What happens when America’s most prestigious universities stop educating and start indoctrinating? In the latest episode of the Goldwater Institute’s Dismantling DEI podcast, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald delivers a blistering critique of higher education’s moral and intellectual decay. Once proud institutions of learning, she argues, the Ivy League has become a network of credential mills—charging nearly $100,000 a year not for wisdom, but for “bragging rights at cocktail parties.”
And the consequences ripple throughout America’s system of higher education.
Mac Donald contends that the problem runs deeper than administrative decadence. America’s colleges have embraced what she calls the “feminization” of higher learning: the insistence that students are unsafe when exposed to disfavored arguments. Undergraduates—who enjoy more comfort and freedom than any generation in history—now demand protection from words. “These are 18-year-olds that have the best life in all of human history,” she observes, “and they go around playing the victim.”
That sense of fragility, she argues, is reinforced by a coddling bureaucracy built to shield students from the consequences of their own decisions while propping up a DEI system that fails to deliver on its grand promises. Students admitted with weaker preparation struggle, fall behind, and then are told the problem is “systemic racism” rather than academic mismatch, for example. DEI cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Mac Donald sees the mediocrity and malaise that has overtaken American higher education as a broader assault on Western civilization itself. Every culture practiced slavery, she notes; only the West produced the ideas that abolished it. Equality, tolerance, human rights, science—all are Western legacies. Yet it is the West, uniquely, that treats its own inheritance as poison. “We are living in one of the weirdest moments in global history,” she warns, “where the Western culture and uniquely Western culture is involved in a suicide mission.”
Meanwhile, rival nations are not making the same mistake. China ruthlessly identifies its best mathematicians, pushes them into elite programs, and dominates international Olympiads. The United States dismantles gifted classes, waters down admissions, and often delays advanced math tracks until late in high school to protect students from “disparity.” She says, “We would rather be mediocre and racially diverse than excellent and compete with China. And China is watching all this and saying, bring it on.”
Even the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial preferences leaves her unconvinced. Universities, she argues, will circumvent the law by weighting race-coded essays instead of test scores. Harvard’s black enrollment dropped from 18 to 14 percent, a marginal decline. “Universities are now dedicated to a lie, not to the truth,” she concludes.
For Mac Donald, DEI is not a trivial policy dispute—it’s an existential struggle for the future. A society that abandons truth and merit for grievance politics and racial preferences is not simply misguided, it is also choosing decline. “Truth is what will liberate us,” she says.
Watch the episode on YouTube and listen on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
🎙️ Dismantling DEI is a podcast produced by the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy. Hosted by Kevin Jackson, the series reveals how DEI policies undermine American institutions.
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