Interviews are a staple of the journalist-equivalent essay or book. They seem credible. If something is taken out of context or completely made up, surely the interviewer won’t get away with it? Well, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” A correction inevitably gets less attention than the original misquotation, and there are only rarely any penalties for misquoting people. So, in a polemical work like Illiberal Education, if you wouldn’t believe the author’s opinion stated directly, you shouldn’t believe it when confirmed by an interviewee. Sad but true.
In his review of Illiberal Education, Goldner, Bruce (1992). “Rev. of Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus by Dinesh D’Souza.” Michigan Law Review. 90 (6): 1291–1307. Michigan Law School professor Bruce Goldner mentions two of D’Souza’s interviews. In the first:
“D’Souza portrays university administrators, professors, and students as having practically abandoned Michigan professor Reynolds Farley when he was accused of racial insensitivity in 1988 (Illiberal pp. 148-51). In fact, Farley recalls that administrators, faculty, and students publicly defended him.” (Goldner, p. 1300)
In the second:
[T]o support his claim on the disproportionate power that a few progressive professors wield at universities, D’Souza describes a telephone conversation between Michigan law professor Alex Aleinikoff and a congressional office in Washington, in which Aleinikoff allegedly sought help in pressuring the University to accede to a progressive agenda (p. 152). Aleinikoff says that this conversation never occurred and that D’Souza grossly overstated Aleinikoff’s power and influence on campus." (Goldner, pp. 1300-1301)
In both cases, Goldner cites an interview with the professor. Since they are his colleagues (in one case, a fellow professor in the law school), I choose to believe his reporting over D’Souza’s.
Let’s see what those two interviews – and others – tell us. What are the clues they provide that D’Souza is being less than honest?
As with all these posts, I link to archive.org’s copy of Illiberal Education so that you can check my citations. Throughout, boldface indicates my emphasis.
The chapter’s theme
In the chapters “The Victim’s Revolution on Campus” and “Travels with Rigoberta,” D’Souza established one theme: that “tenured radicals” were convincing gullible kids that they’re victims. The chapter containing Goldner’s two interviewees, “The New Censorship,” aims to convince the reader that the radicalized students are now exercising their power, aided by professors and given free reign by feckless and ineffectual administrators. They are going after professors who say the wrong thing. Sub rosa, the message is: they’re coming after you next. Remember, my theory is that D’Souza’s primary (or gatekeeper) audience is the chattering classes, who probably fancy themselves freethinkers and truth tellers, even bold truth tellers. They’re easily flattered – and easily alarmed.
One of D’Souza’s arguments is supported by an interview with sociology professor Reynolds Farley. D’Souza’s account is somewhat muddled and disorderly, so I’ve taken the liberty of rearranging it to highlight the theme. [Text in brackets] is my own. The rest is verbatim from Illiberal (pp. 150-151):
[The atmosphere on campus has become hostile to intellectual inquiry. For example,] Michigan recently debated a mandatory course on race relations for all undergraduates. [For an evaluation, I turned to] Michigan sociology professor Reynolds Farley. [He is] acknowledged as America’s leading demographer in the field of race relations. His books Blacks and Whites: Narrowing the Gap and The Color Line and the Quality of Life are widely assigned textbooks. Farley is also a popular teacher who has served on the faculty at Michigan for over twenty years. A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, he has challenged the Republican position on public policy issues in his field over the past several years. [He said this of the debate:]
“the activists promoting the course weren’t interested in an intellectually or historically balanced survey. They wanted a polemical course. They don’t want students to be familiar with all aspects.”
[The atmosphere on campus has changed to the point that Farley recently stopped teaching] his Sociology 303 class on racial and cultural contacts. “Everybody in the 1960s expected the civil rights movement to narrow the gap between the races,” Farley said. “The fact that it didn’t happen has generated enormous bitterness, which now needs an outlet and sometimes a target. When I was teaching my class, I could sense this. Students would ask questions that were clearly aimed at generating incidents, fodder for activism.”
[Doing other work was safer.] “Issues of civil rights have become more, not less, complex,” Farley argued. “Yet such questions as racial differentials on test scores and racial differentials in black and white family structure are now surrounded by intimidation. The discourse at the university has been narrowed.”
[To be sure,] affirmative action “has good arguments in favor of it, on grounds of justice. Personally, I think it’s quite consistent with our historical commitment to racial equality.” On the other hand, he said, “a case can be made that preferential programs cast aspersions on the achievements of blacks.” The problem, Farley said, “is that we cannot have this argument here without the risk of being attacked and stigmatized.”
Thus the minority victim’s revolution has alienated one of its strongest potential supporters.
This, as it stands, is rather dry stuff, so D’Souza chose to introduce (and intermix) it with a narrative of Farley as a victim of the mob. Was he? Some, probably, but here’s my reconstruction of the events. (Both D’Souza and I are relying heavily on an article in the Michigan Daily.) David Schwartz, “Students criticize Soc. 303 prof,” Michigan Daily, January 11, 1989. Page 1, continued on page 3. I note that D’Souza’s account doesn’t entirely square with the facts as stated in the article, but I’ve covered his use of newspaper sources before.
- Professor Farley taught a class titled “Racial and Cultural Contacts.”
- Per the Daily, “he was accused [in the fall term] of being insensitive to issues of racism and sexism” by some of the students.
- Students met with Farley on December 14. In his telling – both to the Daily and to D’Souza – Farley explained that, when covering controversial figures, a professor will inevitably quote people saying bad things about those figures, but it’s unjust to assume the professor agrees with the quotes. The students were not satisfied.
- It’s not stated who, but presumably some students escalated in a “let me speak to your manager” way over the winter break.
- In January, the chair of the sociology department said the department’s executive committee would meet with the complaining students “sometime next week.”
- “Eventually, Farley said, the whole business subsided without any action being taken” (Illiberal, p. 150).
- Farley, however, told D’Souza that his reputation had been “gravely damaged” (ibid).
- At some later point, Farley decided to stop teaching the course.
I’m the sort of person who frets endlessly after being accused of hurting someone, so I don’t want to minimize how Farley might have felt. But note what the actual damages were:
- An unpleasant meeting with some students and, likely, a pretty strained atmosphere in class for the remainder of the term.
- Being interviewed by the campus newspaper for an article.
- Being talked about in an executive committee meeting, which resulted in no consequences. People familiar with bureaucracy might suspect this was the intention all along: to make the issue go away with no one being satisfied but no one motivated enough to cause more trouble. A former Assistant Dean of Student Affairs of my close acquaintance says that’s a fair assumption, and gave me permission to repeat her.
- Reputational damage – but with whom? D’Souza implies Farley was ostracized by the entire campus community, but the only professor who goes on record (in the newspaper article) is “Sociology Prof. Mary Jackman, [who] is chairing a task force on diversity and discrimination in the Sociology department.” She defends him, saying “I’ve talked to (Farley) myself on issues concerning sexism and racism, and I’ve always found him to be quite sensitive about those issues.” Farley later told Goldner he’d gotten public support from administrators, faculty, and students. And call me a cynic about academia, but I’m betting a couple months of conflict with students didn’t materially affect Farley’s reputation among his research peers: sociologists specializing in census and demographic data.
Even assuming the students were way off base, who among us who’ve had bosses hasn’t had them fly off the handle for some stupid reason, making an unpleasant fuss that eventually blew over? Did we get featured in a book as an example of how capricious and unreasonable bosses can be? We did not. Hardly anyone does.
Farley’s situation is different, though, for conservatives, who tend toward a strong belief in hierarchies of authority. Frank Wilhoit put it most memorably:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Bosses (and professors) are allowed to be obnoxious downward; it’s contrary to nature for employees (and students) to be obnoxious upwards.
Objectively, the Farley affair was kind of a nothingburger. Being sympathetic to sensitive souls like my own, I hesitated about that judgment. But if D’Souza can describe being on the receiving end of a genocide as “unfortunate for [Menchu’s] personal happiness,” I can be callous too. D’Souza perhaps realizes that, which may account for his heightened language when describing the actual events. Like, for example:
“Some black students took offense, and contacted UCAR and other minority organizations on campus, which moved in concert to bring Farley before a public tribunal.
The “in concert” and “public tribunal” are not justified – rather, they’re contradicted – by the newspaper article, and none of D’Souza’s direct quotes from Farley justify them either.
Probably when you see such a contrast between actual consequences and the language used to describe them, you should be suspicious. Consider:
“But minority sensibilities have become so touchy that any criticism of the activist agenda is automatically termed racist, and as we saw with Professor Farley at Michigan and Professor Thernstrom at Harvard, even narrative descriptions of controversial policies such as preferential treatment are regarded as improper.” (p. 243)
“Once a professor finds himself the object of vilification and abuse for tackling a political taboo—the fate of Farley, Thernstrom, and Macneil—others absorb the message and ensure that their own classes are appropriately deferential.” (p. 248)
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Farley was not accused of being racist. The accusation was insensitivity and “[a] common student complaint that Farley treated questions from minority students in a condescending, sarcastic manner.” (Michigan Daily)
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As far as I can tell, affirmative action played no role in the Farley story. On p. 149, D’Souza writes “At my request, Farley prepared an itemized explanation of his alleged classroom errors.” D’Souza doesn’t list them all, but none of the ones he lists (and lets Farley refute) have to do with affirmative action. Farley does opine about affirmative action, but only later, in his interview with D’Souza (as quoted above). I very much suspect it was D’Souza who brought it up.
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Two other professors are mentioned. What happened to them? I didn’t go to D’Souza’s primary sources to check his account of Stephen Thernstrom, but I note that the incident ends the same way: “Dean of the Faculty […] clarified that Thernstrom’s academic freedom would be protected: no disciplinary action would be taken against him.” (p. 197) In D’Souza’s third example, law professor Ian McNeil, “eventually the publicity subsided” (p. 199) and he also suffered only reputational damage.
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In none of these cases, it seems to me, was the kerfuffle about weighty issues of academic freedom. It wasn’t about research, but about reactions to and by annoyed students.
Several weak examples, described in inflamed language, don’t make for a good argument.
When the polemical language starts to fly, it’s important to extract what actually happened from the rhetoric.
Mary Sue
I recently picked up Vera Tobin’s Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot. The inside-cover blurb says:
“Why do some surprises delight – the endings of Agatha Christie novels, films like The Sixth Sense, the flash awareness that Pip’s benefactor is not (and never was!) Miss Havisham? Writing at the intersection of cognitive science and narrative pleasure, Vera Tobin explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that define a ‘well-made surprise.’ […]
“Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory conspire with stories to produce wondrous illusions […]”
I haven’t started the book, but I expect it will discuss what I think of as boom! endings: a satisfying and sudden(ish) wrapup to the through-line of the plot. Here’s something of a boom! ending in Illiberal Education, from pp. 151-152:
“A typical example is Michigan law professor Alexander Aleinikoff, a former antiwar activist who now exercises a strong influence both on student activists and administrators. A youthful, dark-haired man with a mustache, he sat forward in his office chair, surrounded by books on history and law. […]
“[H]e maintained that all standards have been established by white males; therefore he is not convinced they can be applied to blacks and women. Asked whether this was true of scientific standards as well, Aleinikoff said yes; even a question such as ‘how a cockpit should be constructed’ has been settled by white norms. If minorities or women were in control, Aleinikoff said, perhaps cockpits would be built differently. The laws of gravity, he conceded, would stay the same.
“Arguments about treating races and sexes equally did not impress Aleinikoff, who said that Martin Luther King’s ideas were obsolete. […] ‘[C]olor-blind is a norm that has now come to haunt us. Now we have new problems, so we need new norms.’
“[H]e said, ‘There is some speech that contributes nothing to the dialogue. To me, racial epithets are not speech. They are bullets. They can be outlawed in the same way that bank robbery can be outlawed.’ Aleinikoff dismissed references to the First Amendment. ‘What white students are very good at doing is moving the discussion to abstract principles.’ […]
“Aleinikoff favored social pressure and social control […]
“The conversation with Aleinikoff was briefly interrupted by a phone call from a Democratic congressional office in Washington, D.C. Aleinikoff discussed strategy for putting pressure on the university to acquiesce in his antidiscrimination agenda. ‘These are internal issues,’ he explained with a smile, ‘but a little outside pressure can’t hurt.’ "
Recall that Aleinikoff denies the phone call happened. Still, artistically, it makes a decent ending. Air some extremist ideas, have the interview subject bring up the idea of wielding the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, then show him actually attempting to wield it, thus ending on a foreboding note.
Note that the interview was “briefly interrupted,” but the interruption serves as the climax. It’s probably easier to shape an interview than to shape a set of quotations from a book.
Better examples
In his review of Illiberal Education, Louis Menand, “Illiberalisms,” The New Yorker, 20 May 1991, pp. 101-107. Archive version; subscription required. Louis Menand writes, archly:
“[D’Souza] reports, as well, his own consistently good luck in turning the tables on the people he interviews. One of the consequences of Berkeley’s efforts to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in each class is that black applicants with relatively low S.A.T. scores have been admitted and Asian-American applicants with relatively high ones have been refused. One of the rejected Asian-Americans threatened to sue Berkeley. When DSouza asks a black Berkeley student what she thinks of that tactic, she tells him, “I wouldn’t fight so hard to go somewhere that didn’t want me” – a reply that gives D’Souza the opportunity to remind her that James Meredith, the first black person admitted to the University of Mississsippi, wasn’t wanted there either.” (Menand, p. 102)
Aaaaand… scene!
This reeks of fiction. As Woody Allen says in “Annie Hall,” “Boy, if life were only like this.” But it’s not.
At some point, D’Souza’s snappy victories overwhelm. Consider his interview with Megan Maxwell on pages 75-77. She suggested reading African writers on colonialism to get a better picture of its effects on natives than Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. D’Souza whips out some erudition and points out that Blacks in the Congo sold slaves to White slavers.
“Confronted with this account, Maxwell became very quiet and did not say anything for several seconds. She now seemed aware of the implications of the term slave trade. Trade implies a buyer and a seller. We unequivocally condemn the buyer of slaves, the white man, but isn’t an equal share of guilt borne by the black seller of slaves, the tribal chieftains?
“After a moment, Maxwell pointed out that ‘In every culture people are selling their own into slavery. The Romans had slaves—didn’t they?'” (ibid., p. 76-77)
I’m supposed to believe that a graduated history major from Stanford, with a special interest in American slavery, didn’t know a basic fact about the African side of the transatlantic slave trade? Or the ubiquity of slavery throughout history? That she was uncertain if the Romans had slaves? (Nor whether slaves were Romans or conquered peoples?)
In the beginning of their conversation, in D’Souza’s words, Maxwell “agreed with Jesse Jackson’s call for American blacks to be described henceforth as African Americans” (p. 75). At the end, “she expressed new reservations about ‘African American’ as a term of self-description. ‘I very strongly identify myself as an American,’ she said. ‘I prefer to call myself a black American.'”
She left her interview with D’Souza a wiser, more appreciative person.
One final example. On pages 221-223, D’Souza talks to three students “majoring or double-majoring in Afro-American Studies at Harvard.” As their conversation comes to an end, D’Souza makes an observation:
“Without the principles of equality enshrined in the founding documents, I suggested, Lincoln would have had no ground to stand on against the South, and Martin Luther King would have had to look elsewhere for a moral basis for the civil rights struggle.”
You guessed it:
“The more Nelson thought about it, the more she saw something there. She said, however, that she had never heard this argument made before. ‘Did you think of it yourself?’ she asked.”
Remind you of anything? Wikipedia says:
“The Mary Sue is a character archetype in fiction, usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and generally lacking meaningful character flaws. […] A Mary Sue is often an author’s idealized self-insertion, and may serve as a form of wish fulfillment. Mary Sue stories are often written by adolescent authors.”
D’Souza is a Mary Sue character in his own interviews. Interviews – like life – are complicated and digressive. Even with editing, they rarely wrap up with the satisfying boom! of fiction. And when they always present the interviewer as clever – the Mary Sue or Marty Stu that rescues the dopey secondary characters from some folly – consider whether the interviews are just bad fan fiction.
And it’s certainly fair to wonder how much else of the text is fiction, too.