ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
by Dinesh D'Souza

“The administration here at Tufts has decided to classify your lecture as a potentially disruptive event,” several students told me when, in the spring of 1991, I arrived on campus to offer a critical analysis of affirmative action policies and their consequences, material derived from my newly published book, Illiberal Education. I also discovered that a coalition of campus activists, backed by some faculty members, bad formed a “sensitivity coalition” to monitor my statements and expose my biases.

No one will agree with all that D'Souza says, but he has spoken with force, clarity, and a keen eye for the problems that conspire against the American campus being the citadel of democratic fair play, reason, and logic that it has always aspired to be. —WILLIAM CHACE, President, Wesleyan University

Before I took to the podium, political science professor Donald Klein, acting on university instructions, read a statement to the audience warning student activists to let the speaker finish, not to shout him down, to abstain from throwing things, et cetera. Apparently, civility cannot be taken for granted in many places, and deterrence against disruption is only purchased by threatening would-be hecklers with arrest or expulsion. But at least Tufts was now seeking to protect free speech, a change from the previous year, when the administration sought to enforce a censorship code that would outlaw expression offensive and “stigmatizing” to minority activists on campus and only abandoned the project in the face of student outrage and press criticism. Fortunately, there were no serious disturbances at my lecture, although the two chained students announced their presence in the audience by loudly rattling their accessories.

After my speech and a lengthy question-and-answer session, I was approached by an Afro-American Studies professor who said that he would be playing a tape of my lecture in his classes as “clinical evidence of racism.”

Somewhat startled, I said that I hoped he would be open to different points of view from his students so that they could respond freely and candidly to the data and arguments I presented.

“No way,” he said. “I am outraged. You want to know why I have my bands in my pockets now? That’s because I am so angry that I have to restrain myself. You are advancing racist views.”

Academic freedom and indeed the very soul of American education are succumbing to a sinister McCarthyite assault of unprecedented proportions. With admirable restraint and civility, D'Souza has written an informative account that provides a rare combination of though-minded analysis, principled judgements, thoughtful proposals and humane sensitivity. —EUGENE GENOVESE, author of Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made

“Oh, I’m not calling you a racist,” the professor replied.

“You said I promote racist views, and presumably racist views are promoted by racists,” I answered, unsure whether I was being syllogistic or redundant.

At this point the conversation took an unexpected turn. “No way, the professor triumphantly said. “You are a person of color. You cannot be a racist. You don’t have power in this society. Only whites can be racist.”

I had encountered this point of view in several articles in campus newspapers and law journals, but it was still something to have it uttered with serious conviction. Indeed, similar doctrines of race-oriented viewpoints had surfaced earlier, when I was berated by a white student who maintained that my defense of academic standards amounted to nothing more than an apology for the “white perspective.” Universities needed to give equal prominence in the classroom to black, Hispanic, and non-Western perspectives, he argued.

When I asked him to identify the white perspective, he looked appalled and threw out his arms, as if to say it was so obvious that it needed no elaboration. I insisted, however, that he provide two or three specific examples of a white perspective.

“How about rationality?” he said with a confident grin.

I wrote that down on the blackboard. “What else?”

“How about logocentrism?” That’s how they talk on many campuses these days.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The white man’s obsession with big words,” he maintained, so I wrote down logocentrism, and asked for another example.

“How about sexual restraint?”

“Not in my experience,” I said. But I wrote that down too.

For students in the audience, this proved to be an exercise in getting the joke a few minutes after the punch line. There were titters in the crowd, but the laughter came almost in slow motion. Gradually, students realized that the concession to white norms of all qualities of logic, clarity of expression, and decency of behavior—and the implication that such things could not be expected from other groups—was profoundly condescending and ultimately demeaning to minorities. Angrily, the advocate of race-based knowledge accused me of “insensitivity” and of unconsciously advancing the goals of “white America.”

As my experience at Tufts indicates, the First Amendment remains in force at many American universities, but there is also a pervasive illiberalism of mind. Instead of cultivating in young people those qualities of critical thought and civil argument that are the essence of a liberal education, university leaders have created sham communities where serious and honest discussion is frequently drowned out by a combination of sloganeering, accusation, and intimidation.

In the few months since the publication of Illiberal Education, I lectured and debated at dozens of campuses, and to a large degree my reception bore out the concerns articulated in this book. At the University of Nebraska Law School, feminist activists sought to get my lecture banned; when that failed, they put up posters in advance of my talk accusing me of seeking to “Celebrate 100 Years of Male Dominance.” At Kenyon College. a Marxist professor, surrounded by a claque of admiring students, chastised me for seeking to restore Western imperialism and institutionalized bigotry. At Stanford, I was heckled by what turned out to be a section of middle-aged professors; another teacher who sat mute through the entire session was later quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying he only wished he could debate me because he would have “shredded” my arguments. At many of my campus talks, groups such as the International Socialists distributed pamphlets ominously titled “Who Is Dinesh D'Souza?” seeking to discredit me through ad hominem charges and guilt by association.

Much of this character assassination and rhetorical bullying I expected. Indeed, over the past several years many speakers have suffered from the “herd of independent thinkers” syndrome on campus, which imposes intellectual conformity in the name of a putative commitment to diversity. Distinguished national figures have been banned from speaking altogether, or had blood, used tampons, and other objects hurled at them, or faced threats of physical danger. The evidence assembled in this book raises the question of whether universities have become, in the memorable phrase of one political scientist, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”

This splendid and necessary book documents how the politics of race and gender in our universities are rapidly eating away traditions of scholarship and reward for individual achievement that it has taken decades, or centures, to erect. —ROBERT H. BORK, John M. Olin Scholar in Legal Studies, American Enterprise Institute

The term “political correctness” seems to have originated in the early part of this century, when it was employed by various species of Marxists to describe and enforce conformity to preferred ideological positions. Books, films, opinions, even historical events were termed politically correct or politically incorrect depending on whether or not they advanced a particular Marxist interpretation. The revolutionary ideologues of that period were serious people, and there is no indication that they spoke of political correctness with any trace of irony or self-deprecation.

Eventually the term dropped out of the lexicon, only to be revived in the 1980s, when it came to apply to the assorted ideologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s: black consciousness and black power, feminism, homosexual rights, and, to a lesser degree, pacifism, environmentalism, and so on. The new Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines political correctness as “marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially race, gender, sexual affinity or ecology.” Like the Stalinists and Trotskyists of an earlier day, contemporary campus activists maintain that “everything is political” and thus it seems quite proper to insist that classroom lectures, the use of language, and even styles of dress and demeanor reflect the P.C. stance of the new generation of professors and administrators—products of the counterculture of the 1960s—who are coming to power in American universities.

The first article about political correctness in a national publication was Richard Bernstein’s New York Times feature “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct.” Published October29, 1990, the article suggested that even though some of the preferred terms “are not used in utter seriousness,” nevertheless an “unofficial ideology” was generating a pressure to conform among students and faculty at American universities. The academicians at a conference at the University of California at Berkeley that Bernstein attended did not deny their project in consciousness-raising, but proclaimed it justified by the need to combat “patriarchal hegemony” and the “white male power structure.”

A couple of months later, on December 24, 1990, Newsweek surprised many with a cover article on the campus “Thought Police.” Written primarily by Jerry Adler, the article was a parade of horror stories, each showing how those who trespassed against the prevailing orthodoxy were made to suffer. Yet the article implied that university leaders permitted these excesses in pursuit of a good cause, and that historical and demographic changes on campus made tensions virtually inevitable. Newsweek’s subtitle “Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism?” reflected the ambivalence of the editors about the P.C. project.

In early 1991 chic New York magazine entered the fray with a vehement blast from John Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” Taylor made harsh fun of the P.C. lexicon, according to which American Indians must be called native Americans, pets are entitled to be termed animal companions, and, in one extreme version, short people were in fact ‘vertically challenged.” While New York vividly captured the Star Chamber environment in which free speech was routinely repressed on campus, it gave no plausible explanation for why any of this was going on, who precisely these new authoritarians were, and what they sought to accomplish. Taylor’s widely discussed article did, however, greatly intensify the temperature of derision aimed at political correctness, and it helped to legitimize such contempt among the intellectual and social au courant.  P.C. was starting to look uncool.

A truly important book, Illiberal Education offers not rhetoric but genuine argument and real case studies. Its generalities are impressively grounded in particulars; the documentation is telling and incisive. D'Souza’s book puts the emphasis where it should be, on educational institutions, and shows in forceful detail just how the New Orthodoxy has come to prevail almost everywhere in American higher education. —WILLIAM ARROWSMITH, University Professor and Professor of Classics, Boston University

When the Atlantic excerpted 17,000 words from my book for its readers, there was strong reaction from this liberal intelligentsia—more letters of response than the magazine had received in years. The positive feedback of many inside and outside university enclaves, and from different political persuasions, suggested a strong receptivity to my argument that university policies were not a consummation but a betrayal of liberal principles. And when the New York Review of Books, one of the last best hopes of the politically correct, published articles by Andrew Hacker of Queens College, questioning racial preferences, and by Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, endorsing the basic argument of Illiberal Education—it was evident that the P.C. issue had deeply fractured the liberal intellectual mainstream.

Indeed, prominent progressive thinkers provided some of the sharpest rebukes to the university leadership, embarrassing the claims of the academic establishment that political correctness was a concoction of right-wing ideologues. In his book The Disuniting of America and in numerous articles, Arthur Schlesinger questioned the increasing balknization of American campuses and society, raising the specter of a society divided into warring ethnic tribes. In Esquire David Rieff skewered campus censorship and other efforts to mandate enlightened views on race and gender; his article was boldly titled “The Case Against Sensitivity.” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a respected feminist scholar who heads the Women’s Studies program at Emory University, favorably assessed my book in the Washington Post, in which she made an eloquent plea for philosophical diversity, particularly in multicultural programs, where there is a strong temptation to proselytize. Even the generally staid New York Times Magazine tweaked the academic establishment with a pungent account of the politically correct Modem Language Association convention, where all the well-attended sessions appeared to focus on sexual eccentricity and where classics such as Moby-Dick were in profound disrepute (“Melville is suspect. There’s not a woman in his book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by chapter 29”).

Television coverage came in an avalanche: within the space of a few months, I found myself on the CBS Sunday show “Face the Nation,” on the David Brinkley show, on MacNeil-Lehrer on “Crossfire” with Pat Buchanan and Michael Kinsley, on “Good Morning America,” and on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” not to mention innumerable local radio and TV shows.

Sensitive to threats to the First Amendment, radio and TV coverage was generally skeptical of political correctness, or at least scrupulous in offering a hearing to all sides of the debate. On one national show, I was approached after the broadcast by a prominent newscaster, a liberal who is routinely blasted in conservative bulletins; he confided to me that “many of us here are concerned about the thought police who are roaming our nation’s campuses.” This was a more strident formulation that anything I had said, but such is the way of the media. On “Good Morning America,” where I was scheduled to debate the chancellor of UCLA on affirmative action and Asians, the show began with anchor Charles Gibson interviewing a pretty young Filipina whose grades and extracurriculars were outstanding but who could not gain admission to Berkeley because, she said, administrators told her that there were simply too many Asians. Gibson kicked off our debate by asking the chancellor what he had to say to the young woman, and his woeful look drove home to me the way in which the entire ground of the debate had shifted: university leaders were the ogres now, with some explaining to do.

For a while, a national debate raged about political correctness, with virtually no response from the leading advocates of racial preferences and multiculturalism and a kind of deafening silence from university administrators. Under ordinary circumstances such rhetorical abstinence is understandable: politicians or corporate leaders under scrutiny often choose to evade the public limelight, either for strategic reasons or because they have nothing to contribute. University heads, however, often are regarded and regard themselves as responsible and articulate civic leaders. They often scurry to Washington or surface on television to offer counsel on national issues that pertain to education. It was striking to the point of incredulity, therefore, that when it came to serious issues raised by the P.C. debate, the leaders of our major educational institutions were mute. It was hard to avoid the suspicion that they could not make an effective public defense of their policies and thus made a tactical decision to lie low until the storm clouds of criticism passed so that then they could resume business as usual. If this approach seems to be an abdication on the part of our academic establishment of its social responsibility to engage issues of principle, it should be noted that in dealing with the concerns of minority activists on campus, college presidents and deans adopt precisely the same approach, ducking responsibility whenever possible and routinely subordinating questions of justice to expediency.

Thus the burden of defending politically correct policies fell to newspaper columnists, many of whom had not set foot on a campus for years, and to faculty radicals, some of whom performed well in ideologically like-minded company but were too embarrassing to mainstream sensibilities to do well in public. At the 1991 conference of the Modern Language Association, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the consensus seemed to be that Americans could not understand the incredible complexities of academia—“It’s like trying to reduce a Henry James novel to a telegram,” protested Martha Banta of UCLA’s English department—and that, moreover, many were just plain stupid, “people who don’t know the difference between Plato and NATO,” in the words of Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin, who was a leader of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. The only practical suggestion for a P.C. defense came from University of Illinois professor Gene Ruoff, who urged that radical faculty mount a campaign of letter-writing and OpEd articles to explain current academic trends to the general public, although he conceded that greater precision had its risks: many Americans held moral convictions in opposition to Marxism, deconstructionism, and gay studies.

“If you cannot answer a man’s argument,” Oscar Wilde once said, “do not panic. You can always call him names.” From the tempestuous literature inspired by Illiberal Education, I have become something of a collector of epithets. The Boston Globe reported that P.C. faculty regard me as a “thinking man’s David Duke.” Typically I was not attacked as a racist, partly due, no doubt, to the fact that I am brown-skinned and of Indian descent, although reviewers sometimes dubbed me “insensitive.” In my office I have framed a picture of myself on the cover of the Village Voice with the endearing title “Wanted for Academic Fraud.” A letter-writer to the Washington Post is confident that he has figured out my true motives: in his words, I am nothing more than a “Brahmin wannabe.” One has to be thick-skinned about some of this nonsense, and at times I found myself hearkening back to my undergraduate days on the infamous Dartmouth Review, when we used to warn the deans that messing with the newspaper was like wrestling with a pig because not only did it get everyone dirty, but the pig liked it.

I do not regard it as a statement of virtue, merely of fact, to point out that I have never descended to the level of the ad hominem critics, seeking to keep the focus on the issues under debate. Ultimately this approach seems to have proved the right one, because in the last several months the P.C. issue has become seriously engaged, setting the stage for an extremely important debate on the central principles of liberal education and on how to establish just rules for a society of diverse peoples. On campuses I have been debating an assortment of leading advocates of political correctness, including the flamboyant and eloquent Stanley Fish of Duke University. The very fact of these debates, which would not have taken place even a few years ago, suggests that the First Amendment is making a comeback, and the passionate and intense interest in the issues raised makes me cautiously optimistic about the possibility of constructive reform. Two new organizations, ambitiously titled Teachers for a Democratic Culture and the Union of Democratic Intellectuals have been founded to mount a P.C. defense, or, perhaps more precisely, to mount a sustained criticism of Illiberal Education and the P.C. critics.

While university elites cheer the pyrrhic victories claimed in the name of black people, the objective situation for far too many black students is worsening. Once upon a time thinkers on the left would have rushed to criticize the excesses and disinformation lucidly described by D'Souza and offer cogent alternatives. Maybe now, some will. —WILLIAM BANKS, Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of California, Berkeley

These questions, energetically advanced by various critics and commentators, are at the core of Illiberal Education. Here the reader will find a wealth of concrete information and specific detail that has withstood the most searching factual scrutiny. It is possible to come up with varying interpretations, but while people are entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. What it is important to recognize is not horror stories or excess, but the fact that these are the logical consequences of a set of principles, indeed of an ideological world view. This vision of the multiculturalists—or multi-culties, as Tom Wolfe calls them—warrants careful examination. Fortunately, the debate cannot be pigeonholed into familiar categories—Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. We live in a world whose rapidly changing trajectory is making the old labels increasingly irrelevant. In the debate over racial preferences, the melting pot, censorship, and the curriculum, the ideological spectrum is refreshingly confused and unpredictable; it is now a kind of smorgasbord.

In all of human history, there is no example of a successful multiracial and multicultural society. Empires such as the Roman and the Hapsburg absorbed diverse peoples, but their enterprise of multiculturalism was marred by fatal flaws and failures. Not only is America seeking to resolve monumental issues of equality, identity, and justice, but at the same time the country is trying to prepare its young people for the challenges of a globally competitive workforce. Illiberal Education has helped to unleash an ongoing national controversy. Perhaps its principled criticism and concrete proposals for reform will guide those who care about higher education to leave behind past bitterness—both the wrongs of the ancien régime as well as the wrongs of political correctness—and look toward a new vision that integrates the highest ideals of equality and excellence, enabling future generations of young people to be more productive workers and harmonious citizens in a multiracial society.

—Dinesh D'Souza, December 1991