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The Diversity Myth, by David O. Sacks, Peter Thiel
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This is a powerful exploration of the debilitating impact that politically-correct “multiculturalism” has had upon higher education and academic freedom in the United States. In the name of diversity, many leading academic and cultural institutions are working to silence dissent and stifle intellectual life. This book exposes the real impact of multiculturalism on the institution most closely identified with the politically correct decline of higher education—Stanford University. Authored by two Stanford graduates, this book is a compelling insider’s tour of a world of speech codes, “dumbed-down” admissions standards and curricula, campus witch hunts, and anti-Western zealotry that masquerades as legitimate scholarly inquiry. Sacks and Thiel use numerous primary sources—the Stanford Daily, class readings, official university publications—to reveal a pattern of politicized classes, housing, budget priorities, and more. They trace the connections between such disparate trends as political correctness, the gender wars, Generation X nihilism, and culture wars, showing how these have played a role in shaping multiculturalism at institutions like Stanford. The authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not about learning more; it is actually about learning less. They end their comprehensive study by detailing the changes necessary to reverse the tragic disintegration of American universities and restore true academic excellence.
- Sales Rank: #707541 in Books
- Published on: 1999-01-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .68" w x 6.00" l, .94 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
"This engaging saga of Stanford’s experiment in multiculturalism compellingly draws readers into the nightmare world of social engineering in practice." —Elizabeth Fox-Geovese, professor of humanities, Emory University
" . . . . [A]uthors David Sacks and Peter Thiel show how Stanford University has incorporated the multicultural agenda into its undergraduate curriculum. The authors note that Stanford’s undergraduates can now get credit for such courses as ‘Creation/Procreation,’ which looks into ‘the gendered aspects of cosmological or religious systems,’ and ’Gender and Science,’ which purports to study science free of outdated assumptions. There is also a feminist studies course titled ‘How Tasty Were my French Sisters,’ about which I dare not speculate." —Wall Street Journal
"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
"A great read and an important story, this book will not just cause alarm about our educational institutions. It will inspire renewal." —William Kristol, editor and publisher, the Weekly Standard
"There is no higher duty for intellectuals than to denounce incipient totalitarianism wherever they observe it. Some of its symptoms are present at Stanford. In The Diversity Myth, two recent Stanford graduates document the situation there with a thoroughness and depth of analysis that should help stiffen the spine of university administrators." —René N. T. Girard, Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, Stanford University
"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 L. Chavez, former Director, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights; Chairman, Center for Equal Opportunity
"Written by two recent Stanford Graduates, The Diversity Myth says the campus was divided, and the curriculum destroyed, by the multicultural movement. The authors, David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, bemoan the offering of a history course in the spring of 1992 that focused entirely on black hair styles as a political and cultural statement . . . . Their book also discusses censorship, speech codes, and date rape." —the Chronicle of Higher Education
"Two former Stanford students, who lived through the 'culture wars' there, have written the most thorough and detailed account yet available of what 'multiculturalism' has meant at a major American university. With fascinating and often disheartening detail, The Diversity Myth will certainly lead readers to question what is happening today in American higher education." —Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, Emeritus, Harvard University
"The Diversity Myth charges that ‘politicized’ classes and student activities have led to an ironic intolerance on campus—intolerance of all things Western." —Newsweek
About the Author
David O. Sacks is a research fellow at The Independent Institute and is vice president of product strategy at PayPal, Inc. He has worked as a legislative aide to U. S. Representative Christopher Cox and received his A.B. in economics (1994) from Stanford University. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Policy Review, and Academic Questions. Peter A. Thiel is a research fellow at The Independent Institute and is chairman andCEO at PayPal, Inc. He has worked as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Financial Products, a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, and a speechwriter for former Education Secretary William J. Bennett. He received his A.B. in philosophy (1989) and J.D. (1992) from Stanford University. They both live in Palo Alto, California.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Prescient and Overly Optimistic, But Contains All The Seeds Of Today's Horrors
By Adam Wayne
“The Diversity Myth” is a twenty-year-old book that nobody would remember, despite its many virtues, were it not for that its authors (and many of the young figures in its pages) have since then become highly-visible billionaires, and, in the case of Peter Thiel, prominent public intellectuals. None of them knew that then, though (presumably!), which makes the book even more interesting.
And everything old is new again. This book has, since I started writing this review, taken on new relevancy, with the puerile and ignorant, yet vicious, happenings at the University of Missouri, Dartmouth, Yale, Oberlin and other colleges last fall (2015). But let’s take the book as it is.
It’s possible, and instructive, to draw a line from William F. Buckley’s “God And Man At Yale,” published in 1951, through this book (published in 1999) to today. A descending line, showing the cratering of the American academy. The declined Yale of the late 1940s and early 1950s criticized by Buckley was a paragon of excellence compared to Stanford in the 1990s, much less compared to universities today.
As with any book that deals with political conflicts of the past, it is easy to see where the authors were right and where the authors were wrong. Unfortunately, they were right about the problem and wrong that it was on the way to being fixed. In fact, the problem of enforced leftist ideological conformity escaped the confines of Stanford and similar universities long ago, mutating and growing along the way, until now it not only suffocates all university discourse, but infects the entire nation’s discourse.
So, for example, a few months ago (November 2015), Obama’s Department of Justice announced that an Illinois school district would be punished by the federal government if they did not let a boy teenager with a mental illness, believing himself to be a girl, use the girl’s locker room with no restrictions. (Of course, they don’t call it a mental illness—they say he “identifies as a girl,” and therefore is one.) If, in 1995, someone had suggested that any of this could ever happen, he would have been treated as unbalanced at best. Similarly, Thiel and Sacks identified lots of problems with what in the 1990s was called multiculturalism, but they could not have seen the inversions of logic and reality to come.
Although the book’s title mentions “diversity,” that word did not have exactly the same meaning in 1995 as it does today, and Thiel and Sacks actually focus almost exclusively on “multiculturalism,” which was the watchword of the coercive Left in the 1990s. Today, “diversity” has taken center-stage. Today, diversity means, in the academic or workplace context, the granting of unearned rewards to the unqualified, under the guise of remedying past or present discrimination, bolstered by (always totally unsupported) claims that selecting awardees to favor chosen racial or other groups creates its own fantastic value, and of course has zero costs.
Shrill demands for diversity today are everywhere in life. But “Multiculturalism” today is an also-ran, essentially folded into diversity, perhaps because multiculturalism as practiced wasn’t multicultural at all, in the sense of wanting to create an environment of cultural openness, but rather a mechanism for creating a united, interlocking front to benefit the political causes of the Left (and to denigrate the superior accomplishments of the West, which denigration is a core political cause of Left). This is the core point of the book, and perhaps the term “multiculturalism” itself has largely disappeared because it lost its propaganda value when the immediate political goals were achieved and it became apparent that the term itself was a lie.
So what was the norm at Stanford is now the norm nationwide. And at universities now, what we have is a bizarre environment consisting of, among other dubious accomplishments of Western civilization, “trigger warnings,” demands to end “cultural appropriation”, tearing down Cecil Rhodes’s statue, and attempting to ban the wheat sheaves on the Harvard seal because the family they represent, who gave money to found Harvard, owned slaves.
Thiel’s and Sacks’s story and analysis is narrowly focused on Stanford. The first part of the book says what diversity/multiculturalism is not (or was not); the second says what it is (or was). In brief, what it is not is the West, which it defines itself in antithesis to. What it is a new, alien culture, based on (largely fake) victim status, but to its proponents the New Jerusalem. (Like all ideological leftist movements, diversity/multiculturalism is largely a religion substitute, in which the proponents achieve redemption and transcendence through their rituals.)
Much of the book is taken up with a catalog of anecdotal horrors (many of which seem mild by comparison to today’s behavior), organized by topic. Apparently some people think this undercuts the probative value of the book—looking at other reviews, accusations of cherry-picking seem pretty common. But anecdotes buttressed by statements and actions by all those in power supporting the behavior in the anecdotes is pretty much the only way to prove behavior. Those who suggest that the anecdotes give a false picture seem unlikely to be convinced by any evidence.
There are quite a few funny lines in the book. Noting the attack by a legal “scholar” on the West, exalting native Hawaiian culture as superior because there was “no money, no idea or practice of surplus appropriation,” Thiel and Sacks note that “Only Western societies have a problem with the exploitation of surplus value because such societies are the only ones that produce much surplus value to be exploited. Digging for taro roots and fishing for seafood [activities praised by the speaker] are quite different from the kind of work one imagines people do at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—a center whose very existence requires more surplus value than Native Hawaiian culture ever generated.” Ha ha. Similarly, they explicitly compare the multiculture to primitive societies, “with its hunger fasts, expulsions and ritual scapegoatings.” And there are also keen insights. “Multicultural victimology is so powerful because it taps into two base emotions that are not often found together—self-pity and self-importance.”
Although the authors don’t mention it, perhaps the best lens for evaluating the inception and metastasizing of diversity/multiculturalism is the “repressive tolerance” of Herbert Marcuse, a leading member of the poisonous Frankfurt School (composed of German refugees who created the philosophical backbone of the New Left, which is now dominant). Marcuse’s 1965 polemic against freedom, contained in the book “A Critique Of Pure Tolerance,” introduced the Orwellian idea that real tolerance consisted of intolerance. Or, as Wikipedia summarizes the idea, “Revolutionary minorities hold the truth and the majority has to be liberated from error by being re-educated in the truth by this minority. The revolutionary minority are entitled, Marcuse claims, to suppress rival and harmful opinions.”
The Marcusian lens explains WHY proponents of diversity/multiculturalism push their ideology. It has nothing to do with justice, the righting of wrongs, or the spread of forgotten or suppressed ideas. Instead, it is purely a mechanism for the totalitarian Left to gain total power, or as close to it as possible. The paths to this are several. The main theme is the self-admitted goal of total destruction of existing cultural values and their replacement by new values—being, as the authors note that Lenin said, “the engineers of souls.” And the immediate 1990s goal (successfully achieved nationwide in educational institutions) was the total replacement of the culture that is the common inheritance of the West with a mishmash of relativism, ignorance and idiocy. Too bad.
Thiel and Sacks point out that multiculturalism is the polar opposite of universalism. In a universalist approach to learning, the goal is to understand and communicate universal, objective truths that are available to everyone. In the multiculturalist approach, there are no universal truths, only ideas available only to victims, and subordinated in service to the achievement of power in a zero-sum game, using the all-purpose victim card.
Fortunately, perhaps, this suggests the solution to the cancer of diversity/multiculturalism—a return to universal principles, and in application of those principles, a focus on competition for excellence and productivity. (It’s a logical conclusion that members of ethnic groups that push diversity/multiculturalism do so in large part because they fear or know that they can’t compete with the ethnic groups, such as Asians, that don’t spend their time shrieking demands for more diversity.) But that solution is not likely in the current environment.
Thiel and Sacks end on an optimistic note, claiming that the “fall of Stanford” had begun. Unfortunately not—not only has the rot spread nationwide, and mutated into something much worse, but its effects are greater. This is because the role of universities today is no longer to educate (except in technical fields), but to act as filter for entrance into the ruling class, the “cognitive elite” of Charles Murray. The authors do seem to be correct in that Stanford, while still certainly narrowly and nastily ideologically conformist, is no longer a leader, and in fact has moved in a technocratic direction since the book was written—a direction that 1990s university leaders sneeringly denigrated as beneath the role of a great university.
Of course, even some liberals, such as Jonthan Haidt, have realized that this will end very badly. To his credit, Obama has also recently been speaking out, even if softly, about the pernicious effects of the more extreme versions of diversity/multiculturalism. (Of course, becoming more extreme is a necessary consequence of any revolutionary movement, which inevitably eat their own until the collapse comes.) Either it will corrode society so badly that we will become a third-rate country, or there will be a vicious backlash. Perhaps after the backlash, the academy can be reformed on principles pre-dating the current decline (i.e., sometime before 1950). And then everything old will really be new again. Sounds good to me.
Sadly, Thiel and especially Sacks now appear to have backed somewhat off their views in this book. (It is amusing, though, that the book contains negative attention to “early” gay rights initiatives, and yet Thiel and at least one major conservative character in the book have since come out as gay themselves. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.) In part this is because it is clearly written by very smart, yet very young, men. In places, it is florid, and uses the metaphors and tropes of immature writers. But mostly it is because Thiel and Sacks now live in the tech world, which while it has libertarian elements, is strongly dominated by hardcore leftists, and there is no room at all for traditional conservatives. I guess none of this is surprising, though.
While the focus here is on the then-current complaints of the proponents of diversity/multiculturalism, today’s major areas of focus are nearly all seen in embryo. (One exception is the accusation of creation of stigma, the modern darling of the totalitarian left, which is used as an all-purpose weapon once leftist aggressors realized that it required no victim at all, just a feeling that others didn’t approve of what you were dong. Nor are bizarre inversions of reality like claims of gender fluidity seen here.) Microagressions are seen in passing where a student complains of “all the very small daily daggers one feels in the environment.” Puritanic regulation of sexual conduct while at the same time demanding total sexual freedom. Institutional racism as an unwashable Original Sin. This makes for interesting, if depressing, hindsight reading.
Now, like the Stay-Puft Man in Ghostbusters, these embryonic ideas have assumed monstrous proportions. I’m not sure what to do about that. There is probably little to actively do, except wait and see whether there will be an opportunity to reclaim the culture, or whether all that’s left to do is wait, on dune and headland, for the fire to sink. The arc of our culture since this book was written suggests the latter.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Buy this book ,save yourself from endless worthless college debt!
By Patrick Von Hyperborea
Must read if you want to understand the SJW Generation and how worthless/expensive most non-technical /skill teaching college degrees have become.To quote Frank Zappa "You want to get laid,go to college ,you want an education ,go to a library ".More truer now than ever.Buy this book before you choose a place of higher leaning.Watcout for any indenity studies!
34 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Opinion of a white male born in the upper-middle class that I hope you read if you were about to flame me
By Michael Horak
As my header states, I'm a white male born and educated in the upper-middle class. Also, like Thiel, I am a libertarian, although politically I'm a little more to the left than he is. I gave the book five stars because I agree with the central premise; however, I understand why people of certain backgrounds and beliefs describe the book as "yellow journalism" because I do agree that it does sensationalize to some extent. If what I've written so far has inflamed you and you believe I'm a bigot then you should continue reading because you are who I want to read this.
First of all, I know that in a way I'm lucky to have been born into a family that has both resources and values education and hard work. I agree that skin color, gender, and wealth create an uneven playing field. I would argue that of those three, wealth has the greatest effect and gender has the least effect. The reason I like this book is because it points out the negative long term effects of the politically correct (PC) culture that exists in the US. What do I mean by this? In a nutshell I mean that the efforts by the PC crowd have a long term effect of reducing diversity. I believe this is the central pillar of the book and I will explain more in the next paragraph.
As a scientist, the type of diversity that matters to me is diversity of opinion. When everyone thinks the same, people do not innovate and society does not move forward. As much as I believe in my understanding of the issue, if you have a different opinion and can back it up with intelligent discourse, that is the diversity I value and that is a positive for society. PC culture destroys this difference of opinion. People who do not have the same views as PC activists and the liberal media are labeled as "bigots". The end result is you get a large group of people of various races, genders/sexual orientations, height, weight, ..., incomes who all believe the same thing and if anyone, from either outside or inside the group, disagrees with an opinion or viewpoint of the group, they are ceremoniously cast away.
Let me give you an example. A common rally of the liberal media is gender income inequality. PC activists commonly state that women make $0.79 for every $1 a man makes. In some cases the PC activists get bold and also add, "for the same job". If you do research on this subject you will find that overall women in the labor force do make about $0.79 for every $1 a man makes. However, this does not take into effect the differences in job occupations and experience between men and women. Men tend to take riskier and more physically demanding jobs than women and also don't lose experience from spending time at home with their kids. When you filter for the same occupation and experience level the gap in pay decreases to less than $0.05. However, when I state this to people in the PC glob I am immediately labeled a bigot and "don't understand". Because my logic is different than their "pack's" opinion, my logic is negatively labeled and not even argued against.
Since I am writing this review over 20 years after the authors wrote this book everyone can see the long term consequences that this book identifies because they have had time to fully develop. People who publicly disagree with a viewpoint of the PC are many times chased on a witch hunt. The PC group has diversity in its members but not in its beliefs. I have one more closing point to add. This is not a new phenomenon, it has most likely been going on even before the birth of "modern humans." People who do not fall within the majority today are outsiders, first generation feminists were renegades, and scientists who believed the earth revolved around the sun were blasphemers. By labeling well educated people who do not share the same viewpoints as you bigots and failing to engage them in a debate, all you show is that you haven't learned enough from the past. Now who's the real bigot?
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