In the fall of 1998 David Wienir, a law student at the University of California at Berkeley, joined with three classmates to start a new fraternity, whose purpose was pretty much the same as all frats: to "provide support for heterosexual men" and offer an "opportunity to interact with a large number of interesting, eligible women."

Harmless enough, one might think. But apparently not everyone did think so. Is the word "heterosexual" so inflammatory these days? Within a week, Wienir writes, "the dean of the law school was notified that something like a white supremacist group had been started" at Boalt Hall, the Berkeley law school.

Ironically, Wienir is Jewish, and his three friends were Jewish, Cuban and Indian. Yet the slanderous report spread like wildfire. "I overheard students I had never met discuss the 'white supremacist' clan, often mentioning my name," Wienir writes. "Students I had never even seen before angrily approached me, demanding both explanation and repentance." Almost a year after the incident, "my name is still being linked to a white-supremacist movement that, to my knowledge, does not, thank God, even exist."

For Wienir, the incident became a paradigm of what "diversity" often really means on today's college campus: the imposition of a leftist orthodoxy that brooks no dissent. During that first year of law school, Wienir writes, he "began to understand the methods of the radical Left to be nothing short of intellectual terrorism. ... The intolerant activists ... have personally attacked students who express contrary views by using techniques of slander, intimidation and pejorative personal statements." Other methods include tearing down "flyers of organizations with opposing views," and interrupting classes by "insulting professors, blowing whistles and screaming into loudspeakers."

All this was part of an organized reaction against the passage a year earlier of Proposition 209 (known as the California Civil Rights Initiative), which forbids the practice of racial preferences in university admissions policy. The result was that only one African-American student entered UC Berkeley in 1997 as a first-year student, which outraged diversity advocates. (In fact, 18 black students were accepted to Boalt Hall, but all chose to go elsewhere.)

Hoping to discover that there was more open-mindedness and tolerance at Boalt Hall than he himself had experienced, Wienir came up with a project that became the core of this book. He sent a letter to all law students, asking them to submit diary-like essays in response to questions such as: "How healthy is the marketplace of ideas here at Boalt? Do you have fair opportunity to share your ideas in the classroom? Does expression flow freely in an environment tolerant of diversity, or does the climate of tolerance at Berkeley paradoxically inhibit true diversity of opinion?"

Twenty-seven students responded, and all are included in The Diversity Hoax. Two of the contributors hold that intellectual diversity at Boalt Hall is alive and well. The rest, however, describe a left-wing hegemony and flatness of intellectual life that would give any free-thinker pause, not just out of concern for free speech on campus but also for freedom off campus, as these law students graduate and spread their worldview throughout the rest of American culture.

Consider the story told by Isabelle Quinn. One October day in 1998, a group of demonstrators entered the classroom and demanded that white students give up their seats to minority protestors. When Quinn refused to give up her seat, they denounced her as a "racist white conservative bigot." It turns out that Quinn is the daughter of Filipino immigrants (of European descent); she herself had benefited from affirmative action when she first entered Berkeley and had previously "protested in support of minority students." The protesters' mistake was to act on the racist assumption that skin color determines a person's politics, and that someone who looks white must therefore "think white."

Or take the story of Heather McCormick, who says that her "first big lesson in the silencing of dialogue" happened in a first-year course on property law. The professor showed a video on housing discrimination, while calling for "an open dialogue, encouraging everyone to express what they felt about what they had seen." At one point, a male student asked a question about the hypothetical possibility of reverse discrimination in housing; indeed, might there not be situations wherein a majority person finds himself discriminated against in housing? "How could you even bring that up?" the professor demanded, and launched into a "tirade [that] went on for a good two minutes," while the student sank "down into his chair, lowered his eyes, and said nothing." The professor's hostile response illustrated "what too often passes for 'open dialogue' at Boalt," McCormick concludes.

Or again, consider the story of Jim Culp. In a class on tort law, discussing the intentional infliction of emotional distress, the professor noted that courts do not allow legal action between spouses, on the grounds that emotional distress is part and parcel of married life. A female student protested that the courts should not ignore "mental abuse of women." The professor asked Culp what he thought. "Well," he replied, "I don't feel that men have a monopoly on inflicting emotional distress. ... Hence ... inflicting emotional distress is not an issue specific to women, as men and women are equally perpetrators and victims of it." Immediately, "There was a roar of scorn from many women in the class," Culp writes. "Many stood up screaming unintelligible insults. Some even threw objects at me." So much for diversity of opinion.

Finally, consider the story of former Army Airborne Ranger Richard Welsh, who was falsely accused by a left-wing activist of cheating on an exam. Welsh then faced a kangaroo-court inquiry by the Honor Board, which found him guilty (but promised that, barring "future violations," it would not go on his record). Welsh could have kept quiet about this potentially career-ending episode, but he wants justice. As The Diversity Hoax was being published, he was pursuing an outside appeal with the university's ombudsman, having "exhaustively traveled the jagged avenues of recourse offered by the law school." Welsh says his hopes for that outside appeal have dimmed, however. The ombudsman won't even return his phone calls.

Stories like these form the core of The Diversity Hoax, and the strength of the book is that it allows students to tell in their own words accounts of leftist intolerance and bigotry on the campus. In addition to the student essays are introductory and concluding chapters by Wienir and Marc Berley, executive director of the Foundation for Academic Standards and Traditions (FAST), which helps students "restore high academic standards and humanistic study of the liberal arts in the Western tradition in their schools." The book also has an afterward by Dennis Prager, conservative Jewish radio talk-show host.

The book gives little attention to the intellectual roots of the diversity hoax; but this comes as no surprise given the book's emphasis on personal experience. For more of a historical perspective, consider the work of Gene Edward Veith, author of Modern Fascism, who documents the parallels between the contemporary diversity movement and the philosophy of fascism.

Veith shows that the diversity movement shares with philosophical fascism an emphasis on group rights over individual rights — in the case of the Nazis, the Aryan race; today, women and minorities. Both diversity champions and fascists deny objective reason, and locate "truth" in the subjective perspective of favored group(s). Both look to the state to redistribute wealth to those same favored groups. Both reject reasoned debate in favor of power politics. And both even grant the state the power to decide who shall live and who shall die — the Nazis with their concentration camps; today's liberals with their impassioned defense of abortion and euthanasia. Finally, both repudiate historic Christianity and revive ancient forms of paganism — the Nazi paganism of blood and soil; today's New Age paganism of pantheism and goddesses worship.

At the heart of these parallels, Veith writes, is a "revolt against transcendence." It is a revolt against any concept of a Creator God who has revealed a truth that is objective and universal, and whose holy character is the basis for an objective and universal morality. As such it must also be a revolt against universal human rights, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence, which states that we are all "endowed by the Creator" with certain inalienable rights. This kind of universalism is dead set against the particularism of group "truth" and group rights.

How ironic that the people who most loudly proclaim the rights of various race and ethnic groups today actually repudiate the vision that makes those rights possible. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that the ideal of a color-blind society could only be based on the conviction that there is a law above the law — a transcendent moral law that acts as the basis for human law. It is the content of our character that matters, not the color of our skin — or our gender or class.

The Diversity Hoax is a good place to start in taking a critical look at the true meaning of what is called "diversity." The students who speak out here should be commended for protesting against racism and discrimination. But they will be even more effective if they also take a deeper look at the worldview that underlies the classroom eruptions, and then craft a notion of genuine diversity that sets people free.