Overview

In the name of “diversity,” many leading academic and cultural institutions are working to silence dissent and stifle intellectual life. This powerful 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, if sometimes depressing, 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.

Sacks and Thiel 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.

Contents

Foreword: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Christopher Columbus, The First Multiculturalist

Part I: The New Academy

Chapter 1: The West Rejected

The New Classics
A Tempest over The Tempest
Rhetoric and Reality

Chapter 2: Multiculturalism: A New Word for a New World

Multiculturalism as Diversity
Multiculturalism as Relativism
Multiculturalism as Ideology
Multiculturalism as Conformity

Chapter 3: Educating Generation X

The Therapeutic Curriculum
The Trendy Curriculum
The Victims' Curriculum
The Radical Curriculum
The Empty Curriculum

Chapter 4: The Engineering of Souls

Liberation Theology
The New Puritanism
The Multiculture

Part II: The New Culture

Chapter 5: Stages of Oppression

Creating Difference
Creating Identity
Race and "Institutional Racism"
Homosexuality and "Homophobia"
Gender and "Sexism"
The Double Bind

Chapter 6: "Welcome to Salem"

Enforcing Orthodoxy: The Speech Code
Otero II: The Empire Strikes Back
"Retributive Justice or Vengeance or Whatever"
"Militant Action"
Enemies Within
Moral Luck
Busy Doing Nothing

Chapter 7: The Egalitarian Elite

One Man vs. The Multiculture
Duping and Doling
The Great Experimenters
Metamorphosis

Chapter 8: Caliban's Kingdom

Beyond the Wasteland
The Culture of Blame
The Problem and the Solution

About the Authors

Index

Detailed Summary

In the 1980s, Stanford University launched what its President Donald Kennedy described as a “great experiment” in “multiculturalism.” The experiment would transform campus life, leading to curricular innovation, new codes for student conduct, the celebration and institutionalization of “diversity,” changes in dorm life, even a refocusing of campus ministries. The Diversity Myth offers an insider’s account of what multiculturalism has meant at a major university, and of what it will mean for America.

The Diversity Myth is divided into two parts. Part I, “The New Academy” (chapters 1-4) explores how multiculturalism has transformed the curriculum and extracurricular campus life. Part II, “The New Culture,” consisting of chapters 5-8, broadens the focus to consider multiculturalism as a social, political and cultural phenomenon.

Chapter 1, “The West Rejected,” opens with an account of Stanford’s debate over Western Culture. Ostensibly, this debate centered on the merits of a core reading list for a series of required freshman courses, but it soon evolved into much more. With the notorious chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”, Stanford’s activists attacked the entire culture studied in that course—and demanded a drastic overhaul of the university’s mission.

By 1990, the Western Culture courses had been replaced by a series of new CIV (“Culture, Ideas and Values”) tracks. But it is highly debatable whether CIV actually increased the “diversity” of the curriculum: The course still primarily drew from Western culture, but its purpose had shifted to denouncing the West as racist, sexist, and classist. By eliminating the core reading list, some of Stanford’s more radical professors effectively were given free rein to canonize their own ideological views.

Chapter 2, “Multiculturalism: A New Word for a New World,” describes how “multiculturalism” filled the vacuum created by the elimination of the West. What is “multiculturalism”? The term is used in several different and contradictory ways. On the one hand, “multiculturalism” is typically defined as a celebration of diversity or as cultural relativism—the belief that no culture may use its standards to judge another. But these explanations are incomplete: Not all kinds of diversity are celebrated, and the relativist rhetoric is never applied to the condemned West. Multiculturalism is also guided by a narrower, though less often articulated, set of values and judgments.

At Stanford, the values that inform multiculturalism are those of 1960s activists, who use the ideological biases of that era to calibrate and evaluate cultural differences. Typically, for example, racial differences are given great cultural importance, while religious differences are completely ignored. But the consequences of multiculturalism is more (or perhaps less) than left-liberalism: In practice, the new multicultural community simply has resulted in the most stifling conformity imaginable—and this is what is so transparently at odds with all the rhetoric about “diversity.”

Chapter 3, “Educating Generation X,” explores what the new multicultural curriculum has meant in areas beyond Western Culture. The loss of objective academic standards has had a number of serious consequences. Grade inflation is rampant and a number of classes are primarily therapeutic, designed to boost students’ “self-esteem.” For other instructors, trendiness has become the guiding principle, with classes studying popular TV shows, rock groups, or cartoon strips. In other contexts, the ideological components of multiculturalism predominate, as instructors focus on social victims and radical political activism.

But when everything is equally important, then nothing really matters. The cumulative effect of all these ephemeral studies is that the curricula are ultimately empty. The real danger is not that students will become left-wing disciples of multiculturalism, but that they will become disenchanted with learning altogether. The nihilism and apathy of Generation X are not that surprising, when one considers the vacuity of much of what they have been offered.

Chapter 4, “The Engineering of Souls,” moves beyond the classroom to consider the extracurricular components of multiculturalism—how it has been implemented in dorm life, in conduct rules, and other university programs. Two contradictory themes soon emerge. On the one hand, there is a “theology of liberation” as the university encourages freedom from traditional Western morality—a bias in favor of sexual exploration, a bias against the Judeo-Christian tradition. On the other hand, however, there is a “new Puritanism,” with the campus hysteria over date rape—a phenomenon that has been greatly exaggerated—leading to more unjustified restrictions of student liberties. Perhaps the best way of reconciling these two disparate themes is to recognize that, broadly defined, both involve the same anti-Western animus that drove Stanford’s curriculum revisions.

Chapter 5, “Stages of Oppression,” looks in some depth at the claims of oppression that are so central to multiculturalism. The multicultural community postulates differences between groups and similarities within groups—so that members of minorities (racial, sexual, etc.)—are all different from the majority in exactly the same way. This sort of “diversity” ignores the enormous diversity of individuals.

More specifically, the differences between minorities and majorities are conceived in terms of the oppression of the former by the latter. Minorities are all alike, according to multiculturalists, because they share a culture of being oppressed. Thus, racial identity is conceived in relation to “institutional racism,” gender identity in relation to “sexism,” and gay and lesbian identity in relation to “homophobia.” One of the interesting—and problematic—corollaries of the culture of victimization is that, if the oppressions ever ended, then the specific minority identities would also disappear. Multiculturalism would cease to exist.

Chapter 6, “Welcome to Salem,” considers another dimension of the oppressed identities. An identity of victimization is not a Platonic essence, standing on its own; it is relational. For every victim, there must be a victimizer. And therefore the culture of multiculturalism (the “multiculture”) must, in order to reaffirm victimized identities, hunt down and eliminate its oppressors. This elimination of oppression does not occur once and for all, but must be periodically reenacted, to reinforce victimized identities that are threatened with dissipation over time.

It is in this context that one should understand the witch hunts against people who are “politically incorrect.” These witch hunts are not an incidental, but a necessary, component of the multiculture. Although conservative students and faculty, and white males more generally, are frequent targets, they are not the only ones. Multiculturalism also goes after people who would seem to be natural allies. Liberals who do not toe the party line in particular contexts, and minority students who do not agree with all multicultural claims, can become “victims” of multiculturalism. The multiculture must have enemies to denounce, and sometimes even very implausible one will do.

Chapter 7, “The Egalitarian Elite,” describes how the multicultural experiment gradually came to an end at Stanford. It did not end from the inside, as all checks and balances (not to mention objective standards) had been gradually eroded. But the end came from the outside, in the form of a debate over indirect costs and federal subsidization of research at Stanford University. Many of these indirect costs had been used to pay for Stanford’s multicultural experiment; as government auditors uncovered a pattern of waste and abuse, they started to cut funding and the cultural revolution on campus showed to a halt.

One of the remarkable features of the cuts in indirect costs involved the arrogant attitude of Stanford’s educational leaders. They could not believe that they had done anything wrong and they could not tolerate the idea that others might be able to review their activities. Plato’s paradoxical question—“and who will guard the guardians?”—may not be as outdated as some believe.

Chapter 8, “Caliban’s Kingdom,” concludes with some thoughts on the aftermath of multiculturalism at Stanford, and the prospects for America. Multiculturalism has failed on campus, but it is unclear whether Stanford can go back to the past—a great deal of damage has been done by the multicultural bulldozer, and it may take many years to undo the legacy. For America, the warning seems equally clear: the multicultural “culture of complaint” will result in a “culture of blame.” As people turn on one another, real solutions to problems will recede further and further away.

It is not clear there is a political or cultural solution to the multicultural crisis. Perhaps the most promising avenues lie outside the politico-cultural realm, and will start on an individual, rather than a collective level. Individuals will have to decide—on their own, with help from no one else—to forsake the ethos of resentment and anger that is so central to the multiculture. Only then will the curtain fall on the multicultural theater of “diversity,” in which the many actors play carefully assigned roles but rarely are able to say or do what they think is right.

Praise

“This engaging saga of Stanford’s experiment in multiculturalism compellingly draws readers into the nightmare world of social engineering in practice. The authors convincingly argue that the campaign to impose ‘multiculturalism’ amounts to nothing less than a war on Western Civilization and, beyond it, a war on the very idea of civilization. Even those who do not agree with all of the author’s views, will find The Diversity Myth a frightening and thought-provoking account—and, above all, a timely reminder that the educational collapse of our most exclusive universities must be of deep concern to us all.”
—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Elénore Raoul Professor of Humanities, Emory University

“The story of The Diversity Myth is based at Stanford, but this book is larger than that. As a Harvard graduate, I recognize my own school in these pages, and quite likely you will too. By detailing the current corruption of our academic ideals with a larger audience, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have hastened the much-needed and long-awaited restoration of higher education.”
—Christopher Cox, former Chairman, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; former U.S. Congressman (R)

"The Diversity Myth shows how McCarthyism on the left is as dangerous as McCarthyism on the right. Read it and weep for what is happening on our college campuses."
—Richard D. Lamm, former Governor (D) of Colorado

“In a new book, The Diversity Myth, authors 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

“Years ago, William Buckley, a very young Yale graduate, authored the seminal critique of higher education in America, God and Man at Yale. Sacks and Thiel, very young Stanford graduates, have now written the sequel. The Diversity Myth confirms the continuing decline of intellectual integrity in our finest colleges and universities and lays bare what must be corrected if higher education is ever to achieve the great potential of which it is capable.”
—Martin C. Anderson, Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; author, Imposters in the Temple: The Decline of the American University

“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

“The Diversity Myth is a devastating indictment of how a great university came close to being destroyed. Well-written and concise, the book lays out the difference between those seeking to understand other cultures and those seeking to eviscerate our own. It is must reading for anyone who values the discourse of civility over the politics of intellectual intolerance and zealotry.”
—Philip Merrill, former President and Publisher, Washingtonian

“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

“Two veterans of the culture wars at Stanford University have written a book exposing the downside of higher education’s rush to embrace a new mission known as ‘multiculturalism.’ . . . The national experiment in multiculturalism and the pursuit of institutional diversity for diversity’s sake led by Stanford also brought the disintegration of academic standards, they contend. ‘It’s completely anti-intellectual,’ said Peter A. Thiel, co-author with David O. Sacks of The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. ‘Multiculturalism is about studying less, not more. It has nothing to do with other cultures and no stress of foreign languages. It’s anti-Western, not non-Western.’ . . . Reaction to the book and its authors from the Stanford administration has been hostile.
—Washington Times

"A first-rate piece of reporting and analysis, The Diversity Myth is required reading for those who care about Stanford and about the content of higher education."
—Dinesh D'Souza, Author, Illiberal Education and many other books

“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

“[T]he ‘multiculturalism’ of today’s politically correct university academician or fashionable writer? Perhaps two Stanford graduates put it best in their recent critique of their university’s rampant multiculturalism. ‘It has nothing to do with other cultures and no stress of foreign languages,’ Peter A. Thiel and David O. Sacks, authors of The Diversity Myth, write. ‘It’s anti-Western, not non-Western . . . indeed, a war on Western civilization.’”
—Chicago Tribune

“The Diversity Myth reveals the intellectual corruption that captured one of our nation’s premier universities. But the fact that these authors demonstrated the wisdom and the will to expose such conditions gives hope for at least some of its graduates.”
—Edwin W. Meese, III, former United States Attorney General; Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow and Chairman, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, Heritage Foundation

“The Diversity Myth charges that ‘politicized’ classes and student activities have led to an ironic intolerance on campus—intolerance of all things Western.”
—Newsweek

“I was blessed to have attended Stanford during a political calm between the violence of 1969-71 and the more subtle intimidation discussed in The Diversity Myth. Even then, Stanford’s political culture was reflexively left, and dissenters could expect rhetorical flailings. But, there were no more taboos on expression than existed in the society beyond. Somehow that changed, and with it the character of the institution. This book explains why.”
—Tim W. Ferguson, Editor, Forbes Asia; Stanford Class of 1977

“People who affect to believe that political correctness is merely a phantom of the conservative imagination are fond of saying that that same few isolated incidents are endlessly recycled. . . . Sacks and Thiel present a series of such incidents, less widely reported than the uproar over Stanford’s curriculum but more groubling because they show how far those in charge of universities are willing to go to intrude on student’s privacy and their freedom of conscience.”
—Linda Seebach, Editorial Page Editor, Rocky Mountain News

"David Sacks and Peter Thiel not only traveled into the heart of darkness, they had to get an education while they were there. The Diversity Myth demonstrates that they succeeded and that the darkness need not always win."
—R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, The American Spectator

“In a just-released, hard-hitting book, The Diversity Myth, co-authors and Stanford Alumni David sacks and Peter Thiel expose the radicalization in curriculum and student activities at Stanford University in recent years. Beyond the pervasive politicization of the curriculum, Sacks and Thiel also detail what they say has been a sharp degradation of academic standards at Stanford.”
—Human Events

“Although this book is by no means the first effort to isolate and analyze the multiculturalist virus infecting American higher education, it may well be the best. . . . The Diversity Myth is both an alarming account of a great institution’s flirtation with self-destruction and a withering exposé of academic arrogance and folly.”
—Crisis

“Requirements at prestigious Stanford University have been altered to emphasize political correctness at the expense of the classics, two recent graduates argue in their provocative book, The Diversity Myth. . . . Thiel and Sacks provide a devastating report from the belly of the beast of multiculturalism and political correctness, or PC.”
—Insight on the News

"The Diversity Myth is a compelling tour of campus speech codes, ‘dumbed-down’ admissions standards and curricula, and anti-Western zealotry that masquerades as scholarly inquiry.”
—Christopher G. Long, President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Author

Both graduates of Stanford University and Research Fellows at The Independent Institute, David O. Sacks is former Chief Operating Officer and Peter A. Thiel is former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at PayPal, Inc. Mr. Sacks is also Founder and former Chief Executive Officer at Yammer, Inc., and Geni, Inc.

News

Events