Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience [Paperback]

Dinesh D'Souza (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 32 pages
• Publisher: John M Ashbrook Center for Public (June 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878802089
• ISBN-13: 978-1878802088
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,887,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The fascism of political correctness, January 5, 2001

By 

Richard Rail (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience (Paperback)

I rate this book at five stars, both for excellence in treatment of subject and for the importance of what Dinesh D'Souza says about higher education in America. What I don't understand is how D'Souza held his temper while researching this book, or his lunch while writing it.

Subsequently notorious for his landmark The End of Racism, D'Souza investigates political correctness on "the best" university campuses and finds that fascism has taken deep root. You can say anything you want on the average American campus so long as it doesn't counter liberal orthodoxy -- which is anything but liberal. Openly oppose that orthodoxy, or accidentally and innocently run afoul of it, and you get to endure a maze of bureaucratic claptrap designed to make it look as though you got a fair shake. Translation: you will be bullied into admitting the error of your ways and, to prove it, accepting "sensitivity training" completely at odds with anything education is supposed to be about. It smacks of Maoist and Khmer re-education camps, which smacked of Orwell's 1984. Even the Nazis were kinder; they just killed you outright.

American higher education today has little to do with preparing bright young minds for useful work in society, and everything to do with indoctrinating these minds in feminist, gay and black victimology. If you are white and male, you will find yourself vilified at every turn in the most aggressive and hateful language. Respond in kind and it's off to the commissars with you -- or out of the university. You do, after all, have freedom of choice.

You're relatively safe in the hard sciences, which can't suffer too much from such foolishness as "feminist science." No respecter of sex ("gender"), gravity cannot be made to accord with ideology and two plus two somehow really does always equal four, even if a white man says so. But if you seek what used to be called liberal education -- the pursuit of Matthew Arnold's famous, "The best that has been thought and said in the world" -- you won't find it. In its place will be smug, arrogant, ignorant professors who don't know that the infamous 3-5ths rule was the anti-slavery position and who elide the fact that Western civilization (dead white males), vilified for enslaving blacks and women, abolished slavery worldwide and freed women from nature's heavy hand by inventing the pill.

In short, you will find a gigantic con game in operation that presents America as the greatest evil on the planet, whites as the distilled essence of that evil and everyone else as victims. The name of this game is multiculturalism. Play it -- that is, take a degree in the humanities, especially one of the pretend disciplines in the "studies ghettos" -- and you will be incapacitated for serious work in the real world but well prepared to storm the bastions of oppressive, patriarchal, racist, homophobic Amerika. You will not learn of the magnificent, heroic accumulation of knowledge in the West, from the Greeks thru the Romans thru the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, our own Founding, down to the days of Martin Luther King. From the contemplation of the extraordinary thoughts of extraordinary minds you would have learned to think, to weigh and consider, to live by principle, to differentiate the truth from humbug. You would have gained depth and vision from standing with Newton on the shoulders of giants, connected to the greatest thinkers of all time.

In place of that, you may instead get to revel in the hallucinations of Afrocentrism or the petty spite of rape-obsessed campus feminists. This "education" will cut you off from the vast record of human achievement, its glorious flights of creative imagination and the search for enduring meaning, the hard road to political freedom, economic uplift and scientific miracles that called forth prodigies of courage and effort thru the ages. In a sea of freedom you will live in a mental cave, suspicious and venomous, cut off from those different from yourself, graduate and prisoner of what classicist Harold Bloom aptly calls The School of Resentment.

D'Souza does a good job on a depressing subject, but his book is actually a once-over-lightly. Allan Bloom treated this theme fully in his 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. Even Todd Gitlin, one of the avatars of modern political correctness, despairs of the American Left in his "The Twilight of Common Dreams." Camille Paglia does a shorter, much more savage (and therefore much more fitting) treatment of the same theme in her essay, "No Law in the Arena," found in her Vamps and Tramps. Or you can see it acted out in the movie Oleanna.

I'm pessimistic. Liberal education is dead in America's great universities. Look abroad and you'll see that it's dead or dying throughout the West. If we can't reverse this, mankind is headed for the darkness that fascism and Communism wrought.

8 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars More propaganda from the Goebbels of the radical right..., January 17, 2001

By 

Michael P. Pelaez "peace &anarchy" (everywhere) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience (Paperback)

Hitler said that the "big lie" is more effective than little ones in deceiving the masses and D'Souza (like his co-conspirators David Horowitz and Rush Limbaugh) attempts such a feat again here in trying to present a big lie as truth. If the corridors of higher education have been "infiltrated" by "radical leftists" so effectively and for so long, then why have the conservative and radical right been growing in strength over the last 20 years while the left has suffered only setbacks??? Universities have NOT been a training ground for politically correct liberals and bleeding hearts - in fact the opposite is true - university educations once valued for their own sake, are now valued only insofar as they provide job training and business/government networking. Follow the money trail - if research funding for universities comes from corporations and government then what kind of output would one expect - yeah, that's right - pro-corporate and pro-government research and pro-corporate/pro-government graduates. Duh! The decline of the university is the direct result of the capitalist system that D'Souza and his ilk proudly defend. This is pure crypto-fascist drivel. If you want some truth about the decline of America and American education read Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, and especially Noam Chomsky. This pamphlet is not even worthy of being used as toilet paper.

5 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars garbage from the extreme right, January 30, 2001

By 

"papakat23" (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience (Paperback)

garbage from the extreme right...don't need to say anything else...