics any day. At least there, you know, you have people saying, "I'm a worker"—that's an accomplishment. Being female is not an accomplishment; I don't deserve credit for being female; it's not something to study. Being a welder is—being a chemist is—that's something you have accomplished. So yes, class politics is bad, and America's—you know, the left wing of the Democratic Party certainly likes to flirt with socialism. On the other hand, it likes its goodies, you know, and nobody's gonna mess really with Silicon Valley, so it's—it's really sort of paying lip-service to the hip notion of being sort of post-neo-Marxist, but I—I don't—I think the identity politics are a bigger poison in society.

So our immigration system was changed dramatically in 1970. Do you see a tie-in between that and kind of the diversity delusion today? Well, it could be. I mean, we certainly have a—a third-world population here that was not assimilated—that, you know, it arrived and—and got—we had already Chicano studies that were breeding this separatism. So I think it definitely makes it more difficult. You know, Robert Putnam wrote a groundbreaking work that said diversity actually lessens social cohesion in communities—lessens social trust. He then had to walk that back as he got so attacked by the left because he's a liberal, but it's—it's been borne out. So I think, yeah, we have—were now at the highest level of foreign-born population since the turn of the nineteenth—the twentieth century, but we're in a very different environment without the confidence in American values to demand assimilation, and instead we promote separatism. So I think, yeah, it's—it's—I think it's definitely related. I'd have to think about Europe. I mean, they're not—they're still much more committed—they're much less apologetic about Western civilization than we are. They obviously have their Muslim problem, but French schools—you learn French literature, and as far as I know, there's not a whole lot of apologizing going on for it. What—German? Yeah, they're state—possibly. I mean, the operas have been destroyed—that's for sure. I mean, the opera productions, they are just utterly atrocious; they trashed the greatest works of on the musical stage. I don't know about the literature though. You think that—that they're not reading Heine and Kleist and Goethe? I don't know—could be. I mean, German—drums—ironically, actually, in the United States, the German departments traditionally were the holdouts against French theory—against deconstruction and Jacques Derrida. In the 70s at Yale—the Yale—the German department was seen as like so backward because it was still reading books instead of reading theory. So whether that reflects something true in Germany, I don't know. But yes, they have a lot of—they are easily manipulated; they've got their own guilt source, so that's true. [Applause] You