Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)
BOOK REVIEWS - John C. Chalberg: Dinesh D'Souza: Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. The Free Press, 1991. 319 pp
rationally, and yet without understatement, he assumes the pose of a Paul Revere in the past tense and without exclamation points: "The barbarians have arrived, the barbarians have arrived," he repeats and repeats. And just who are these barbarians? Some are young. Others are not so young. Some wear T-shirts and angry faces. Others disguise themselves behind three-piece suits and nervous, if smiling, faces. Some occupy entire buildings. Others occupy over-sized desks. Some do not know any better; others should. And all claim to be well-intentioned to a fault. The result of all these good intentions is an unspoken —and unlikely — alliance between highly organized cadres of self-styled campus "activists" and usually reactive ad hoc committees of university faculty and administrators, more than a few of whom were once themselves campus "activists" of another era, specifically the 1960s. D'Souza finds no conspiracy in any of this. Thankfully, his mind refuses to work that way. But he does find policies in place with which he is in fundamental disagreement, as well as a lot of irony sprouting among the hardy ivy. It is true that the American academy has become over-populated with "tenured radicals" (to borrow from the title of a recent book on the state of American higher education). It is also true that these radicals operate on the basis of political agendas that extend well beyond the walls of American universities. And it is finally the case that many of these radicals are either left-over from the 1960s or desire to revive some version of radicalism, whether Marxist, feminist or otherwise, for the 1990s. In an irony that extends beyond D'Souza's purposes, it is both maddening and laughable to note that Marxism, having been expelled from the east, has found a haven in the academies of the west. If for no other reason than that, educational reformers in what was once the Soviet sphere ought to look elsewhere for models of openness and true intellectual exploration and diversity. In D'Souza's field of vision it is both ironic and menacing that first amendment freedoms do not draw the radicals of the 1990s to the barricades with the same fervor that animated the radicals of the 1960s. Nearly thirty years ago California-Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio 160
