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The Diversity Delusion  By  cover art

The Diversity Delusion

By: Heather Mac Donald
Narrated by: Pam Ward, Heather Mac Donald - intro
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Publisher's summary

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

By the
New York Times bestselling author: a provocative account of the attack on the humanities, the rise of intolerance, and the erosion of serious learning.

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.

But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.

©2018 Heather Mac Donald (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“I read every word Heather Mac Donald writes and always have. She is brilliant and has tons of guts and is an inspiration." - Peggy Noonan, New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary

"Others besides Heather Mac Donald have indicted academia for devastating liberal education, but no one has ever documented the damage as Mac Donald does in The Diversity Delusion. It is crammed with facts and numbers that universities go to great lengths to hide. How she did it is a mystery, but The Diversity Delusion will be my master reference for anything I write on these topics." - Charles Murray, Emeritus Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

"Not since Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind has a book so thoroughly exposed the damage done to American institutions--particularly universities--by modern liberalism's glib commitment to 'diversity.' Mac Donald unveils today's true operating principle: that claims of social justice precede the diminishment of Western greatness--a greatness that has (and will continue to) benefit the former victims of Western bigotry. This book is a story of what happens when too much insecurity seeps into a great civilization." - Shelby Steele, author of Shame, White Guilt, and The Content of Our Character

What listeners say about The Diversity Delusion

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Definition of the campus 'diversity' issue

It seems unlikely that two books so similar as The Diversity Delusion and The Coddling of the American Mind would be released on the same day. Author Heather Mac Donald goes into far more detail in her citing of examples of the negative impact of the campus diversity delusion than Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff while they offer specific prescriptive solutions that she does not. Along the way in The Diversity Delusion Mac Donald dismantles a central premise of The Coddling of the American Mind that the current campus lack of tolerance began in 2013 as the first of the Internet generation (I-gen) became college freshmen. She also does a much better job of describing how the politicization of the social sciences has already made huge inroads into the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.

Despite my issues with the proposed solutions in the Haidt/Lukianoff book and despite the my lower rating for it, if the listener has time for just one of the two books I recommend The Coddling of the American Mind over The Diversity Delusion. But consider listening to both.

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Important topics covered by a skeptic of the prevailing narrative.

I don’t agree with everything said in this book but there are important things discussed in this book that have been deemed off limits. Those limits must be challenged and, when appropriate, broken. Without such challenges, progress will be impossible.

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A must read and warning to every American on the damage the universities are doing to our students and country.

Students graduate as victims who are not equipped to make adult decisions. Universities are now victim centers. Everything is based on lies and phantom racism/sexism. They have become wisdom free and left wing indoctrination centers.

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Not Quite What I'd Hoped For

I was expecting something at the level of Dr. Sowell. This was more of a "ripped from the headlines" commentary than a heavily researched work.

It was decent, but didn't go into as much depth as I'd hoped.

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Exhaustive on her subject!

Heather Mac Donald’ Diversity Delusion is exhaustive without being exhausting.

Much of what she writes about and duly denounces came as a revelation to me.
Having a bachelors degree, as well as a masters degree, obtained after studying at five different Catholic universities in three different countries, obtained by 1994, I value what she defends as essential in a liberal arts education. But, having been outside of the university setting for almost a generation, I have been unaware of the apparent disintegration of learning at today’s university. What a disaster for our children, and society.
I appreciate her thorough referencing of The Great Courses of the Teaching Company, as a light in the darkness. I’ve been a customer of the Teaching Company for around twelve years, and couldn’t agree with Mac Donald more.

This is a book worth reading and listening to for everyone invested in the education of young minds. Parents, professors and students will do well to give Ms. Mac Donald an ear.

On her next edition of this book, if one is in the making, I would appreciate an exposé on colleges and universities in the United States who are doing things right regarding the liberal arts. Although Hillsdale College, Ave Maria University, and Thomas Aquinas College, just to name a few, cannot compare in size to the U.C. campuses, and state schools around the country, as well as Ivy League universities, it would be helpful, I think, if she were to add these institutions to the refreshing chapter on the Teaching Company.

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"Stupifying"



I give this work five stars even though it is profoundly depressing. However, subject yourself for the sake of future humanity! Future is the right term because it will take colleges many generations to recover from their current state of derangement. If it can even be done at all.


The book explores among other things, lunacy in the equity, diversity and inclusion industry.  For instance, colleges have been crawling over broken glass to hoover up any prospective minority they can find. Then confess their campuses to be dens of institutional racism were those same students are “unsafe”.  And then expand the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to atone for their sins.


The author then moves on to discuss “the college rape culture” and the apparatus constructed to find and prosecute it. The examples have become legendary but are still appalling told again years later.


My favorite is unconscious bias theory. This has reached religious cult levels of absurdity. And a financial scam on a nationwide scale.  Whole industries have been extorted to buy “unconscious bias” training to avoid inevitable charges of racism. Racism can be proven by simply pointing out the company does not have enough black left handed female neurosurgeons.  


The inquisitors have power over even Google! Google probably sweats blood to find women and minority software engineers. A Google employee wrote a paper recommending how the company might appeal to women.  He was fired because he implied men and women might respond to different incentives. “Men and women are the same, you misogonist!”


There is hope.  This book by itself is nice bit of fumigation. And of course Jordan Peterson has an entire library on youtube.  Dennis Prager and Jonathan Haight have their own youtube presentations.


If you are graduating from high school I would think twice before paying money to college morons who will likely make you dumber then when you arrived. Learn to fix MRI machines or perhaps welding. Either one would be more intellectually challenging. In addition, if you are a guy you won't end up competing with prefered women. The diversity police are not interested in diversifying those occupations.



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Fantastic and urgently needed book

Anyone who sends kids to college, or even high school these days, should read this book and probably have their kids read it, too. It is a bracing examination of the sad state of identity politics on campuses across the country. Heather Mac Donald is a national treasure.

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Where is the silent majority?

I say this as a progressive. Heather Mac Donald has competently documented and critiqued the current state of identity politics, ‘wokeism’ and all manner of intolerant, ignorant and bad-faith-based (student) activism which seeks to subvert the worthy and noble values our society is built upon. This is an important book and at this time (June 2020) its message is more timely than ever. I see relatively few reviews but
I hope people are reading this and authors like McWhorter, Steele and even the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. I don’t really understand why the left has allowed this illiberal and undemocratic element to go unchecked (White Guilt?), but it’s going to take the American public to wake up (in a different way) and challenge this threat to our academic institutions, private enterprise and civil liberties.

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The Epitome of Arrogance

Talk about an overly verbose and self indulgent writer. The author has taken simple thoughts and dressed them up with synonyms to simply sound intellectually... offensive. While she may have read Socrates and Aristotle her inability to relate to their teachings is astonishing. The very fabric of education is to challenge the status quo - is the reason why we have thought leaders who keep getting challenged in the social sciences. My sense is that she uses verbosity to defend her very own feelings of victim hood, masking her privilege. It comes across very clear on her positions of people of color, women, and those other than heterosexuals should be/behave like. It is clear that she lacks the emotionally intelligence to actually address these issues of diversity in a social science environment. I picked up this book recommended by a family member who loves to live in a double standard world. Contrary to what this book suggests, I do welcome opposing opinions. However, I don’t indulge in utilizing narratives as facts to present a very extremist conservative view. Should you read this? Nah, skip it. Unless you want to flip through pages written by an emotional intelligent buffoon pretending to be a pundits.

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Outstanding

An outstanding description of the embarrassment of what is the university today. Mac Donald's research and presentation is incredible.

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