A few weeks ago, The Fenwick Review hosted Heather Mac Donald, a conservative author and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for a talk on her latest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. The talk sparked a considerable amount of controversy, prompting many to ask why the Review brought in Mac Donald, what we were hoping to accomplish, and what how we as a publication responded to the talk. This article is an attempt to answer those questions, while also reflecting on the broader implications of Mac Donald’s visit—and the community’s reaction.
Before we get into the talk itself, we want to make a few things clear. First, although The Fenwick Review sponsored Mac Donald’s talk, our invitation does not reflect an endorsement of everything Mac Donald believes (or how she expresses those beliefs). We invited Mac Donald to campus because we hoped that she could spark a productive conversation about the value of diversity, a buzzword that is becoming increasingly prevalent on college campuses. Given that Mac Donald holds degrees from Yale, Stanford, and Cambridge; is a New York Times bestselling author; and is a respected intellectual, we felt like she could make a valuable contribution to a crucial conversation.
As for the talk itself—we cannot speak on behalf of the publication anymore, but personally, we were not thrilled, and we know we are not alone. Her argument, which she lays out so effectively in her book, was presented in a way that was dry, devoid of most of the statistical evidence that she presents in The Diversity Delusion, and at times even somewhat condescending. To be fair, Mac Donald was fighting a losing battle: half the audience members were on their phones (with their ringers on), and then proceeded to walk out as part of a pre-scheduled protest. Still, Mac Donald kept talking, and her response to the protesters—she urged them to have faith in their own arguments, and to stay and debate her—was commendable. She also made several valuable points throughout the talk, although undeniably faltered during the Q&A, especially when she butchered a question about sexual assault.
So what, exactly, was the argument that Mac Donald was trying to make?
First, we want to make clear what Mac Donald was not saying. She was not saying that minorities do not deserve to go to elite colleges. She was not saying that minorities are not welcome on campus. She was not saying that racism is fake, that people’s oppression is an illusion, or that minorities should not—or are not—welcome on campus.
Here is an oversimplified version of perhaps the most controversial component of Mac Donald’s argument:
Policies like affirmative action stem from the desire to compensate for disparities in opportunity that disproportionally affect minorities. The thought process is that kids from underserved public schools have not had the same educational opportunities as their peers are more privileged, so colleges need to lower their standards when it comes to admitting students from less privileged backgrounds.
This isn’t anything most sane people will deny. Mac Donald herself does not contest the fact that plenty of students, particularly minority students, are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to applying for college, thanks to increasingly segregated school systems. But according to Mac Donald, these policies actually hurt minority students by pushing them into an academic atmosphere they aren’t prepared for.
Before you accuse Mac Donald of racism, just listen. Schools set certain standards for admissions, not to be jerks, but because they want to accept students who can be academically successful at their institutions. Test scores and high school grades can be an indicator of how much one has learned, or how prepared one is for college. Unfortunately, all the data seems to indicate that minority and low-income students do poorer on standardized testing, because of educational inequalities: they simply don’t have the same resources or means of preparing for college as their white peers. In other words, lower SAT scores do not mean that minority students are less intelligent or less worthy of a good education. But if a student has been deprived of updated text books or subjected to overcrowded classrooms led by underpaid teachers, and if this deprivation is reflected in grades and test scores, then how can we reasonably expect these students to be successful when they have to compete against peers who have faced none of the same handicaps?
Mac Donald’s argument needs to be at least seriously evaluated by all who claim to have the best interest of minority students at heart. It is not the seething, racist rant that some seem to think it was.
Admittedly, aspects of Mac Donald’s talk were unnecessarily inflammatory. She gave a heinous answer, for example, to a question about sexual assault. Still, we would argue that her talk did not merit the absolute pandemonium that it triggered. We have been to plenty of bad—and frankly offensive—Rehm talks in my time here at Holy Cross, and we can’t recall any getting this kind of reaction.
So then what was all the chaos about? Why did hundreds of students walk out? Why have we spent weeks trying to “put out fires”? Why are we getting emails from the Chaplain’s Office (who have no reason to be involved in this) offering to facilitate “conflict mediation” before the talk even happens? Why did we have to do a walk-through with Public Safety in advance? Why does everybody seem to think that Heather Mac Donald is a threat to our campus?
It isn’t because she’s physically imposing (she was one of the most physically non-threatening people we’ve ever met), or because she was brainwashing Holy Cross students to become neo-Nazis (she was not). No—Heather Mac Donald is dangerous because she challenges the dominant progressive narrative. She represents a threat, not to students of color, but to the various deans, directors, and other administrators whose jobs depend on the narrative that Holy Cross, and the typical college campus, is a cesspool of racism and intolerance. And yet the only real intolerance that Mac Donald’s talk exposed was the intolerance of progressives, who couldn’t stand the idea of a conservative scholar getting a platform on campus.
See, the protests at Holy Cross are not an isolated incident. They are part of a larger trend on college campuses where conservative speakers are consistently protested, threatened, heckled, and attacked, and usually called some kind of nasty name. When people first accused Mac Donald of being racist, we disagreed with them, but understood why they might make that accusation. After all, the woman does spend a large chunk of time fighting society’s obsession with diversity. But it turns out that just about every conservative speaker, regardless of whether they talk about race, is derided as racist. Oh, and Mac Donald didn’t actually make a racist argument. As a result, we began to wonder if most of the ire directed at Mac Donald was really due to the fact that she was a conservative intellectual, and these days, there’s nothing more dangerous or offensive than intellectual conservatism.
That’s because, whether we admit it or not, there’s a sort of “Progressive Orthodoxy” that dominates much of society, and in particular, college campuses. Anyone who is even remotely heterodox—anyone who questions dominant thinking about diversity, gender, sexuality, Trump, abortion, or any other controversial issue—is immediately black-listed, canceled, cast out, and called a bigot, a racist, or a neo-Nazi. Not only does this trivialize the evil of actual racism and Nazism, it stifles free speech, cripples society, and undermines any attempt at civil discourse. Instead of intelligently engaging with Heather Mac Donald’s ideas, Holy Cross students, faculty, and staff resorted to ad hominem attacks, genetic fallacies, and straw-manning to deride, mock, and slander. The fact of the matter is that I didn’t agree with everything Heather Mac Donald said either, but we wanted to have a conversation about it. Not a walk-out.
The moral of the story? We have to stop silencing conservatives, labeling heterodoxy as racism, and using “tolerance” as a weapon to bludgeon the supposedly intolerant into silence. If we want to even pretend that we, as a campus, can approach complex and emotionally challenging issues with any level of maturity and open-mindedness, then we cannot get carried away with petty name-calling, character assassination, and cancel culture. (Both sides are guilty of this.)
One final note. White supremacists have a long history of ruthlessly persecuting people of color. But let’s not forget that they also have a history of vicious anti-Semitism and, to a lesser degree, anti-Catholicism. Groups like the KKK hate Jews and Catholics. Now that’s not to say that there aren’t Jews or Catholics who sympathize with neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but it does mean that people should probably think twice before accusing an Orthodox Jew like Ben Shapiro, or an avowedly Catholic publication like The Fenwick Review, of being in league with the very white supremacists who hate us.
Just a thought.