ustxtxb_obs_1991_09_20_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

undergraduate, who had declined to be interviewed by the magazine, was described without her consent.” William Greider recounts that under D’Souza, Prospect derided the women’s center as nothing but “freaks and frumps,” and declared it the “pockmarked face of feminism.” Prospect’s favorite targets under D’Souza were women’s studies, feminism, sex education on campus, gay rights, counseling women on birth control, and other issues related to women. In his first article for the magazine entitled “Let’s Mainstream Women’s Studies,” D’Souza complained of “perspiring feminists” and declared that “no longer do slatterns have abortions to prove they are liberated.” Responding in a letter to the editor, Princeton history professor Maurice Lee, class of 46, called D’Souza “ill informed and the possessor of … a remorselessly adolescent sense of humor.” He corrected D’Souza on one important point: “anyone understands,” wrote Lee, that “women don’t have vasectomies.” In the October 1984 issue, D’Souza complained of “Mondale’s Effeminate Style,” all but openly gaybaiting the then-presidential candidate for his high-pitched voice and softspoken demeanor. In a letter to the editor the same issue, an alumnus complained of Prospect’s “flagrant anti-feminism and paranoic homophobia, both expressed in sniggering terms that I have not heard since high-school days in locker rooms.” After his tenure at Prospect, and after publishing his Falwell book, D’Souza worked as managing editor of Policy Review, the theoretical journal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. There D’Souza wrote a sympathetic analysis of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s theology, noting that many prominent right-wing groups take money from Moon’s Unification Church, which lavishly funds anti-communist organizations worldwide. Of charges of Moonie brainwashing, D’Souza writes, “civil libertarians are right to point out that there is a fine line between `being brainwashed’ and ‘discovering the truth,’ and who is to say that this sort of control is not what the Moon convert was looking for in the first place?” After probing Moon’s doctrine to determine whether it is inherently socialist, D’Souza decided that it is not terminally so. He concludes on a bright note, pointing out that “America is home to many religions that originally attracted hostility but have since gained comfortable respectability.” Citing Mormons and Christian Scientists, D’Souza declares, “In these examples, the Unification Church finds hope.” Articles like this one soon attracted the attention of the Reagan administration in 1987, D’Souza moved from the Heritage Foundation to become a “domestic policy analyst” under Reagan. While D’Souza today portrays himself as a champion of the First Amendment, at the time he promoted, among other issues, Attorney General Ed Meese’s anti-pornography campaign. And for a man who just a few years before published an article decrying feminism’s “pockmarked face,” he was not above drawing on the arguments of feminists to make his point for banning pornography. While the issue of suspending free speech to ban pornography remains one of the most bitter disputes among feminists today, D’Souza was able to embrace this decidedly illiberal idea without blinking an eye. Liberal Funding from Conservative Sources After his stint with the Reagan team, D’Souza hooked up with his old start writing his next book. In 1988, D’Souza received, through the IEA, a $30,000 grant from the John M. Olin Foundation to begin working on a book tentatively titled The New Elite, which would become Illiberal Education. From there, even though D’Souza was still an unknown to most everyone in higher-education circles \(except to a its own. Dinesh D’Souza SEAN FRENCH In 1989, D’Souza became a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Olin upped its ante to $50,000 for that year. The Olin Foundation also provided funds, $30,000, for the first Madison Center conference in October 1989, at which a then-almost unknown D’Souza participated in a panel discussion on “The Politicization of Education.” \(The Madison Center, founded by Allan Bloom and former Education-Secretary-turned-drug-czar William Bennett, would merge other $50,000, and through the Madison Center authorized another $20,000 grant for “promotion” of his book upon publication. Meanwhile, D’Souza kept busy researching his book, and making occasional public appearances. According to the July/August 1990 Campus Report, D’Souza spoke on “race, gender and class issues on campus,” at the July 6-7, 1990 AIA Conference. Campus Report said D’Souza complained of “‘victims studies’ classes \(i.e. Women’s, Gay and Lesbian, Afroto the problem of admission by affirmative action rather than merit.” The newsletter went on to report that “D’Souza said that the idea of anything non-Western being superior is the ‘new cultural imperialism.'” One might dismiss such wild-eyed,, convoluted statements as poor reportage on the part of AIA, except that D’Souza kept repeating it in hisbook and in myriad articles the following year. In a Feb. 18, 1991 New Republic article, for example, D’Souza made basically the same argument: Affirmative action creates an unqualified group of minority students on campus who then embrace “minority separatism” to “seek support and solace from others like them.” To avoid facing up to their own inferiority, then, minorities demand curriculum reforms and greater representation of minorities among faculty and administrators. This line of “reasoning” ignores the history of black thinkers like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, who called for separatism well be THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7