The Diversity Myth Read online

  The Diversity Myth

  “THE DIVERSITY MYTH charges that ‘politicized’ classes and student activities have led to an ironic intolerance on campus—intolerance of all things Western.”

  —NEWSWEEK

  “The story of THE DIVERSITY MYTH is based at Stanford, but this book is larger than that. As a Harvard graduate, I recognize my own school in these pages, and quite likely you will too. By detailing the current corruption of our academic ideals with a larger audience, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have hastened the much-needed and long-awaited restoration of higher education.”

  —CHRISTOPHER COX

  United States Congressman

  “If you want to find out what went wrong at Stanford University, read THE DIVERSITY MYTH. There's hardly a better source than this book for learning why multiculturalism on campus cannot work.”

  —LINDA CHAVEZ

  former Director, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights

  “THE DIVERSITY MYTH is a carefully documented and sensitively recorded historical account of the whole tragic saga, together with keen analysis of how all this could have happened. Future historians will find this book indispensable.”

  —NATIONAL REVIEW

  The Diversity Myth

  Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus

  DAVID O. SACKS

  PETER A. THIEL

  Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

  Printed in the United States of America 1998 by

  The Independent Institute

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  Copyright © 1995, 1998 by The Independent Institute

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  The Diversity Myth : “multiculturalism” and the politics of intolerance at Stanford / David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel

  Includes references and index.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 95-80321

  Hardcover: 978-0-945999-42-3

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  For our parents,

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Christopher Columbus, The First Multiculturalist

  Part I: The New Academy

  1 The West Rejected

  The New Classics

  A Tempest Over The Tempest

  Rhetoric and Reality

  2 Multiculturalism: A New Word for a New World

  Multiculturalism as Diversity

  Multiculturalism as Relativism

  Multiculturalism as Ideology

  Multiculturalism as Conformity

  3 Educating Generation X

  The Therapeutic Curriculum

  The Trendy Curriculum

  The Victims’ Curriculum

  The Radical Curriculum

  The Empty Curriculum

  4 The Engineering of Souls

  Liberation Theology

  The New Puritanism

  The Multiculture

  Part II: The New Culture

  5 Stages of Oppression

  Creating Difference

  Creating Identity

  Race and “Institutional Racism”

  Homosexuality and “Homophobia”

  Gender and “Sexism”

  The Double Bind

  6 “Welcome to Salem”

  Enforcing Orthodoxy: The Speech Code

  Otero II: The Empire Strikes Back

  “Retributive Justice or Vengeance or Whatever”

  “Militant Action”

  Enemies Within

  Moral Luck

  Busy Doing Nothing

  7 The Egalitarian Elite

  One Man vs. The Multiculture

  Duping and Doling

  The Great Experimenters

  Metamorphosis

  8 Caliban's Kingdom

  Beyond the Wasteland

  The Culture of Blame

  The Problem and the Solution

  About the Authors

  Index

  Foreword

  Ten years ago, Stanford University was enjoying its status as one of the most prestigious universities in the country, as much for the quality of the education it offered undergraduates as for its graduate schools and the research of its faculty, but most people would not have thought of the happenings at Stanford as material for the national media. Then, Stanford's “revision” of its Western Civilization requirement and, shortly thereafter, its administration's questionable financial practices captured national attention. The tendency to present Stanford as a unique case must have been reassuring for the leadership of other great universities, if only because it suggested that Stanford was anomalous rather than typical. In private, however, many university presidents, provosts, and deans must have been saying their novenas (if they remembered how to) for dodging the bullet that so easily might have hit them. For the real interest of Stanford's miseries lies precisely in their embodiment of trends that are sweeping through higher education in the United States.

  David Sacks and Peter Thiel were attending Stanford during the great curriculum wars and the revelations about unseemly misuse of taxpayer dollars. Their engaging saga of Stanford's response to both compellingly draws readers into a surreal world of social engineering and institutional arrogance. Having lived through the campaign to reshape thought and behavior, these young authors are well positioned to chronicle the experience from the perspective of students who did not share the prevailing commitment to “multiculturalism” but were nonetheless caught in its throes. The chilling picture they paint is one of a pervasive arrogance that drove one of the country's most prestigious, elite universities to dismantle the educational system and quality that had built its reputation.

  Let us note that there are principled reasons to support some aspects of what has, however vaguely and imprecisely, become known as multiculturalism; for many serious, honest people do, for a variety of reasons, support it. At first glance, there seem few reasonable grounds not to endorse a broadening and enrichment of undergraduate education, especially in a world in which women have become regular participants in the economy and politics, and in which the cultures of other civilizations enjoy increasing prominence in our national and international life. Presumably some professors among the vast majority of the Stanford faculty who endorsed the replacement of Western Civilization by Cultures, Ideas, and Values did so for the most honorable of reasons. But once all allowances have been made and all caveats filed, the authors’ account commands serious attention, not least because it lays out the connections among superficially disparate tendencies.

  In attacking multiculturalism, Mr. Sacks and Mr. Thiel readily acknowledge that neither they, nor apparently anyone else, know precisely what the term means. At Stanford, and other universities, where multiculturalism may have less to do with a coherent educational program or philosophy than with a series of interlocking attitudes and practices, what multiculturalism in the curriculum assuredly does not mean is a renewed emphasis upon the mastery of foreign languages or the close study of complex civilizations. All of the multicultural texts are read in English, and it appears that most of them were written since World War II. We are not, in other words, talking about close and respectful study of the Koran which has shaped the consciousness of millions of people throughout the world since the seventh century. We are not, to be blunt, talking about a substantive introd
uction to the values and identities of peoples who differ radically from today's youth. After all, distance in time offers one of the most promising avenues to an encounter with people whose values and assumptions have differed radically from our own. No. We are talking about various participants, many of them “revolutionaries,” in today's increasingly homogenized global system. Thus the most popular multicultural texts are written by people who may differ from elite Stanford students by sex, “sexual preference,” skin color, wealth, or place of birth and access to opportunity, but who share many, if not all, of the values of Stanford students and of a majority of the Stanford humanities faculty.

  Even here, we might reasonably debate the value of including one or more such texts either to expand students’ familiarity with the contemporary world or even out of respectful desire to “recognize” cultural variation among contemporary Americans. What is difficult to debate at all is the value—or, indeed, the intellectual and moral integrity—of requiring students to agree with or even applaud views and values that mock the values with which they have been reared. Yet Stanford built a radical sensibility into the very fabric of its residential and social life, censuring students for “incorrect” views and, at the extreme, excluding them from funding for speakers or even residence in the dorms. No less disturbing, the triumph of multiculturalism at Stanford coincided with a period of extraordinary and extravagant grade inflation that resulted in the vast majority of students ending up with only As or Bs on their record. It does not take much imagination to understand that this practice severely diminished the accomplishment of students who did take their work seriously. If the best way to get a good grade is to ignore the assigned readings, get a good night's sleep, and write “what the professor wants to hear,” the value of reading the texts and thinking for yourself declines accordingly.

  Mr. Sacks and Mr. Thiel provide abundant examples of the excesses they deplore, and even if Stanford provided more space for dissent than they suggest, they make a convincing case that the cause of responsible education and intellectual inquiry was being poorly served, if indeed it was being served at all. Obviously, some Stanford students, by whatever means, continued to acquire a quality education, for how else do we explain Mr. Sacks and Mr. Thiel? But the most chilling core of our authors’ argument does not lie in the documentation of this or that excess or even this or that atrocity. It lies in their convincing argument that, at Stanford and beyond, the campaign to impose “multiculturalism” amounts to nothing less than a war on Western civilization and, beyond it, a war on the very idea of civilization.