The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus

Two Stanford Undergraduates, Before They Built PayPal

In 1995 David Sacks and Peter Thiel were recent Stanford graduates who had founded a contrarian campus paper, The Stanford Review, and spent their undergraduate years fighting the university's administration. This is the book that came out of that fight. Both authors went on to found PayPal, and afterward Palantir, Founders Fund, Yammer, and Craft Ventures. Read now, it is two things at once: a document of the campus culture wars at their origin point, and the earliest sustained statement of a worldview that later moved a great deal of capital.

The Case They Make

The book is a close study of one institution in one decade. Stanford in the late 1980s and early 1990s replaced its Western Culture requirement with Cultures, Ideas, and Values after a campaign whose slogan, chanted with Jesse Jackson on campus, was "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go." Sacks and Thiel treat that curricular fight as the visible edge of something larger, and work outward from it through speech codes, disciplinary proceedings, admissions policy, funding of identity-based programs, and the handling of sexual assault allegations.

Their thesis is that the multiculturalism installed at Stanford was not primarily about including more perspectives but about establishing which perspectives could be voiced at all, and that a doctrine advertised as pluralist produced in practice a narrower range of permitted opinion. Much of the book is reportage: named cases, quoted administrators, reproduced documents. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the historian of the American South, contributes the foreword.

Why It Reads Differently Now

Written before the internet reorganized these arguments, the book describes as a local dispute a set of conflicts that would become national and then global. Its specificity is the point. This is what the argument looked like when it was still confined to a few campuses and had not yet acquired vocabulary that everyone recognizes.

Paperback reprint. The Independent Institute. Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.