The Specter of PC
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
The Specter of PC Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus By Dinesh D'Souza Free Press. 319pp. $19.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...If being Asian were not bad enough, her SAT score was 1,000—low by Berkeley's standards for whites and Asians —so she was doubly damned in the eyes of admission officers...
...This may seem an exaggeration but is absolutely right...
...Censorship and the pressures to conform on race are deadly serious problems, however, because they stand in the way of reform...
...The Berkeley administration first denied what it was doing, then promised to change its policies but didn't, andfinally, after the chancellor was forced to resign, made minor improvements...
...So much for the broadening effects of multiculturalism in Palo Alto...
...Because "politically correct" is an invidious term, no oneembraces it...
...For most who are meant to gain from it, therefore, affirmative action is a cruel hoax...
...Indeed, much of the book's value stems from his lack of sensationalism in dealing with explosive subjects—in contrast to the politically correct, who habitually respond to critics by charging them with being racist or sexist or homophobic...
...As it happens, Thuy Nguyen is a boat person who lived in a Thai refugee camp before immigrating with her family to America, where her parents found menial work...
...The domination of literary scholarship by deconstruction and related theories is bad for students of literature yet seems relatively harmless otherwise...
...The politicization of academic life is something educators would rather not read about, so many respond by denying it exists or else attempting to discredit the messenger...
...Although in no case does anyone seem to have suffered material harm, these and numerous other incidents reinforce an atmosphere on campus that makes it impossible to freely discuss many questions of importance...
...D'Souza himself only uses it when quoting President S. Frederick Starr of Oberlin College, who says that owing to PC there is less freedom of expression now than in the days of Joe McCarthy...
...It begins with Berkeley, where admission policies are more race-oriented than at any other major institution...
...First, CIV is a tool of the academic Left, which is preoccupied with the Third World and its victimization by the West...
...I lliberal Education is a close study of six universities that exemplify different aspects of the problem...
...In 1989, two thirds of the entering freshman class of the University of California at Berkeley were nonwhite...
...McCarthyism inspired many professors to fight for academic freedom, while few challenge the new orthodoxies related to race and gender...
...Everyone is familiar with the reasoning behind affirmative action, the theory that to compensate for the damage done by past injustices special breaks must be given to members of the offended groups...
...In fact, to a considerable extent they are the problem because they legitimize a regime of double standards that divides and balkanizes the campus...
...merit admissions were restricted to 40 per cent...
...Under the circumstances, her high school achievements were extraordinary...
...She is precisely the sort of person universities should be searching for, not rejecting on the basis of race...
...Illiberal Education makes a start toward bringing the situation out into the open...
...The two qualifications would almost certainly raise the success rate...
...That she is a Marxist and a feminist traveling the globe to attend political congresses apparently does not reduce her representativeness as, in D'Souza's wonderful phrase, "a modern Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of North American white male cruelty...
...But as D'Souza says, "the new racism cannot be fought with the more vehement application of preferential treatment, teach-ins, re-education seminars and censorship...
...In addition, the special advantages accorded minorities have produced what D'Souza calls the "new racism...
...As an Indian national D'Souza is certainly aware that non-Western civilizations have rich heritages, and that it would benefit Americans to study the Ramayana or the Koran or the analects of Confucius...
...On a recent airing of Nightline Dean Donald Kagan of Yale made the same point...
...The author also has a few "modest" proposals for change...
...It has replaced the old core of required studies based on Western literature, philosophy and history with a multitrack syllabus called "Cultures, Ideas, Values" (CIV), in which every civilization is theoretically treated equally...
...When racist incidents occur universities respond by ignoring their real sources and resorting to previously unsuccessful strategies...
...Asian Americans were hit hardest, for given a level playing field they outscore all others...
...These figures include qualified minority students...
...Just as Berkeley leads the prominent universities in affirmative admissions, Stanford has done most to politicize the curriculum...
...Bankrupt in principle, this logic has not worked in practice, either...
...This is never discussed, because to do so would be to admit that preferential treatment has increased, not decreased, racial separatism and bigotry...
...D'Souza rightly observes that feminism and gay rights are marginal matters for most students and professors compared with race...
...In the "bad" old days of equal opportunity their rate of increase at Berkeley was the highest...
...Whereas 65 to 75 per cent of whites and Asians graduate from Berkeley, fewer than 50 per cent of Hispanics and 40 per cent of blacks graduate...
...Perhaps no less important, they would prevent the kind of wrong done to an Asian student D'Souza met who had been denied admission to Berkeley despite an A- high school grade average...
...Nevertheless, the sorry reality is that Berkeley increased the quota of students admitted on merit by a meager 10 per cent in 1990, and elsewhere there does not seem to have been any change...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...There are two reasons why multiculturalism at Stanford does not mean studying the great works of other civilizations...
...But that wouldn't be politically correct...
...D'Souza repeats some of the familiar horror stories...
...whites, conscious of the official favoritism toward minorities, are often deeply resentful...
...This is a deliberate effort on his part to abstain from inflammatory language...
...Some supporters will admit that reverse discrimination is unfair, but insist it is less so than racism and necessary in any event—two wrongs, in other words, make a right...
...But those are not the sort of things Stanford undergraduates are being exposed to...
...It is no accident that Illiberal Education was written by an outsider...
...The effects of affirmative action upon those it is supposed to benefit have been pernicious as well...
...One consequence has been the extreme polarization visible on virtually every campus: Blacks and Hispanics self-segregate in their respective majors, student associations, dormitories, and sections of the cafeteria...
...indeed these tactics, which are tailored to address the old racism, only addtothenew problem...
...They are genuinely modest, except for his suggestion that affirmative action programs be based on economic need rather than race, and that they be targeted at students who have demonstrated real promise...
...Instead they are reading anti-imperialist diatribes such as the work of Frantz Fanon and a book called I Rigoberto Menchu...
...D'Souza is equally acute about a variety of other issues—the effort at Howard University to create a fraudulent black past, censorship at the University of Michigan, deconstruction and minority hiring at Duke, and the "tyranny of the minority" at Harvard...
...D'Souza avoids labels, except those like "Marxist" and "feminist" that people employ to define their own positions...
...Granted the whole country addresses race relations hypocritically, yet the campus adds an element of successful bullying and intimidation...
...Published in 1983, the latteris the autobiography of a Guatemalan peasant as told to a French writer, who explains that Rigoberta speaks for all Indians of the American continent and for oppressed people everywhere...
...Yet everyone knows that political correctness is alive and well, and the more elite the institution the more PC is likely to flourish...
...Besides contributing to a general lowering of standards, affirmative admissions, as Thomas Sowell and a few other black scholars have been arguing for some time, too often means failure at the university level for an individual who could have excelled at a state college...
...A recent study quoted by D'Souza finds that 30 per cent of blacks and Hispanics drop out in the first year, staying "only long enough to enhance the admissions statistics...
...No one has managed to explain how a policy that alienates whites and Asians, fails the educationally disadvantaged, and stigmatizes qualified minority students can be justified...
...A student at Michigan is threatened officially for refusing to accept a gay roommate...
...His book invites debate on the most sensitive subjects, a rare thing these days in the halls of ivy...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" The criticism Dinesh D'Souza's book has been receiving is a function of its honesty...
...Two famous historians at Harvard are forced to give up teaching about race for being "insensitive"—i.e., in the Orwellian language of political correctness, for not toeing the line...
...At Berkeley and many other universities it has created a revolving door...
...The pressure to conform comes from within now and is much harder to resist...
...Some of these, he notes, are not terribly significant...
...To appreciate the true results of admitting the unprepared, one need merely know that five years after affirmative admissions were introduced at Berkeley only 18 per cent of blacks and 22 per cent of Hispanics so enrolled had managed to graduate...
...It is hoggish of Duke to try and corner the market on gifted black scholars, since there are not enough to go around, but that would still be true even if Duke simply went after its fair share...
...Moreover, it hurts qualified minority students too, in that everyone assumes they have gained admittance because of their race...
...This meant that any black or Hispanic applicant with decent Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and a B average in high school was assured of acceptance, but 2,500 Asian and white applicants with straight A averages were rejected...
...Since Asians are more likely than whites to come from deprived or disadvantaged families, the affirmative admissions approach was especially inequitable in their case, and Asian pressure groups led the attack on this reverse discrimination...
...Second, Stanford decided that it could not afford to hire the specialists required to teach non-Western civilizations in depth, but that its existing faculty could teach the literature of Third World protest because it is based on Western concepts of race, class and gender familiar to liberal arts professors...
...In New Jersey, for example, where blacks and Hispanics constitute 14.6 per cent of the population, they made up 38 per cent of the entering class at Rutgers, the state university...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
