Books in Brief

The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, by David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel (Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif., 283 pp., $24.95)

FROM the late 1960s on, politicization and mediocrity in the name of social engineering practically destroyed liberal education at Stanford, particularly at its core, the humanities. Most of the professors just went along, as 95 per cent of Frenchmen had done under Vichy. Those who didn’t toe the line had rough going. Sacks and Thiel detail all this in their sober and reliable, often grim, some-times hilarious book. As students at Stanford, the two young authors showed no lack of guts in reporting and commenting on the unfolding scandal, in the student papers. Now, a few years after graduation, they have put together a carefully documented and sensitively recorded, almost day-by-day, historical account of the whole tragic saga, together with keen analysis of how all this could have happened. For example, the pages on ressentiment as the mainspring of the ganging-up on genius like Shakespeare’s read as convincingly as Ortega. Future historians of the period will find this book indispensable.

RC

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Robert Greer Cohn

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The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, by David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel (Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif., 283 pp., $24.95)

FROM the late 1960s on, politicization and mediocrity in the name of social engineering practically destroyed liberal education at Stanford, particularly at its core, the humanities. Most of the professors just went along, as 95 per cent of Frenchmen had done under Vichy. Those who didn’t toe the line had rough going. Sacks and Thiel detail all this in their sober and reliable, often grim, some-times hilarious book. As students at Stanford, the two young authors showed no lack of guts in reporting and commenting on the unfolding scandal, in the student papers. Now, a few years after graduation, they have put together a carefully documented and sensitively recorded, almost day-by-day, historical account of the whole tragic saga, together with keen analysis of how all this could have happened. For example, the pages on ressentiment as the mainspring of the ganging-up on genius like Shakespeare’s read as convincingly as Ortega. Future historians of the period will find this book indispensable.