On October 4, MI's Thomas W. Smith Fellow Heather Mac Donald addressed the Young Leaders Circle in New York City.

For a quarter century, Mac Donald has written with clarity and force about many of the most contentious social issues of the day. The integrity of her research, no less her personal courage, has kept her at the forefront of our national debates on issues such as immigration, criminal-justice reform, race relations, family breakdown, higher education, and policing.

She is a contributing editor of City Journal and has written for other publications including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Her best-selling book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, warns that misleading rhetoric about racism in the criminal-justice system has undermined police officers' ability to keep neighborhoods safe, therefore putting lives at risk.

Heather has also written extensively about the state of American higher education, analyzing trends that have distracted and diverted colleges and universities from what ought to be at the core of their mission: the transmission of knowledge to the next generation. Through her writing, she has shined a light on the narcissism that pervades identity studies and student culture, debunked what she calls the "campus-rape myth," brought attention to schools' wasteful spending on diversity bureaucrats, and highlighted corruption in teaching and research in the humanities, among other work.

Heather has herself experienced the resistance to intellectual diversity that has become all too common on the nation's campuses. In April, when she was invited to Claremont McKenna College to speak on The War on Cops, protesters blocked the entrance to the lecture hall; Mac Donald was forced to speak to an empty room and to depart early under a police escort (an episode she refers to in her article, "Get Up, Stand Up"). The day before her speech at Claremont, protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles, interrupted her question-and-answer session after a talk on policing.