The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on the Campus

The argument in one breath

Sacks and Thiel argue that the “multiculturalism” that swept Stanford in the late 1980s was neither multi nor cultural. It was an in-house ideology — narrow, monolingual, and reflexively hostile to the West — dressed up as openness. Their book is a 250-page case file built from the Stanford Daily, course catalogues, dorm policies, faculty memos, and speech-code transcripts. The thesis: Stanford did not broaden the curriculum; it gutted the curriculum, then replaced it with a smaller, more ideologically supervised one.

The famous chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go,” led by Jesse Jackson on the Stanford quad in 1987, opens the book and supplies its ambient noise. Within three years the Western Culture course was gone, replaced by the CIV tracks (Cultures, Ideas, and Values). On paper this looked like an addition. In practice, Sacks and Thiel show, the same Plato and Shakespeare were now being taught largely as evidence for the prosecution — racism, sexism, classism — while Stanford’s foreign-language departments had their budgets cut to pay for the new program. The book asks a sharp question: if you’re really pursuing diversity, why are you defunding the language departments?

What the evidence actually looks like

The strongest chapters are the ones that read like a tour. Sacks and Thiel do not theorise; they catalogue. A homework prompt asking freshmen to produce a fake Aztec newspaper dated 1524. A required reading list that swapped Shakespeare’s The Tempest for Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, in which Caliban menaces Prospero with what he wants to do with his bare fist. Courses with names like “How Tasty Were My French Sisters” or “Issues in Self-Defense for Women,” whose intellectual content is roughly what their titles suggest. A speech code applied selectively, depending on the political identity of the speaker. Dorm life refashioned around identity groupings, with resident assistants serving as something close to commissars.

Some of this is funny. Most of it is grim. The authors saw, correctly, that the comic stuff and the coercive stuff were two views of the same building. Thiel later put it well in his 2023 New Criterion talk: absurd and coercive at once, where the absurdity is the part that keeps you from noticing the coercion. A speech code that punishes the wrong jokes is, on its face, a joke. What it actually does is teach freshmen, on day one, that there are sentences they cannot say out loud.

The chapters on identity (“Stages of Oppression”) and on the speech-code apparatus (“Welcome to Salem”) are where the book is at its sharpest. Sacks and Thiel notice that the new identity categories were defined relationally — a minority’s identity was its experience of being oppressed by a majority — which means the system needs oppressors permanently on tap. There must be witches, or the witch-hunt has nothing to do. The book traces, by name, what happens to students and faculty who refuse to play the assigned role: the disciplinary letters, the dorm transfers, the campus pile-ons. By the time you finish chapter six you understand that the targets are not always conservatives. Liberals who fail a particular purity test, or minority students who decline the script written for them, end up in the same dock.

The double meaning of the title

The title carries two readings, and the second one is the more interesting. The first reading, the obvious one, says: the diversity is fictional — what the activists call multicultural is monoculture in costume. Fair enough. Plenty of other 1990s critics made that argument.

The second reading, which Thiel emphasised more in retrospect, is that diversity itself is the myth — a sacred word nobody on campus could actually define when pressed. The administrators tasked with explaining what “multicultural” meant produced documents Sacks and Thiel quote with relish: vague, circular, almost ceremonial. The word’s job, they argue, is not to describe a programme. Its job is to be unanswerable, to short-circuit the question. You cannot be against diversity, so the conversation ends.

This is the framing that has aged best. Three decades on, “DEI” plays exactly the role “diversity” played in 1995: a term whose vagueness is the point. You can’t lose an argument you’ve defined yourself out of.

Where the book holds up — and where it doesn’t

Sacks and Thiel are right about most of what they set out to be right about. The CIV tracks did become what they said they would. The speech-code culture metastasised, first across other elite campuses, then into HR departments at every Fortune 500. The “stages of oppression” framework, which the book describes in 1995 as a peculiar local theology at Stanford, is now the operating logic of mainstream American institutions. They were early. They were specific. The receipts are in the book.

What the book is weaker on is causation. Sacks and Thiel describe a phenomenon vividly but never quite explain why it took root. Their proposed answer — that the activists were ideologues and the administrators were spineless — is true as far as it goes, but spinelessness alone does not explain why the same ideology propagated to every other elite institution within a generation. If it were just one university’s nervous breakdown, Yale or Chicago or Columbia would have been the cure. They weren’t.

The proposed solutions, in the closing chapter, are also the book’s weakest pages. Sacks and Thiel land on something like: individuals will have to decide, on their own, to walk away from the politics of grievance. That is not a solution; it is a hope. A 250-page indictment ends with a single paragraph of personal-responsibility libertarianism. We sympathise with the instinct, but as an answer to a problem that turned out to be institutional capture, it is thin.

The book also has a 1990s tic that hasn’t aged well: a tendency to treat every freshman silly-syllabus moment as a cosmic warning. By page 150 the Aztec newspapers and condom-rating contests start to blur together. Thiel himself conceded this in his New Criterion talk — that what he and Sacks had written was, in places, a kind of pornography of campus dysfunction. Fair self-criticism.

What Thiel said about the book later

The most useful thing for a reader in 2026 is not the book itself but Thiel’s two retrospectives on it: the Founders Fund interview from 2023 and the New Criterion talk that became his Edmund Burke Award speech the same year. Thiel concedes, three decades on, that the book did not work. The trends it described did not retreat; they generalised. Simply describing the absurdity, which was Sacks and Thiel’s whole strategy, did not defuse the absurdity.

More striking, Thiel argues that the diversity fight was itself a distraction — that he and Sacks spent four years and 250 pages on the wrong target. The real story, in his later telling, sits in three places the 1995 book barely touches.

First, scientific stagnation. While the humanities were embarrassing themselves visibly, the sciences were producing far less than their billion-dollar grant footprint suggested. Thiel name-checks the Stanford physicist Bob Laughlin, who used his post-Nobel academic freedom to argue that most of the biology department’s grant work was, charitably, derivative make-work. Laughlin was effectively shown the door for it. The DEI fight was loud; the failure of the sciences was quiet, and the quiet one matters more.

Second, real-estate capture. Thiel is half-serious and half-mischievous when he proposes that the diversity industry is partly an ideological superstructure for landlords — that the doubling of urban rents in places like Manhattan and San Francisco between 2007 and 2023 needs an explanation, and identitarian politics that keeps people from moving is part of the answer. We are not sold on this as a complete theory. But as a question — who is actually getting paid in the diversity economy? — it deserves to be on the table.

Third, the religious dimension. Thiel argues that wokeness is a deformed branch of Christianity rather than a separate faith — a theology of the victim that inherits the Judeo-Christian preoccupation with the marginalised and amputates the part about forgiveness. This is the most interesting move in the speech, and probably the most contested. We find it suggestive but not fully convincing, partly because it lets American Protestantism off the hook for its own theology and partly because it papers over the very Marxist genealogy of much of the content.

The other thread Thiel pulls, which the 1995 book also gestures at, is the etymology of “political correctness” — that the term, in the 1950s, meant taking your direction from Moscow. He runs with this further than we would. Treating modern campus illiberalism as a direct descendant of Stalinism is, in our reading, more rhetorically satisfying than analytically tight. The continuities are real but the discontinuities are also real, and a serious account has to do both.

Reading it in 2026

The reason to read this book now is not for the Stanford material, much of which has been covered better elsewhere since. It is to sit with a primary document of how plain the trajectory was, in 1995, to two undergraduates with a typewriter and a stack of Stanford Daily back issues.

Almost everything that elite American institutions have done in the thirty years since — the speech codes, the bias-response teams, the curriculum struggles, the disinvitations, the firing of administrators who don’t keep up — was visible at one university in one decade. Sacks and Thiel didn’t predict it; they watched it happen, in the lab where it was being built. The book is a field report from that lab. As a check on the comforting belief that “this came out of nowhere,” nothing else does the job as well.

It is also a useful corrective to the assumption that calling the bluff is enough. Sacks and Thiel believed, in 1995, that simply describing what was going on would be sufficient to stop it. That is the bet we still see plenty of writers making today, on Substack and elsewhere. The book is the empirical refutation of that bet. Description is necessary. It is also, by itself, useless.

Who should read it

Two kinds of reader will get the most out of this book.

The first is anyone who watches the 2020s campus-and-corporate landscape and wonders how old the choreography is. The answer the book gives — older than you think, and almost identical down to the pamphleteering style — is genuinely clarifying.

The second is anyone curious about Thiel as a thinker rather than as a venture capitalist. This is the work of a 27-year-old who already had the temperament that would later show up in Zero to One and the Founders Fund essays: contrarian, specific, a little too fond of the rhetorical cliff edge. It also marks the shape of what he later got more right than this book did. Read it together with the 2023 Burke speech and you have something interesting: a writer revisiting his own earlier work and conceding, in public, where it missed. That is rarer than it should be.

Skip it if you want a balanced sociology of the late-eighties campus left, or a careful account of how the multicultural agenda interacted with the actual aspirations of minority students at Stanford. The book is not interested in either, and the gap is real. Read Roger Kimball or Allan Bloom alongside it for context, or Glenn Loury and John McWhorter for a smarter, more recent treatment of some of the same arguments without the score-settling. The Diversity Myth is a polemic. It works as a polemic. It is not a substitute for the broader literature.

A last note on tone. The book is sometimes accused of being mean. It is, in places. It is also written by two people who, fairly clearly, loved Stanford and were watching something they cared about be reorganised around principles they thought were dishonest. The anger in the prose is not posturing. Thirty years later, it reads like the right amount.