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This special double-length episode features a wide-ranging conversation with best-selling author and iconoclast Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, with special focus on her new book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. I hosted Heather this week at . . . UC Berkeley (!!), and we decided that rather than going with a set-piece speech, I’d interview her about the full range of topics she’s written about.
So we talk about her own intellectual odyssey, the decline of literature in universities, crime and punishment, the drug war, why we’d actually cheer the return of old-fashioned Marxism, as well as the hot button issues of her new book: preferential college admissions and the entire “diversity industrial complex.” We even get to the “T-question” (Trump), where Heather remains skeptical and conflicted.
One thing that comes through immediately is how utterly fearless Heather is.
For our exit music today, I discovered what I suspect is one-off artist named Michael $cott, a parody of “Michael Scott” of The Office, who has put to music the script to the famous “diversity training” episode of The Office. Hence the opening teaser of this episode.
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What a week!!!! Lucretia and Heather Mac Donald, my two most admired women. This pod was phenomenal. Heather expressed my view of Trump in a way that I have never quite been able to express. She is a force of nature, a fabulous person of absolute integrity and intellectual supremacy. I could listen to Lucretia and Heather Mac Donald to the exclusion of all else. That Steve has made both of them his friends speaks volumes about him. I was initially annoyed when the old HWX podcast ended and Steve took over. I have more and more become a fan of his as I have seen his remarkable erudition and, need I say it, integrity. This podcast has become one of my favorites based on the amount I learn with each episode. More Heather and more Lucretia, there can never be too much of such greatness.
Thanks much for such a kind comment! You won’t have to wait long. Another episode with “Lucretia” is coming very soon.
I’m astonished that colleges are still pushing unprepared students into schools for which they are not prepared in the name of “diversity” (in my day “affirmative action”). My late father was pointing out forty years ago that such actions were harming the very students the college administration claimed to be trying to help. Have college administrations failed for so many decades to fail to see the problems they are creating?
My father didn’t publish his results; he only yelled at college administration. He was a professor of engineering at one of the campuses of the University of California. One of his pet projects was to work with high schools in low income areas (mostly ethnic minority) to encourage high school students who showed aptitude in science and math into engineering as a career that (in the 1970’s and 1980’s) provided a solid step into the economic “middle class.”
He was therefore dismayed to analyze UC system data and learn that ethnic minority students who would have been appropriately prepared for colleges like UCRiverside or Cal State Fullerton, or CalPoly Pomona were being steered to UCLA or UC Berkeley, only to fail out a year later. And, at that time, he found that most of them completely dropped out as “failures,” rather than transfer to an “easier” major. So, lots of minority students who were capable of getting an engineering degree from a “second” or “third” tier school (and going on to a solid if unexciting career in engineering) got no degree from any school, all so university administrators could brag about the number of “minority” students admitted to the top tier campuses (and ignore graduation rates).
Along the way, he also discovered that in the UC system student enrollment, the most underrepresented demographic group relative to its population in the state, was white males. As far back as the early 1980’s!
Great interview as usual. Ms. McDonald just seems so sane compared with almost all other reporters today. Sheryl Atkinson and Byron York too. Maybe because they are real reporters instead of just pundits?
Why didn’t your father publish his results?
I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to spend a long,long evening than sitting around a dinner table (osso buco,risotto Milanese and a great Barolo) with Steve Hayward, Heather M and Lucretia and a few friends…and listen.
His main objective was internal – to get university administration to change their policies. Also, it would have taken a lot more work than he had time for to get them to the level of rigorous analysis to be appropriate for publication. He knew that to get results that would withstand the scrutiny that publication would generate there were many variables that needed either to be controlled for, or the ignoring of which needed to be justified. Except in his specific field (orbital reentry of spacecraft), he was mostly a “back of the envelope” type person, which is fine for most day-to-day decision making, but isn’t what you want to publish.
One of my dearest friends was a Black USAF General (there were not too many—so go ahead and wonder) with whom I served who ‘HATED! HATED! HATED!!‘ AFFIRMATIVE ACTION since he said he could not put his head on his pillow much less return a salute without wondering if he ‘deserved’ a good night’s sleep or the respect of his comrades—Black or white–absent AA.