Editor's note: The latest book by Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion, is available now.
A onetime liberal, Heather Mac Donald now believes identity politics threatens higher education and civilization itself.
Heather Mac Donald may be best known for braving angry collegiate mobs, determined to prevent her from speaking last year in defense of law enforcement. But she finds herself oddly in agreement with her would-be suppressors: “To be honest,” she tells me, “I would not even invite me to a college campus.”
No, she doesn’t yearn for a safe space from her own triggering views. “My ideal of the university is a pure ivory tower,” she says. “I think that these are four precious years to encounter human creations that you’re otherwise—unless you’re very diligent and insightful—really never going to encounter again. There is time enough for things of the moment once you graduate.”
In her new book, “The Diversity Delusion,” Ms. Mac Donald, 61, explores how identity politics has diverted higher education from more elevated subjects. She warns of this ideology’s spread to other cultural institutions and industries—Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
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Ms. Melchior is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion (available now). Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal