An Intolerance of the New Intolerance : ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus <i> By Dinesh D’Souza</i> (<i> The Free Press: $19.95; 300 pp.) </i>

Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” is a book so overheated that it almost undoes its own horror stories.

The reader is led to believe that the groves of academe have been bulldozed into boot camps. The classics no longer are respected; instead, students are dragooned into chanting praise for Alice Walker and Frantz Fanon. The hoary search for truth and beauty has been sacrificed to a curriculum that “sprang out of the passions of the civil rights and feminist movements, which were hardly value-neutral.”

Doctrinaire veterans of ‘60s student radicalism force-feed their nonsense and nihilism down the collective throat. Professors who deviate from the new orthodoxies are persecuted, driven to silence, as weak-kneed administrators kowtow to enrages students who cannot bear to hear home truths. Minority students accumulate privileges and take up space that belongs to their betters (until they drop out prematurely). Then they find themselves the butts of racial antagonism--because whites properly resent losing ground to the less qualified in the name of affirmative action.

D’Souza’s caricature is a half-truth. The trouble is that he blows so many whistles so loudly and insistently that he shatters eardrums--which shouldn’t, but may, lead some readers to think they can afford to ignore or deflect his charges across the board. Today’s campus territory is full of minefields, though D’Souza is not a consistently reliable guide to them. Which is a pity, because some of his horror stories are genuinely alarming.

In 1988, some Harvard students (black) publicly criticized a well-known Harvard historian, Stephan Thernstrom (white), for “racial insensitivity,” claiming that he had defended Jim Crow laws and “read aloud from white plantation owners’ journals.” They had never complained to him face to face about what he called “a ridiculous distortion of what I said in class.” The administration first stood silent and then waffled. As a result, Thernstrom has decided to stop teaching lecture courses on race. A comparable decision was made by a liberal Michigan sociologist, Reynolds Farley, who came under fire for similar reasons.

Such cases of officially sanctioned intolerance would be strong enough evidence to support D’Souza’s neoconservative brief against left-wing intimidation. Unfortunately, though, D’Souza tends to weaken his arguments through overkill. He writes, for example, that Thernstrom “had a good reputation as a progressive.” But in a phone conversation with me, Thernstrom called himself “a neoconservative on race issues.” (Not that this matters a whit for Thernstrom’s defense.)

Or consider D’Souza’s case against Stanford’s decision to replace its Western Civilization canon. Here one particular Marxist book becomes, for D’Souza, “perhaps the text which best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum.” Why? Because it is, on his account, the most vulnerable to his finger-pointing.

He sputters on for two dozen pages about Stanford’s much-abused--and misunderstood--”Cultures, Ideas, Values” (CIV) substitute for the old “Western Civ” requirement, but never once gives a reader a complete reading list. Neither does he point out that the single course that offers the books he loves to hate is one of eight options.

Again and again, D’Souza gathers incendiary quotes and bastes them together. He shows no sign of having read much of the (admittedly boring) scholarship he trashes, preferring to cite journalistic accounts, wild-sounding professors and know-nothing students. The more arrogant or ignorant the quote, the more typical D’Souza finds it. If an unspecified Stanford student says, “Who gives a damn about (Japanese capitalism or Islamic fundamentalism)? I want to study myself,” or Prof. Barbara Herrnstein Smith boasts that Duke’s hypertrendy English Department is “the mainstream--what we are doing here is what most of the best colleges are oraspire to be,” D’Souza licks his chops. But again: Who can deny that the student D’Souza quotes who has never read, or even heard of, John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” seriously indicts the higher education in America? In the University of California, there are upper division history majors who have never heard of Tolstoy.

Uninterested in the case for affirmative action, let alone the question of how to overcome the awful legacy of white and male supremacy in a state moving toward a nonwhite majority, D’Souza devotes a chapter to bashing Berkeley’s admissions policy, which fails to admit many white high school graduates with perfect grades. Again, D’Souza overdoes his case. His image of precipitous decline-and-fall is undisturbed by inconvenient data.

Deploring the subnormal graduation rate for affirmative-action admits, he fails to note that the five- and six-year graduate rates for blacks (still grievously much lower than average) have picked up by a full 50% over the past five years. He fails to note that in the good old days, Berkeley (like other major universities) admitted uncounted numbers of students for reasons far from meritocratic--athletes, alumni children, friends of friends--without inciting holy horror in major-magazine cover stories. The underperformance of black and Hispanic students at the university today is indeed troubling, but D’Souza makes things too easy: off with their heads! (He wants affirmative action on class but not racial grounds.)

Despite D’Souza’s defense of objective knowledge, his sense of history is paper-thin. He tends to argue that all politicization and narrow-mindedness come from the left, and that The Canon was engraved in granite until the barbarians poured onto the campus. Hardly so:

In the ‘40s, as the literary historian Leo Marx has pointed out, it took a struggle to get good gray Walt Whitman into the pantheon of American greats. In his intolerance of intolerance, D’Souza also scants the intellectual achievements of minorities, feminists and literary radicals over the last two decades--in women’s, black, ethnic, gay, labor and social history; in the sociology of deviance, the family, gender, social movements; and so on.

He also misses an irony: While the academic radicals have worked their way into the academy--elite universities above all--many, perhaps most, have sealed themselves off from real political influence in the outside world by hardening their positions, speaking in academic tongues and happily marginalizing themselves.

Still, for all its excess, D’Souza’s book should not be ignored. The climate of academic intolerance needs the scrutiny of every unblinkered eye, even the jaundiced. Alas, “Illiberal Education” is likely to inflame a controversy that dearly requires the calm and civil reason that D’Souza rages that he believes in. It will be seized upon by the academic right as incontrovertible proof that the academy goes to the dogs once liberal wimps fail to hold the line against the barbarians. Meanwhile, the academic left will hunker down defensively--Who, me?

More’s the pity on both counts. We badly need a careful account of the intellectual, social and cultural nature and roots of the new illiteracies and conformities--as well as the academy’s high-level efforts to integrate hitherto submerged materials and populations.

The aspiration to see the world (and the West) as a whole is indeed undermined today--by rampant specialization and the uncritical dominance of the scientific world view as well as by a cultural style that values the romance of marginality and victimization over respect for the achievements of liberty, equality, reason and empathy. D’Souza’s spleen reverses the black hats and white hats, but his hysteria will only exacerbate the illiberal mood.

BOOKMARK

For an excerpt from “Illiberal Education,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.