Heather Mac Donald: Campus Social Justice Is Impacting the Real World

Author Heather Mac Donald argued that colleges are “hatred-machines” in a Fox News interview this week.

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald appeared on Fox News this week to talk about the state of college campuses. Mac Donald is the author of the new book, The Diversity Delusion, which argues that identity politics has overtaken and corrupted American universities.

Mac Donald started the interview by highlighting recent social justice campus trends. “From a moment that a student steps on campus, a vast diversity bureaucracy tries to indoctrinate him with the idea that to read Shakespeare or Kant or Plato is to be the victim of life-threatening racism, to hate the monuments of western civilization, and to hate their alleged oppressors.” In December 2016, Breitbart News reported on students at the University of Pennsylvania who rallied to have a large portrait of William Shakespeare removed from the English department because he is a “white male.”

“They are being taught to see sexism where none exists. As a female, you are taught to feel like you are the victim of rape culture, as a minority you’re taught to feel like you are the victim of ubiquitous systematic racism,” Mac Donald added.

Mac Donald ended the interview by arguing that the harmful social justice politics of academia are beginning to make their way into the real world. “If a politician is denounced as a white supremacist for saying that we can’t ‘monkey around’ with our economic success and that is viewed as a legitimate accusation. When people are fired for challenging the feminist ideology as happened at Google,” she said. “The identity politics that is poisoning the campus is spreading the world at large.”