Twice this month, campus speech censors tried to shut down lectures by Heather Mac Donald, the conservative contrarian whose articles and books have exposed the lies behind the campus-rape and killer-cop myths.
Her books on those subjects were bad enough, of course.
But Mac Donald’s latest literary felony, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, is yet more evidence she must be silenced, which is what leftist radicals tried to do at Bucknell University and the College of the Holy Cross (shown).
The message from the put-upon students at the two expensive private schools: Mac Donald’s ideas are too dangerous to hear.
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At Holy Cross
At Holy Cross, the College Fix reported, campus protesters disrupted a speech Mac Donald was to give about her new book on November 18. The campus conservative newspaper, the Fenwick Review, sponsored the event.
“My oppression is not a delusion,” an apparently delusional woman student chanted, with other protesters, who apparently also imagined themselves victims of oppression, repeating her words. Protesters also shouted “Your racism is not welcome!” and “Your homophobia is not welcome!” — and trying not to put too fine a point on their protest, “YOU are not welcome!”
Amusingly, as the protesters left the room where Mac Donald spoke, she discussed “the abundant resources” the school offers, the Fix reported.
“Either you talk and try to hash out your differences using the power of human rationality or force is what remains. It’s a shame,” Mac Donald said. “I would have really enjoyed the opportunity to hear about the oppression at Holy Cross and be able to debate whether the perception or impression is valid or not.”
Alumni from the once-venerable Catholic college in Worcester, Massachusetts, include political commentator Chris Matthews, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Boston Celtics greats Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn, John Birch Society president emeritus John F. McManus, and Edward Bennett Williams, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy’s attorney and former owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
Annual tuition, room, and board at Holy Cross is $69,810.
Bucking The Left At Bucknell
On November 14, Mac Donald spoke about the diversity delusion at Bucknell as part of its Program for American Leadership.
That speech, the Fix reported, inspired the theft of posters announcing the speech and opinions that denounced Mac Donald in the campus newspaper, the Bucknellian.
“We need to be comfortable not giving oxygen to the sort of lazy, anti-intellectual commentary that Mac Donald espouses,” one of the pampered pupils wrote, because “‘viewpoint diversity’ is ahistorical and deeply violent, and goes against our aims as a university.” Another wrote that the program’s organizers are a “clandestine group of reactionaries who want to launder partisan — even openly racist and sexist — opinions.”
The unhinged leftists also suggested blacklisting and shunning students and teachers who attended or supported Mac Donald’s speaking at the school.
In April, campus radicals at Claremont-McKenna College made so much trouble for Mac Donald that campus cops shut down her speech before she was finished.
“The protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall,” Mac Donald told the Fix. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking. An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.”
Tuition, room, and board at Bucknell is $72,370. At Claremont McKenna it can reach $73,490.
After the insanity at Holy Cross, Mac Donald told the Fix that “the hysteria that routinely breaks out on college campuses in the presence of ideas that challenge the reigning orthodoxy is an ominous sign for society.”
“Students are taking their brittle victim identities with them after they graduate and putting a whole set of explanations for the world off limits,” Mac Donald said. “Any student who thinks of himself as oppressed on an American college campus is in the grip of a terrible delusion that will encumber him for the rest of his life; that delusion is now fast dismantling color-blind standards of achievement in the non-academic world, endangering America’s competitive edge.”
Video of the “My-oppression-is-not-a-delusion” protest at Holy Cross invited this comment on YouTube: “Delusional people aren’t known for being aware that they are delusional.”
Photo of College of the Holy Cross: DenisTangneyJr/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
