Review/Illiberal Education, by Dinesh D'Souza
Karl, Jonathan D.
ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: THE POLITICS OF RACE AND SEX ON CAMPUS Dinesh D'Souza/The Free Press/300 pp. $19.95 Jonathan D. Karl A merican colleges and universities have come under almost unremitting...
...As a Stanford professor explained to D'Souza, "It would be very difficult to confront embarrassing facts about Third World norms and attitudes in a politically charged environment...
...A policy requiring proportional representation of ethnic groups has created a three-tiered admissions policy that applies separate standards to blacks and Hispanics, whites, and Asians...
...He revisits the major campus events of the past few years—the bashing of Western civilization at Stanford, the protest over Lee Atwater's appointment to the board of trustees at Howard University, and discrimination against Asian-Americans at Berkeley in the name of affirmative action...
...Chances are D'Souza's struggles in college stemmed more from his editorship of the combative Dartmouth Review than from his immigrant status, but that's another story...
...They are shown capitulating to practically any student display of force with token gestures that do nothing to address root problems and everything to destroy liberal education: • In response to students who took over his office, Stanford president Donald Kennedy insisted, "The university will not negotiate on issues of substance in response to unlawful coercion...
...Asian immigrants are left to pay the highest price for historic discrimination by whites against blacks...
...T he uninitiated will be struck with I disbelief at just how bad things are on campus...
...19.95 Jonathan D. Karl A merican colleges and universities have come under almost unremitting attack since 1985, when William Bennett, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, began to condemn the higher education establishment for falling standards and politicized classrooms...
...This Guatemalan woman's autobiography is included because "she speaks for all the Indians of the American continent...
...D9 Souza sees affirmative action as the cause of much of the insanity on campus...
...The evidence he presents speaks for itself...
...Such exaggerations, however rare, only weaken his case...
...In the first chapter he explains, "I especially empathize with the struggles of minority students...
...Faced with an intense academic challenge, the black student is offered a blanket explanation for his troubles: racism...
...D'Souza uses the Stanford example to show that multi-culturalism is undertaken as part of an ideological agenda rather than as an attempt to understand non-Western cultures...
...The most comically ineffective and unprincipled characters in D'Souza'sstory are college administrators...
...When Howard University students forcibly occupied the school's administrative buildings to protest Lee Atwater's appointment to the board of trustees, President James Cheek bravely announced, "Any student or other individual who persists in occupying any university building or otherwise disrupts university operations will be arrested and/or expelled...
...My own college newspaper, the Vassar Spectator, was censored for "destroying the atmosphere which welcomes the free exchange of ideas...
...D, Souza concludes with a modest proposal...
...In other words, if 11 percent of the freshman class were black, four years later 11 percent of the graduating class would have to be black...
...He defends affirmative action, but argues it should be based on class rather than race—on the actual disadvantages suffered by individuals...
...The student is encouraged to divert his energies from self-improvement through learning to political action against oppression...
...He refers to I, Rigoberta Menchu as "the text which best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum," but the book is an extreme example in a curriculum that still includes Aristotle, Augustine, and Shakespeare...
...Multi-cultural study, as exemplified here, is undertaken not to learn about other cultures but to promote a radical egalitarian political agenda, to build the self-esteem of minorities, and to attack Western civilization...
...He tries desperately to do more than preach to the converted, who will nod in agreement at any lambasting of left-wing colleges and universities...
...D'Souza documents an era of racial hysteria with extensive research (763 footnotes) and fresh reporting, rather than sociological or philosophical analysis...
...The college is "institutionally racist" because it has few minorities in the faculty and administration...
...These are the challenges I faced very recently in college, and continue to face as a first-generation immigrant...
...The children of a black doctor would no longer be given preferential treatment over the children of a white Kentucky coal miner...
...But D'Souza's case is so devastatingly strong that even liberals, who would usually dismiss him because of his Dartmouth Review ties, are taking him seriously...
...The most recent attacks on political correctness include a substantial liberal backlash against the enforcers of a new campus orthodoxy, as described in cover stories in Newsweek, New York magazine, and the New Republic, and articles by liberals Irving Howe and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...This is a highly doubtful, reckless statement that D'Souza sees as "an emerging consensus...
...The early assault, primarily from conservatives, focused on the lack of academic requirements, over-specialized study, and the displacement of the Great Books...
...While whites and Asians graduate Berkeley at a rate of 65 to 75 percent, the rate for Hispanics is 50 percent, for blacks 40 percent...
...Besides making a mockery of academic standards, the Hayden bill would further inflame racial tensions by making race a deciding factor in grading as well as admissions...
...By citing a series of campus horror stories, D'Souza, playing the unlikely role of a progressive, effortlessly demonstrates that the new campus orthodoxy stands opposed to the progressive ideals of racial integration, equality of opportunity, and academic freedom...
...The next day he caved in to the demands of the protesting students illegally occupying his office...
...Rutgers Chancellor T. Edward Hollander was "delighted" when protestors prevented him from speaking by seizing his platform during a university conference...
...He is now taking his show on the road, speaking at over thirty campuses on an issue which, until recently, was taboo...
...The varying admissions standards predictably result in disparities in academic performance...
...The ideal of multi-culturalism is an appealing one for most Americans, but, by citing example after example, D'Souza shows that under the banners of multi-culturalism, tolerance, and diversity, something quite different is being carried out...
...He finds that "Non-Western cultures are ransacked to fmd representative figures who are congenial to the Western progressive agenda...
...I've waited ten years for students to show this kind of unrest," he told the New York Times...
...0 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...At Berkeley, affirmative action programs have been shown to discriminate against Asians...
...Yet far worse than the occasional punishment of an offensive remark or censorship of a politically incorrect newspaper is the restriction of academic freedom...
...At times, D'Souza exaggerates the depths to which American higher education has sunk...
...In his quest to reach a larger audience, he cleverly capitalizes on his status as a "person of color...
...In fact, Rigoberta is a Marxist educated in France, who attended Popular Front meetings in Paris, renounced marriage and childbearing, and dictated her autobiography to French feminist Elizabeth Burgos Debray...
...So far, he has received an often stormy reception—lifts University rated his appearance a high-risk event and dispatched extra security officers to keep the peace—but he has been invited, and even allowed to speak...
...He explores the well-publicized trashing of Stanford's core curriculum in 1988 as a vivid example of the new orthodoxy's first principle: Western civilization is inherently racist...
...D'Souza documents incidents of speech restricted in the name of diversity, openness, and free speech itself...
...A bill drafted by Tom Hayden, currently before the California legislature, not only requires strict quotas for University of California admissions, but seems to apply those quotas to graduation rates as well...
...The result is ignorance, like that of the Vassar student who wrote in a student newspaper, "Historical evidence (slavery, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism) shows that it is the white man who has the monopoly on cruelty and sadism...
...Such a policy would address another anomaly of race-based affirmative action pointed out by sociologist William Julius Wilson: it disproportionately benefits wealthy blacks, hence increasing the "schism between lower-income and higher-income black families," while doing nothing to help what Wilson calls "the truly disadvantaged": the underclass...
...The tide must be turning...
...The argument is gaining widespread acceptance precisely because these threatJonathan D. Karl is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic...
...At many elite THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 53 universities, there is a backlash against the very concept of academic standards...
...ened ideals are treasured by most Americans—whether liberal or conservative...
...He uses Berkeley as a case study in the absurdities of "proportional representation" (racial quotas...
...He cites I, Rigoberta Menchu, a book now included in Stanford's new and improved core...
...With the political savvy he showed as a Reagan policy adviser, Bombay-born Dinesh D'Souza attempts to fuel the liberal backlash rather than add to the exhaustive conservative critique...
...the curriculum is racist because it is composed of works written predominantly by whites...
...In another instance, he quotes a Penn State professor as saying, "I would bet that Alice Walker's The Color Purple is taught in more English departments today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined...
...In the words of one Berkeley student activist, "qualifications" and "standards" are "the catch phrases of the politics of exclusion...
...D'Souza explores disturbing incidents of professors intimidated into silence, and courses canceled at Harvard and Michigan...
...policies initiated to combat racism have inflamed racial tension, re-segregated the schools, and ravaged liberal education...
...Within days, the school gave in to student demands, Atwater resigned, nobody was expelled or arrested, and President Cheek declared, "What has occurred on Howard's campus is refreshing...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
