The Diversity Myth

David O. Sacks and Peter Thiel · 1995

Thesis

The multiculturalism that took hold at Stanford in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not a commitment to diversity but its opposite: a political project that replaced the study of Western civilization with an ideology of oppression and enforced conformity to it through required courses, campus rules and accusations of bigotry.

The main ideas

Stanford's 1988 replacement of its Western Culture requirement marked a shift from preserving a tradition to engineering social change.
Multiculturalism, in the authors' account, meant uniformity of opinion, not diversity of thought.
The new courses and classrooms taught students to see the West as an oppressor and themselves as victims or victimizers.
A culture built on victimhood needs victimizers, and so generates accusations and witch hunts.
Speech codes and harassment rules gave the orthodoxy enforcement power.
The ideology served a privileged elite while claiming to speak for the oppressed.

The end of Western Culture

David Sacks and Peter Thiel, both recent Stanford graduates and editors of the conservative student newspaper the Stanford Review, which Thiel had co-founded in 1987, begin with the university's freshman requirement in Western Culture. In January 1987, about 500 students marched with the civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson, and some chanted for Western culture to go, though Jackson told the rally the aim was to expand it. In March 1988 the Faculty Senate voted 39 to 4 to replace the requirement with a new course sequence, Cultures, Ideas and Values, which began in 1989 and added works by women, minorities and non-Western authors.

The authors argue that the change was not a broadening of the reading list but a change of purpose. The old requirement aimed to transmit a tradition; the new one, in their reading, aimed to engineer social change on campus according to the doctrines of multiculturalism.

Their evidence is largely their own experience: course readings, the Stanford Daily, the notes they took in classes and the student controversies they covered as journalists. They cite courses such as a history seminar on Black hair as culture and history. One replacement text they discuss is Aimé Césaire's A Tempest, a rewriting of Shakespeare in which Caliban becomes a revolutionary hero and Prospero an imperialist; a later chapter is titled "Caliban's Kingdom."

Implication: when an institution changes what it teaches, ask whether the purpose of the teaching has changed as well as its content.

The diversity myth

The book's title states its central claim. Stanford's leaders described the new requirement and campus policies as promoting diversity. The authors argue that diversity of skin color, sex and ethnic origin was promoted at the expense of diversity of ideas: students and faculty were expected to share one view of history and society, and those who dissented were treated as bigots.

In their account, the first part of the book traces how this view spread through the academy: moral relativism, which held that no culture could be judged superior to another; courses that presented Westerners chiefly as oppressors; and what they describe as an attempt to engineer students' souls, shaping their beliefs and identities rather than training their minds. They also link it to grade inflation, which they see as part of the same reluctance to judge.

The mechanism, as they argue it, is that an ideology which holds that every belief reflects the believer's group identity leaves no room for argument on the merits. Disagreement is reinterpreted as a symptom of privilege or prejudice.

Implication: test claims of diversity by asking whether people with opposing views can state them without penalty.

Victims and witch hunts

The second part of the book treats multiculturalism as a social, political and cultural phenomenon. Its chapters describe stages of oppression, a hierarchy of groups ranked by their claims to victimhood, and a chapter titled "Welcome to Salem," on accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia.

The argument is that a culture organized around victimhood must find victimizers. Status comes from belonging to an oppressed group or from denouncing oppressors, which rewards accusation and makes ordinary incidents into evidence of systemic bigotry.

Among the episodes from the period is one at Ujamaa, a residence for Black students, in October 1988. After an argument with a Black student about race and music, two white students defaced a concert poster of Beethoven with caricatured features and posted it outside his room; one later called it satirical humor. Together with a party flyer defaced with a racial slur a few weeks later, the episode led President Donald Kennedy to order a full investigation, which in turn led to new rules on campus speech.

The book also defends at length a law student, Keith Rabois, who in 1992 shouted homophobic abuse outside the campus residence of a lecturer, saying he wanted to test the limits of the speech rules. The university did not discipline him under its code, and he left to finish law school elsewhere.

Implication: when an institution rewards accusation, expect accusations to multiply, and judge each one on its specific facts.

Speech codes

The enforcement of the orthodoxy, in the authors' account, came through rules. In 1990 Stanford adopted the Grey Interpretation of its Fundamental Standard, written by the law professor Thomas Grey, a speech code that prohibited harassment by personal vilification: speech intended to insult or stigmatize an individual or a small number of individuals on the basis of characteristics such as sex, race, religion, sexual orientation or national and ethnic origin.

The authors present the code as an instrument of the conformity they describe: a rule that, by defining certain speech as harassment, could be used against opinions that dissented from the campus consensus.

A court agreed that the code went too far. In February 1995, the year the book appeared, a California superior court struck it down in Corry v. Stanford, a suit brought by ten students, under a state law extending free-speech protections to students at private universities, and Stanford's president, Gerhard Casper, chose not to appeal.

Implication: rules against offensive speech should be judged by how they could be used against dissent, not only by the intentions of those who wrote them.

Limits

The authors later disowned parts of it. Thiel told The New Yorker in 2011 that he wished he had not written about the Rabois incident. In 2016, after passages on rape resurfaced, including one suggesting that a rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, Thiel said he regretted writing passages that had been taken to suggest rape was not a crime, and Sacks said he was embarrassed by some of his former views.
Its evidence is partisan and anecdotal. The authors were activists and editors of a newspaper opposed to the changes they describe, and the book relies heavily on their own class notes and selected incidents; when the authors summarized their case in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 1995, Casper and the provost, Condoleezza Rice, replied that they had concocted a cartoon, not a description of Stanford's freshman requirement.
Its subject has changed. The course sequence it attacks was replaced in 1997, and Stanford's general-education requirements have been rebuilt several times since.

Zero to One — Thiel's later, business-focused case for thinking against consensus.
Brave New World — a society that engineers its members' beliefs and calls the result contentment.