Heterodox Woman
by Elizabeth C Corey, First Things:
Book Review: The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture by Heather MacDonald:
There’s much talk about listening to women’s voices in the present moment, but I wonder if there is much room for heterodox women’s voices. Heather Mac Donald is just such a heterodox woman—a truth-teller who says things that nobody else is brave enough to say. On questions of race and gender she is relentless in following evidence where it leads, calling out the Orwellian doublespeak that hides political agendas in universities and government agencies. She looks at data on policing and criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement. She looks at data on campus sexual assault and questions the narrative of #MeToo.
Her latest book, The Diversity Delusion, is divided into four parts. The first examines race on campus, beginning with affirmative action and moving to the currently fashionable topics of microaggression theory and unconscious bias. The second part takes up gender, rape on campus, and #MeToo. Part three is concerned with academic bureaucrats and the way diversity harms scientific endeavors. Part four offers a critique of the academic offerings of universities. All four sections of the book are interesting and provocative. But Mac Donald’s discussion of gender most remarkably displays her fiercely countercultural bona fides.
In a chapter called “The Campus Rape Myth,” Mac Donald argues that the campus rape “industry” depends for its survival on the idea of a widespread but underreported epidemic of sexual assault. The typical line on campus is that “one fifth to one quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years.” This is the “one in five” statistic that one hears so often from activists.
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