The Victim Culture Produces No Winners: Heather Mac Donald’s Take

“But instead, universities have been captured by a destructive ideology of victimhood that insists that to be a female or a minority on an American college campus is to be the target of endless, nonstop oppression.”

Author, attorney, journalist, and editor—political commentator Heather Mac Donald has had quite a prolific career, championing free speech and other causes. She was the subject of a Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Silencing of Heather Mac Donald,” which discussed the now-famous protest against her speech on policing at Claremont McKenna College. The author of books such as The War On Cops and The Diversity Delusion, she currently works as a contributing editor for New York’s City Journal. Ms. Mac Donald, a proponent of free speech and vocal critic of today’s “identity politics,” joined Merion West’s Erich Prince on May 28th to discuss the problems with fixation on diversity in academia and other aspects of American life.

You have a piece in National Review coming out in the June 11th magazine issue, and it concerns an incident at our alma mater: a white graduate student calling the police on a fellow graduate student, who was black and napping in a common room. This is another incident in a long line of recent Yale events involving race. What’s going on at Yale, and what does this say about the situation of the leadership at various institutions in the Ivy League and beyond?

Well, what is not going on at Yale is a single-minded focus on scholarship and learning. This incident—a possibly emotionally troubled graduate student did call the police on a female who was sleeping in the common room at 1:40 AM who happened to be black—is a trivial incident. In any other context, if the caller were not white and the sleeper not black, this would pass without notice.