TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050691/0506470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.6 KB | 80 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 71

Failing to Make the Grade


By WALTER SHAPIRO

ILLIBERAL EDUCATION
By Dinesh D'Souza
Free Press; 319 pages; $19.95


    Conservative polemicist Dinesh D'Souza is living every
nonfiction author's fantasy: to publish at precisely the
politically correct moment. Like the cavalry in an old-time
western racing over the hill to save the wagon train from the
murderous Indians -- oops!, misunderstood Native Americans --
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
arrives just as public outrage is building to a peak. Liberals
and conservatives alike have suddenly joined forces to ridicule
the excesses of left-wing policies and posturing in academia.
It is almost as if, having exorcised the legacy of Vietnam in
foreign policy, Americans are now mounting a mopping-up
operation against that last bastion of 1960s-style thought,
colleges and universities.

    The rewards of being topical carry with them the risks of
overfamiliarity. That is the problem with the six case studies
that make up the heart of Illiberal Education. D'Souza ably
documents the prejudice against Asian Americans in the admission
policies of Berkeley, the absurdities of recasting the
introductory civilization course at Stanford to purge many
Western white male thinkers, the affront to civil liberties in
the racial-speech code at the University of Michigan, along with
analogous flaps at Howard, Duke and Harvard. But he rarely
transcends his material; the writing is earnest, the details
repetitive and the analysis predictable. Many of the best quotes
and anecdotes in Illiberal Education turn out to be secondhand
prose. A pivotal paragraph that argues that affirmative action
lowers the self-esteem of black students is buttressed not by
firsthand interviews but merely by citations from newspaper
articles.

    This is not to suggest that the book is entirely a
cut-and-paste job. D'Souza, 30, a native of India who as an
undergraduate was an editor of the militantly conservative
Dartmouth Review, slips behind enemy lines on campus. In fact,
he boasts that "I can still pass for a student." Maybe so, but
his interview style is that of a patronizing pedant. At
Stanford, D'Souza confronts a black undergraduate woman with a
scholarly account of the complicity of African middlemen in
sending their compatriots to the New World in bondage. "((She))
became very quiet and did not say anything for several seconds,"
D'Souza notes proudly. "She now seemed aware of the implications
of the term slave trade." True, there are occasional wry
moments. Stanley Fish, the avant-garde chairperson of the
English department at Duke, proclaims that the university's
commitment to affirmative-action hiring is a way to seize "our
historicist, postmodernist, poststructuralist moment."

    Illiberal Education disappoints because it never delves
beneath the surface of its all-too-easy targets. We read the
self-important jargon of professors like Fish, but we never
understand them. University presidents have uttered public
relations bromides for decades; D'Souza reacts as if he is
hearing them for the first time. Too young to have lived through
the Vietnam era on campus, D'Souza fails to realize that tenured
professors with radical views are not solely a postmodernist
phenomenon. Like the Broadway theater, liberal education always
seems in peril. Luckily for D'Souza, equally constant is the
off-campus demand for books direly proclaiming the end of
Western Civilization courses as we knew them. Not to worry;
Shakespeare will survive.