1) A year or so ago when Dinesh D'Souza was researching his new book, "Illiberal Education," at the University of California at Berkeley, he asked an admission official a question.

2) What if he had an A-minus average and scores of 1200 out of 1600 on the SATs? D'Souza queried, "If I were black, would I get into Berkeley?"

3) "Yes," the admissions officer replied. Then D'Souza asked, "What if I had that average and those scores and were white or Asian?" His chances would be about one in 20, came the reply.

4) The answer struck D'Souza as patently unfair--for the Asians and whites denied admission, though qualified, and for the blacks, likely to be ill-prepared to compete in college with their white or Asian counterparts, who probably attended the best high schools and prep schools.

5) For the young native of India and graduate of Dartmouth University, it also symbolized much that is wrong with higher education in the United States today.

6) It is not simply affirmative action with which D'Souza takes issue. It is affirmative action plus all it has given birth to on college campuses: falling standards of student achievement, the loud, unceasing denunciation of Western civilization, the special consideration demanded by groups that call themselves oppressed--minorities, women, and homosexuals.

7) That is not new territory. Last year, Charles Sykes in "The Hollow Men" and Roger Kimball in "Tenured Radicals" showed what bizarre places American universities, particularly the most prestigious ones, have become.

8) But D'Souza has a great deal to add. Not yet 30 and a dark-skinned Asian to boot, D'Souza must have impressed many of his liberal and leftist sources as one of themselves. Certainly, many opened up to him in ways that they have so far never done.

9) At Harvard, for example, a dean in charge of "radical awareness" programs tells him that many of the classics must be rewritten before students read them so that wrong opinions on women and minorities can be removed.

10) An English professor at Stanford confesses an admiration for Milton and then, in the same breath, calls the great English poet an "ass" and a "sexist pig." She goes on to suggest that perhaps what faculty should be teaching is "suspicion" by letting students read Dante and other classics, then showing in class how "unprogressive" they are.

11) But D'Souza's conservative credentials are in order. As an undergraduate, he was an editor at the raucously conservative Dartmouth Review, which confronted left-wing faculty and administrators head-on. So moderate and conservative students (and sometimes even faculty) saw in him a kindred spirit.

12) As a result, "Illiberal Education" is rich in vivid anecdotes. It reads like an intimate portrait of the campuses it visits, and that is no mean achievement because D'Souza traveled to campuses as diverse as Stanford, Howard University, Harvard and the University of Michigan.

13) This is a disturbing book. Among many conservative and moderate (and mostly white) students, the author found a dissatisfaction so deep that it leads him to predict at the end of his penultimate chapter: "A storm is coming."

14) White students told him of their anger over favoritism shown minorities in getting into universities and the special efforts to keep blacks and other groups on campus once they are there. They spoke, too, of growing resentment over efforts--usually by university administra-tors--to make them properly sensitive to the rights of others, since few whites regarded them-selves as dangerously or even mildly racist.

15) But the problems to not end there, D'Souza shows. He argues that it is wrong to bring ill-prepared minority students onto prestigious campuses where they compete with whites who have no doubt already studied calculus and foreign languages and read "Hamlet."

16) First, it creates extreme feelings of discomfort on the part of the black or Hispanic students. Then, giving in to these feelings of discomfort, D'Souza argues, the student finds some solace in saying he can't read "Hamlet" because it was written by a white male and is not part of his culture--give me something of my own kind I can understand.

17) Such students also turn to racial and ethnic organizations for security, but according to D'Souza, these African-American Centers and the like end up being a form of group therapy that reinforces notions that minority student problems stem entirely from white racism.

18) Sadly, many faculty members only add to the problem. Contemporary social and literary philosophies argue that there are no such things as real values, certainly not ones that would lead people to say democracy is better than totalitarianism, or "War and Peace" better than "The Godfather," or one form of human behavior over another.

19) In this atmosphere, it becomes difficult to judge student achievement: Why deem mastery of calculus as in any way more admirable than knowing the novels of Louis L'Amour? (The late author's westerns are central to a Duke University English course, D'Souza reports.)

20) D'Souza's very real talent is the telling detail: He sees the small things that give the whole show away. He captures, for example, the enormous smugness and condescension of someone such as Stanley Fish, chairman of Duke's English department, possibly the most politically correct in the country today, with anyone who does not think as he does. "His field of expertise is ferns," Fish told D'Souza about a colleague who had to be reeducated to be politically correct. "He had to be told what Third World studies is, what feminism is. But he's learned. Now he teaches seminars in ‘feminism and botany."

21) D'Souza is also good at taking apart hypocrisy. He deals at length with the notorious curriculum change for freshmen at Stanford, which saw the advent of a new course that brought in works by women and people of color for students to read for the sake of multiculturalism.

22) One of these books, "I, Rigoberta Menchu," purported to be the story of a Guatemalan Indian woman--a tale Stanford students read, according to an explanation for the course, so that they could get the views of a Third World woman, oppressed by sex, class and ethnic group.

23) D'Souza notes that the book was written by a Frenchwoman whom Menchu talked to in, of all places, in Paris, when Menchu was attending an international socialist conference. That hardly would make Menchu a typical Guatemalan, to say the least. D'Souza writes that in the course of the book, Menchu renounces marriage and motherhood, a double denial that may not sound at all like an Indian in Central America but does sound very much like what faculty and students at Stanford want to hear (and what they hope their Third World heroes will say).

24) Indeed, the rush for victim status is the most bizarre of the current campus rites that D'Souza recorded. "Everybody races to seize the lowest rung on the ladder," he writes, whether it is to identify as a black, a woman, or homosexual. But this is self-defeating, because "the campus psychology of victim status makes it impossible for victims to be relieved of their perceived woes," else they lose their identities.

25) Oddly, it is the students at Howard University in Washington who achieve the most victimized status of all in this book--and they gain that status in search of creating a great past for blacks.

26) D'Souza traces a movement at Howard to sketch ancient Egypt as a black nation and as the source of all wisdom and science. It was a wisdom and science, however, that the adherents of this theory say was stolen by the Greeks and never acknowledged. Thus in ancient history began the white man's wanton, rapacious treatment of others, rendering the rest of the world as ultimate victim. He has fun with this too, noting that if the sources of Plato and Aristotle is black culture, then these writers can no longer be dismissed as white males.

27) D'Souza offers three proposals for change. He calls them modest, but they are not that. They would require major rethinking and restructuring.

28) One is to alter affirmative action so that only the disadvantaged (regardless of race) are considered. That way a black man's son would not win out over a poor white girl from, say, Appalachia.

29) A second is that universities permit no organization on campus that practices racial separatism, thus fostering the ill feelings D'Souza has so vividly detailed.

30) The last, and probably least likely to be implemented, is that faculties develop freshman curricula dealing with issues of "equality and human difference"--based on reading the classics.

31) Meanwhile, the nonsense goes on. D'Souza has found the perfect quote to show what is wrong with the politically correct and the properly sensitive. The speaker is Socrates in "Euthydemus."

32) "Mastery of this sort of stuff would by no means lead to increased knowledge of how things are, but only to the ability to play games with people, tripping them up and flooring them with different senses of words, just like those who derive pleasure and amusement from pulling stools from under people when they are about to sit down, and from seeing someone floundering on his back."

(Reprinted with permission from Insight Magazine, April 22, 1991, pages 18-19.)

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