“We’re all in gender studies 101 now”
Heather Mac Donald on Higher Ed’s Influence on Politics
Manhattan Institute scholar and author Heather Mac Donald appeared on the Mark Levin show this weekend to discuss how campus culture has begun to surface in American politics. Social justice warriors used to be confined to college campuses, now their world view has been adopted by many elected officials.
Mac Donald points out that college students are indoctrinated upon arrival to believe they are either victims or oppressors and that this paradigm is worsening the problem it is supposedly solving.
She uses the Kavanaugh hearings as an example of the advancement of the progressive concept of campus ‘rape culture’ and the diminished value of due process.
Here’s a partial transcript via FOX News:
LEVIN: Well, you have a BA and MA in English. You have a JD. You are a lawyer, but you are a scholar in so many areas — race relations, immigration, policing in colleges and universities. And this is where I really wanted to delve in with you. You have a new book, “The Diversity Delusion: How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture.” This so relevant today, and you that argue toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance and widened division in our larger culture. And I think we see this everywhere now.
MAC DONALD: We certainly do, the Kavanaugh hearings was an example that were all in gender studies 101 now, Mark. Virtually every aspect of the culmination of hysteria that greeted Judge Kavanaugh was perfected over the last decade on the college campus.
Above all, the preposterous mantra to believe survivors regardless of the evidence, regardless of due process. This is the campus rape hysteria that has been transforming the lives of males on campuses, creating an extraordinarily costly bureaucracy, moved into the real world and it is not going away, it’s only going to get worse.
This is the key line of her argument:
From the moment a student steps on a college campus today as a freshman or a fresh person, I should probably say, the bureaucracy is determined to drum in to that student’s head, identity politics, which says, he is either a victim or an oppressor. Oppressors are obviously most famously white males, heterosexual white males. The only way they can get out to of their oppressor category is to become an ally – an ally of the oppressed.
The most preposterous delusion of all of this is student actually believe that they are at risk of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism on a college campus. This is an environment that in traditional liberal terms is the most tolerant environment in human history for society’s traditionally marginalized groups.
She goes so far as to say that this campus culture is breeding hate and could ultimately lead to civil war as generations of young people are being taught to hate each other, their country, and western civilization.
This video is about 15 minutes long. Watch the first five minutes at least. After that, you may decide to view the whole thing:
Mac Donald discussed similar issues and her new book ‘The Diversity Delusion’ during a recent interview with Aaron Sibarium of The American Interest:
Aaron Sibarium (The American Interest): Thank you for agreeing to do this, Heather. To begin, why don’t you tell me what The Diversity Delusion is about, and what inspired you to write it at this particular moment.
Heather Mac Donald: The book is about the identity politics and victim ideology that have taken over college campuses. I was inspired to write it out of a combination of sorrow and rage. Sorrow, because I believe so strongly in the humanist mission of universities and the extraordinary privilege of being able to study the greatest works of civilization. And rage, because I see ignorant students being encouraged by faculty and campus administrators to reject the monuments of human thought on such absurd grounds as an author’s gonads and melanin.
TAI: In the book, you talk about this “metastasizing diversity bureaucracy,” saying it’s not just on campus, but that it’s spread to other institutions too. In particular, you talk a lot about businesses and tech companies indulging in identity histrionics. Do you see this ideology affecting national politics too? Has it started to affect not just private businesses and HR departments, but also the day-to-day political realities of America?
HMD: Absolutely. We have just lived through a month of Gender Studies 101 with the hysteria over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The tribal victimology that characterizes college campuses is now becoming the currency of a surprisingly large sector of the Democratic Party. Many females have decided that they represent an oppressed class and that such traditional Enlightenment values as due-process and the presumption of innocence are expendable. Campus rape tribunals have discarded essential truth-finding mechanisms such as cross-examination in the service of the #BelieveSurvivors mantra. And now that contempt for rational means of proof is entering the public consciousness as well.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Two very good things about this. One: McDonald and her message; she’s articulate and dead nuts on, clear, and concise. Two: Levin, for the most part, lets her talk without interrupting. She needs to be able to deliver this message on college and university campuses, but then that’s what UC culture warrior administrators, are paid four hundred thousand dollars a year to prevent. He should have the courage (not likely) to come on Levin’s show to make his case, rebut McDonald with similarly few interruptions and no outbursts from Levin.
More on topic, the universal acceptance and defense of the things McDonald condemns are made possible by a primary and secondary education system that provides little or no exposure to meaningful civics and history education.
I love Heather Mac Donald. Just listen to her speak in complete, logically constructed sentences. Reminds me of Charles the K-hammer.
She is well researched and in a few Q&A sessions I’ve seen of her, it is hard to catch her off guard or to get her off track.
However, too often for my tastes she talks in -isms. And she can be trite. Neither is necessary something that turns me away. It just makes it easier for the shrieking social justice mob to paint her as an ideologue or the like. Jordan Peterson has mastered talking in common language by comparison. She is still a good person to have out there highlighting the erosion of free thinking and freedoms.
The academe has long been a breeding ground (in a good sense) for liberal thought. To open minds. In less than a few decades progressives have taken over the bureaucracy to accelerate the direction to one of illiberal thought but masquerading it in the most Orwellian terms.
I’m a product of the STEM fields and have long assumed they would for the most part be immune. However, about 8 years ago I interviewed some new civil engineering graduates. Of no surprise, I found a few who were coming out of “prestigious” programs had taken courses in areas that merged social justice and design. One was called Designing Towards Solving Human Rights Issues. So we can all be comforted in knowing bridges will no longer be designed to be racist!!!
“The Diversity Delusion: How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture.”
The subtitle to this is “End the taxpayer funded gravy train, and this problem will be corrected in short order.”
But the corrupt-o-crats in DC are too fearful of being smeared as ‘anti-eduction’ – despite it truly being indoctrination.
I’ll leave it at that before I say something to regret…
An example of feminism gone wild is when a friend of mine as the captain of an airliner comforted one of his crying flight attendants by hugging her while she was sobbing. A passenger had insulted her and she was unable to control her emotions and broke down crying. This all happened while boarding the plane just outside of the cockpit. Everything was under control and the crises ended. A month later the FA sued the captain for “Unwanted Touching”! Needless to say, it was a shock to all concerned. But in the world these new PC correct people are creating, any form of old world compassion will be treated as an attack or insult.
It’s almost as if some enemy of the United States had been supporting Diversity to divert resources away from actual education and to hamstring America’s competitiveness especially in science and technology.
Our loss of STEM edge has less to do with diverity indoctrination at the college level. We are on a consistent slide backwards from K-12. It may even be a worse decline than college. At least test data show that to be the case. It’s just that the colleges have to pick up more of the slack. (I’m specially referring to STEM graduates and their test results for graduate degrees, etc. Not college graduates overall.)
K (actually pre-K) through 12 is where diversity indoctrination begins, and demonstrating how much you love the taste of Kool-Aid is very helpful for college admission.
I would suggest that you look more closely at the data, casualobserver. It it true that test data is showing a general decline (and I believe the data to be accurate.) The trend line is for the average, however. America is still producing the best of the best; they are just outnumbered by the marginal. Basically, we see the same sort of disparity in educational outcomes that we are seeing in many areas of American life. Those at the far right of the bell curve are moving further from the middle as are those on the far left, and the middle is collapsing.
Sadly, it’s also infested the well known 12 – step program, Alcoholics Anononymous, which is based in New York City.
The problem with Democrats identity politics bullshit is that it will ACTUALLY LEAD to more racism.
Every single race is being told that they have to be defined BY their race. Black, latino, and white, are all defined by their race.
And when day after day and year after year you scream about race race race race, then people DO identify with their race.
And then people think ONLY about race.
Obama and the Democrats have set race relations back 50 years.
Diversity is color judgment/discrimination. It is racism. Identity politics is a politically congruent (“=”) euphemism that denies individual dignity, in the same manner that Pro-Choice/selective and recycled-child deny human evolution and value.
She has some excellent and eloquent points. And I must say her two degrees in English sure came in handy, or she might never have been able to use the word “circumambient” in a sentence correctly.
When I was in college we thought of ourselves as one big melting pot and we were proud of it. I got to believe that underneath this veneer of multi-cultural stupidity it is still one big melting pot. Yup, I would bet a couple of beers on that.
When I hear “Gender Studies”, I think this, Regardless what is said it boils down to. A man & a women= Gender, that’s natural. put here, by nature. It’s simple, but true. Period. EVERYTHING ELSE is bovine Scatology
When colleges began accepting, then handing out degrees like candy to minorities regardless of their academic grades, what do you expect? Mental midgets always bite the “helping hand”.