DINESH D'SOUZA has had a prominent career as a writer, scholar, public intellectual, and filmmaker. Born in India, D’Souza came to the U.S. as an exchange student at the age of 17 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College. The author of many bestselling books including America, The Big Lie, Death of a Nation, and United States of Socialism, he is also the creator of three of the top ten highest-grossing political documentaries ever made.
Virtually all U.S. universities now fill a sizable portion of each year's freshman class with students from ``certified minority groups''--mainly blacks and Hispanics--with considerably lower grade-point averages than white and Asian-American applicants who are refused admission, according to the author. A former White House policy analyst, D'Souza believes that preferential-treatment admissions policies weaken educational standards and foster separatism and racial tension on campus. In a hard-hitting, controversial report sure to be widely debated, he focuses on divisive issues at six schools: Stanford's multicultural curriculum; Berkeley's ethnic admissions policy; Lee Atwater's forced resignation as Howard University trustee; and recent developments at Michigan, Harvard and Duke. Now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, D'Souza calls for ``nonracial affirmative action policies'' based strictly on socioeconomic disadvantage. He further argues that university-funded student groups should be built around cultural and intellectual interests, not skin color or sexual proclivity. (Apr.)
This book is sure to generate controversy. The author's thesis is that affirmative action policies in college admissions, and the higher education establishment's zealous pursuit of a curriculum that reflects the new orthodoxy of multiculturalism (which calls for increased minority admissions and privileges, more minority-based classes, more minorities on faculties) promote ignorance and racism. D'Souza, a former White House domestic policy analyst, supports his views with extensive interviews and studies conducted on six college campuses. The new victims, he feels, are the high academic achievers who are assumed to rejected for fear of overrepresentation (various Asian minorities). The debate has already begun over D'Souza's engaging and thought-provoking book. Articles featuring it appeared in Atlantic Monthly (February) and are forthcoming in Read er's Digest and Forbes in April. For most libraries.-- Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, N.Y.
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