Dinesh D'Souza
New York: The Free Press, 1991; 319 pp.
Paul A. Trout
English
Montana State University
If the National Book Foundation gave an award for the Most Politically Incorrect Book of the Year, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education would win it.
Rushing in where even white, hegemonic, patriarchal, logocentric, and elitist angels fear to tread, D'Souza examines some of the most controversial issues affecting--indeed transforming--higher education: affirmative action in admissions (Berkeley), multiculturalism (Stanford), Afrocentrism (Howard), anti-harassment codes (Michigan), hiring and academic standards (Duke), and ethnic/gender studies programs (Harvard).
What he finds is idealism run amok. However noble the motives and goals of this "academic revolution on behalf of minority victims," the methods used to achieve it, D'Souza argues, flagrantly discriminate, warp student relationships, violate academic freedom, inhibit teaching and scholarship, exacerbate racial tensions, and injure the very minority students the revolution intends to help.
This is not a message that reformist professors, well-meaning administrators, and minority activists want to hear. Yet the reactions to Illiberal Education have been a lot meeker than one might expect. Perhaps this is because D'Souza can't be poofed away with epithets. Calling him a "racist" won't work, because he's dark-skinned and from a Third World country (India). Moreover, he professes to sympathize with the plight of minorities on campus: "I especially empathize with minority students.... Acutely conscious of America's history of exclusion and prejudice, they know that their past victories have not come without a struggle, and they yearn to find their place in the university and society, to discover who they are, individually and as a people. These are challenges I faced very recently in college, and continue to face as a first-generation immigrant. Thus I feel a special kinship with minority students, and believe that the university is the right location for them to undertake their project of self-discovery."
Dismissing him as a "right-wing idealogue" doesn't quite work either, because although he writes from an admittedly conservative stance, his book's most damning material comes from surveys, official statements, and taped comments from campus activists. Even those who don't agree with him recognize the power of his analysis. He is not the token conservative invited to more left-oriented conferences.
To D'Souza, most of recent indictments of higher education have done little to clarify what's really going wrong on campuses. To read Allan Bloom, he said in an interview, "one would think that the real issue in universities is, Should one read Plato or the Koran? To hear this debate about censorship and political correctness, you would think that the key issue is, Should universities allow blatant, rampant bigotry to flourish or should they, regrettably, practice censorship?"
But the real issues facing academe, D'Souza contends, are much more complicated, divisive, and dangerous, and have for too long been protected from scrutiny by posturing and taboo. By exploring them in a richly detailed, almost ethnographic analysis of six major campuses, D'Souza hopes to help "minority victims" to better achieve their "legitimate aspirations," and to be "better prepared for the challenges of career and citizenship in the society in which they will find themselves after graduation."
Illiberal Education begins with an examination of how the preferential admissions policy at Berkeley undermines its own goal of creating a racially diverse campus, and injures the very minorities it was meant to assist.
Despite professing commitment to "equal opportunity," Berkeley discriminates between ethnic groups in admissions by slotting applicants into appropriate racial tracks with different requirements. This keeps down the numbers of Asians on campus (who would otherwise take up almost all the openings) and inflates the number of blacks and other minorities. Besides mocking the ideals of academic merit and equal opportunity, and unfairly penalizing minority groups who played no part in the historical crimes against blacks, this policy, D'Souza argues, injures the very students it is meant to help. By admitting minority students who are inadequately prepared to compete academically, schools like Berkeley are knowingly putting these students at risk. Minority drop-out rates are highest at universities with ambitious preferential treatment plans. Preferentially admitted students often last just long enough, D'Souza observes, to be counted in statistics demonstrating the school's commitment to "diversity."
Many of these students, of course, would have done quite well at less competitive schools. But selective universities seem willing to "sacrifice the future happiness of many young blacks and Hispanics to achieve diversity, proportional representation, and what they consider multicultural progress."
Those less-qualified minority students who manage to hang in there confront the stigma of being preferentially admitted, a stigma affecting even those minority students with the highest qualifications (for who knows who they are?). To avoid interacting with more qualified students, and to create a comfort zone bolstering morale, most minority students retreat into segregated enclaves, further alienating themselves from campus life and shutting out whites sympathetic to diversity. Isolated from the larger campus community, minority students are vulnerable to face-saving group-think, attributing their isolation and academic problems to white bigotry instead of poor preparation and misguided policies. For D'Souza, preferential treatment, instead of promoting educationally enriching diversity, too often leads "to racial stereotypes, divisions, and balkanization."
Another aspect of the minority revolution that D'Souza takes to task is the call for a "multicultural" curriculum, a call that, for D'Souza, abounds in ironies. The call is usually justified on the grounds that Western culture reflects a white, male, European, and heterosexual mentality which is sexist, racist, ethnocentric, and homophobic and minorities should not be subjected to it.
For D'Souza, this call for "multiculturalism" is often both phony and political. At Stanford, for example, multiculturalists were not urging minority students to major in anthropology, to learn foreign languages, to study Arabic culture, to read the Ramayana or The Tale of Genji, or to study the rise of capitalism in Japan--all valid ways of preparing students for a diverse world. Instead, the multiculturalist agenda at Stanford was to find Third World texts that could be used to indict Western, especially American, civilization--texts such as I, Rigoberta Menchu, the story of a woman who goes from being an accepting peasant to a radical Marxist.
But the multiculturalist enterprise faces a major problem: few--if any--civilizations are as multicultural, tolerant, and liberated as Western civilization. Non-Western cultures, D'Souza points out, are often actively hostile to such Western ideals as feminism, gay rights, and social and legal equality, and they frequently, and officially, engage in such politically incorrect practices as wife-burning, clitoridectomy, and the criminalization of homosexuality. In other words, ethnic cultures are almost always sexist, homophobic, and racist.
Such troubling facts force multiculturalists with a political agenda into twisting the values of other cultures and suppressing information about their more repugnant practices.
Again, the victims of this ideological agenda are the students. As D'Souza puts it:
students are not only deprived of full exposure to the Western tradition, but they do not even get a genuine and comprehensive understanding of non-Western cultures. Their curricular diet now consists of little more than crude Western political slogans masquerading as the vanguard of Third World thought. Not only does the new multiculturalism deprive students of an opportunity for learning about themselves and others, but it distorts other cultures and peoples and makes future global understanding more difficult.
D'Souza urges campuses to prepare students for a diverse world by teaching "both Western and non-Western philosophy, history, and literature in a more balanced and truthful manner."
But there is little hope for such "balance" and "truth," D'Souza contends, as long as Black and Women's Studies programs continue to politicize scholarship and warp student perception of campus life. Their fundamental tenet--that everything can be understood in terms of race, gender, and class (which serves as an excuse to do so)--does not promote "diversity" but dogmatism about civil rights, feminism, homosexual rights and other issues pressed by the '60s activists ensconced in these programs.
More alarmingly, these programs too often function as "grievance factories." They encourage minority students to view themselves as permanent victims of a irredeemably hostile and racist environment. To facilitate this mindset, the words "racism" and "sexism" are kept conveniently broad or vague, allowing almost any incident, word, or gesture to be the cause of grievance.
According to D'Souza, heightened "sensitivity" and "awareness" can seduce some minority students into aspiring to be victims. They do not yearn to be oppressed, of course, but they desire the moral leverage oppression gives them. As minority and feminist activists soon learn, the "moral capital" of victimhood lets them get away with things others can't. Victimhood arms minorities with "a truncheon" useful for intimidating anyone who displeases or "offends" them. White students interviewed by D'Souza regard these studies programs as veritable "base camps for mounting ideological assaults against everyone else," urging minority students "to make accusations of bigotry" while sanctioning "anti-Semitic and anti-white rhetoric."
Official, or semi-official, sanctioning of double standards is not likely to defuse the tense racial climate at most major campuses. D'Souza is acutely aware that racial relations on campus are in deep trouble, and that anti-minority and sexist incidents have occurred. But the "official"--"whites are just racists"--interpretation of such incidents, he argues, is wrong-headed. It doesn't explain that most racial incidents occur on campuses in the Northeast with the most liberal racial attitudes. It does not explain why racial incidents on campus are increasing at the same time that racism among whites is declining.
According to D'Souza, what's behind many racial incidents is white resentment over preferential treatment of minorities and the double-standards that protect them and yet infringe on the liberties of others. In short, "racial incidents" correlate not with more prejudiced attitudes but with less prejudiced attitudes. The more whites view blacks (and other minorities) as equally competent, the more whites resent the special treatment given to minorities. "White hostility to preferential treatment and minority separatism is a major force behind many of the ugly racial incidents that have scarred the American campus."
Whites also resent being written off as bigots. As a Harvard political scientist puts it, "after being accused time and time again, people become weary of being scapegoats. Their patience cannot last forever. You can only get people to collaborate in the accusations against themselves for so long, and then you begin to lose their goodwill, and your accusation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
At the risk of being accused of "blaming the victim," D'Souza presses this point because he is convinced that trying to combat this form of "bigotry" through anti-harassment and speech codes amounts to throwing gasoline on the fire. Whites regard such codes with deep suspicion, as just another double standard used to suppress reasoned discussion of the very policies contributing to racial tensions on campus. Illiberal Education is liberally sprinkled with examples of coercion and intimidation of both students and faculty.
According to D'Souza, the prospects for improved racial relations look dismal. He believes that "because universities have exhausted the patience of the most sympathetic advocates of the victim's revolution, the backlash against preferential treatment and sensitivity education will continue to get worse. Nobody will say so, but the truth is that a large number of students and faculty have simply had it with minority double standards and intimidation."
Most of the policies and programs intended to help minorities succeed and feel comfortable on campus, and to make campuses multicultural, diverse, and intellectually tolerant, are doing just the opposite. They "undermine the norms of fairness and exchange which are central both to the university and to minority hopes for racial understanding and social justice." Unfortunately, the blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities in whose name the victim's revolution on campus is being conducted are the ones least served by the university's disastrous encouragement of close-mindedness and intolerance--its untoward commitment to Illiberal Education.