Vintage Books, 1991

Excerpts: page number in the book follows in brackets; source given in brackets where appropriate.

At the University of California at Berkeley, black and Hispanic student applications are up to twenty times (or 2,000 percent) more likely to be accepted for admission than Asian American applicants who have the same academic qualifications… "For a black student," [Berkely professor of business who served on several admissions committees Ernest] Koenigsberg says, "the probability of admission to Berkeley is 100 percent." But if the same student is Asian American, he calculates, "the probability of admission is less than 5 percent." [3]

• [source: confirmed by Berkeley Office of Student Research.]

At Ivy League colleges… incoming freshmen have average grade scores close to 4.0 and average SATs of 1,250 to 1,300. According to admissions officials, however, several of these schools admit black, Hispanic, and American Indian students with grade averages as low as 2.5 and SAT aggregates "in the 700 to 800 range". [3]

• [source: provided by admissions officers who requested anonymity; unless ordered by the courts to disclose the information, they often avoid public disclosure because "we don't think it's anyone's business" according to the Princeton admissions office]

African American scholar Leonard Jeffries claims that whites are biologically inferior to blacks, that the "ultimate culmination" of the "white value system" is Nazi Germany, and that wealthy Jews were responsible for financing the [European-African] slave trade… Jeffries told his class that whites suffer from an inadequate supply of melanin, making them unable to function as effectively as other groups… The Ice Ages caused the deformation of white genes, while black genes were enhanced by "the value system of the sun." … [7]

Jeffries is no academic eccentric; he is chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at City College of New York (CCNY), and coauthor of a controversial multicultural curriculum outline for all public schools in New York State. [7]

• [source: numerous, including "Professors' Theories on Race Stir Turmoil at City College," Joseph Berger, New York Times, April 20, 1990, where Jeffries asserted that "rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade"; "Racism in Black Studies," Campus Report, June 1988, p. 1, 8, in which Professor Jeffries argues that "white folks are deficient in melanin" and consequently less "biologically proficient" than blacks.

 In a manual for race and gender education, distributed they the American Sociological Association, Brandeis University Women's Studies professor Becky Thompson acknowledges the ideological presuppositions of her basic teaching methodology: "I begin the course with the basic feminist principle that in a racist, classist and sexist society we have all swallowed oppressive ways of being, whether intentionally or not. Specifically, this means that it is not open to debate whether a white student is racist or a male student is sexist. He/she simply is. Rather, the focus is on the social forces that keep these distortions in place." [8]

• [source: as cited, edited by Patricia Collins and Margaret Anderson, An Inclusive Curriculum: Race, Class and Gender in Sociological Instruction, American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., 1987.]

When the University of Pennsylvania recently announced mandatory "racism seminars" for students, one member of the University Planning Committee voiced her concerns about the coercion involved. She expressed her "deep regard for the individual and my desire to protect the freedoms of all members of society." A university administrator wrote her back, [indicating that the word "individual" was] "a RED FLAG phrase today, which is considered by many to be RACIST. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privilege the `individuals' who belong to the largest or dominant group." [10-11, emphasis NOT added]

Rachel Hammer, a… student at Columbia University… said that the only overt racism she has encountered at Columbia involves hostility directed against whites. [10]

 A 1989 survey commissioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities showed that 25 percent of college seniors have no idea when Columbus discovered America; the same percentage confuse Churchill's words with Stalin's, and Karl Marx's ideas with those in the United States Constitution. A majority of students were ignorant of the Magna Carta, the Missouri Compromise, and Reconstruction. Most could not link Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton with their major works. [14]

• [source: A Survey of College Seniors: Knowledge of History and Literature, conducted by the Gallup Organization for the NEA, Washington, D.C., 1989, pp. 35-6.]
• [Editorial note: when you consider that according to the 1999 Census data, less than 10% (9.4%) of Americans were college graduates, this means that the aggregate knowledge level of the rest of the United States citizens is even more deficient on average, assuming that those who make it to the senior year of college have a higher average exposure to and retention of the historical, literary, and cultural information being tested.]

It is possible to graduate from 37 percent of American colleges without taking any courses in history, from 45 percent without taking a course in American or English literature, from 62 percent without studying any philosophy, and from 77 percent without studying a foreign language. [15]

• [source: Lynne Cheney, Humanities in America, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 5.]