The Multicultural Madhouse

The recent flood of attention to “political correctness” on American university campuses ranks among the most remarkable developments in the long history of the struggle for sanity in higher education. For years, stories of the academic Thought Police, debased standards, and politicized curriculums have circulated in samizdat among a handful of besieged academics. But it has only been in the last six months that readers outside of academe have been able to get a glimpse of just how bad things have become. Besides a growing number of books on the subject, there have been cover stories in such unlikely venues as Newsweek, The New Republic, New York, and The Atlantic. Even the New York Times and The New York Review of Books have taken notice of the stranglehold of the rigid new orthodoxies of race, class, and gender on scholarship and pedagogy alike.

This suggests that the battle for the soul of the academy has been joined. If so, it is hard to imagine a more potent weapon than Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education. Exhaustively researched, cogently argued, and sweeping in its range, Illiberal Education is both a primer on the breadth of the crisis and a penetrating critique of the fundamental issues that underlie the assault on academic values, free speech, and intellectual integrity in American higher education.

About the Author

Charles J. Sykes

Mr. Sykes was a longtime conservative talk-radio host in Wisconsin and is the author, most recently, of How the Right Lost Its Mind.

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The recent flood of attention to “political correctness” on American university campuses ranks among the most remarkable developments in the long history of the struggle for sanity in higher education. For years, stories of the academic Thought Police, debased standards, and politicized curriculums have circulated in samizdat among a handful of besieged academics. But it has only been in the last six months that readers outside of academe have been able to get a glimpse of just how bad things have become. Besides a growing number of books on the subject, there have been cover stories in such unlikely venues as Newsweek, The New Republic, New York, and The Atlantic. Even the New York Times and The New York Review of Books have taken notice of the stranglehold of the rigid new orthodoxies of race, class, and gender on scholarship and pedagogy alike.

This suggests that the battle for the soul of the academy has been joined. If so, it is hard to imagine a more potent weapon than Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education. Exhaustively researched, cogently argued, and sweeping in its range, Illiberal Education is both a primer on the breadth of the crisis and a penetrating critique of the fundamental issues that underlie the assault on academic values, free speech, and intellectual integrity in American higher education.