Introduction of the article, source, author, and the reviewer's point of view, quotation of the main idea as stated in the article, clarification of the reviewer's position and purpose of the essay:

In his essay, "Author Affirms Campus Hypocrisy," in the April 22, 1991, issue of Insight, Stephen Goode reviews Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. The book, notes Goode, addresses the negative effects on higher education of "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." Goode's review is sympathetic to D'Souza's attack on the "politically correct" movement in American universities, and he argues on behalf of D'Souza's thesis.

(Return to Top of Document)

Identification of the claims: the final conclusion, the premise(s) using quotations of the critical terms in the article, and a one-sentence description of the argument (identifying its structural type, semantic type, and its evaluation):

Among his claims, Goode states that D'Souza is "good at taking apart hypocrisy."  As his premise, Goode cites D'Souza's analysis of 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." As developed, Goode's claim that "D'Souza is . . . good at taking apart hypocrisy" is a conclusion for a simple, deductive, though unsound argument.

(Return to Top of Document)

Identification of only the stated claims of the argument, identification of the semantic type of argument:

As stated, Goode's argument appears at first to be non-deductive and can be outlined as follows:

1) [D'Souza] deals at length with the notorious curriculum change for freshmen at Stanford.

2) D'Souza is good at taking apart hypocrisy.

(Return to Top of Document)

Identification of the implied premises:

Unstated premises, however, are essential to his support in premise 1 for conclusion 2. These unstated premises may be defined as follows:

3) (Anything notorious is hypocritical.)

4) (To "deal at length with" means to be "good at taking apart.")

(Return to Top of Document)

Restructure of the argument in Standard Form Analysis:

Restructured, the argument can be outlined again.

1) (Anything notorious is hypocritical.)

2) (To "deal at length with" means to be "good at taking apart.")

3) [D'Souza] deals at length with the notorious curriculum change for freshmen at Stanford.

4) D'Souza is good at taking apart hypocrisy. 1, 2, 3

(Return to Top of Document)

Construction of the Numerical Analysis; reconfirmation of the semantic type of the argument:

Or, in its numerical analysis:

As such, the conclusion, "D'Souza is good at taking apart hypocrisy," becomes deductive since it is guaranteed by both stated and implied claims.

(Return to Top of Document)

The Evaluation of the argument:

An examination reveals, additionally, that, although conclusion 4 is deductive, the argument itself is unsound; his characterization of the curriculum change at Stanford as "notorious" is questionable, at least in D'Souza's challenge of one of its texts, I Rigoberta Menchu. His analysis of the text is superficial and fails to justify adequately his dismissal of the Guatemalan author as "atypical" or that selections of texts "for the sake of multiculturalism" is an insignificant criterion for text adoption. He fails to mention, for instance, that during the times addressed by the book, Guatemala was a brutal land in which her father, mother, and younger brother had been tortured and murdered by the military; that she was in Paris, having fled for her life from the Guatemala highlands with the support of human rights groups sympathetic to her cause. If she is "atypical," she may be only in that she was one of the few fortunate survivors to escape. Goode's rather flippant--though unsupported--rejection of multicultural studies seems prejudiced by his concerns for other issues raised in the article; sarcasm alone won't satisfy the demands of sound reasoning.