Dinesh D'Souza first came to national prominence in 1987, at the age of twenty-six, when he was appointed to a position in the Reagan White house as an assistant to domistic policy chief Gary Bauer. In 1991 he published Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, a critique of what he argued was the academically stifling atmosphere perneating politiacal and artistic life on some major university campuses in the country. The book became an instant sensation in academic and political circles, and catapulted the young man to national fame-- even a sort of cult status in certain circles.




Dinesh D'Souza was born on April 25,1961, in Bombay India, into a family of Catholics, a minority religion in India. His father was an executive at Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceuticals, and his mother worked in the home. Dinesh was educated in the private Jesuit schools that stressed a traditional, heavily Western, mostly British curriculum. In 1978, Dinesh came to the united States for his final year of high school. The trip was funded by the Rotary Club, and he spent a year living in Patagonia,a small town on the Mexican-Arizona border. As he told Charles Trueheart of the Washington Post in 1991, "It was like going back to eight grade acdemically speaking,but I was really there for something different." What he came for was exposure to another culture.

D'Souza was expected to return for college but was persuaded to stay in the United States by a guidance counselor at the local high school. He enrolled in Darthmouth in 1979, where he immidiately immersed himself in student activities such as writing for the campus newspaper,working with the international students association, and serving on the campus energy conservation committee. In his junior year, he began working on the Darthmouth Review, a newspaper not affiliated with the college, which opposed what its editors decleared was the mindless liberism exhibited in nearly all campus affairs, classrooms, and publications. The newspaper gained national attention for its sometimes outrageous editorials and its perceived insensitivity to minorities,whose presence on Ivy League campuses, the editors argued, was due to affirmative action and not to the acdemic credentials of the students, a situation they believed ran the counter to the idea of schools for the intellectual elite. D'Souza became the Review's third editor.
D'Souza graduated from Darthmouth in 1983 with a bachelor of arts degree. He then moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to become editor of Prospect, a magazine published by Princeton alumni. He also began contributing articles to magazines such as National Review and Policy Review, two conservative political journals closely allied idiologically with President Ronald Reagan and his conservative agenda.
In 1984 D'Souza published his first book, Falwell:Before the Millennium, a critical biography of Jerry Falwell, evengelist and political activist founder of the Moral Majority, a conservative movement dedicated to convincing morally conservative voters to support like-minded candidates. The book was widely criticized, even on the right, for not presenting a balanced view of Falwell.
Two more books followed in the next two years, during which time he had moved to Washington D.C., to work as an editor with Heritage Foundation' journal, Policy Review. In 1986 he published The Catholic Classics, a two-volume series of interpretive essays on the ideas and writings of the great Catholic thinkers throughout time. And in 1987 he collaborated with Gregory Fossedal, a friend from Darthmouth, on the novel My dear Alex: Letters from KGB, a recasting of the C.S. Lewis novel The Screwtape Letters, a classic Catholic parable of evil's influance in the world.
Also in 1987, D'souza took a job in the Reagan administration. His first position was as assistant to domesticpolicy chief Gary Bauer, where he distilled Reagan domestic policy for the congress and the press. He described to Trueheart his job during the Busch-Quayle election campaign in 1988 as "director of Catholic votes."
In 1991 D'Souza published Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. The book became a bestseller and fueled ongoing national debate about political correctness, the role of the university in society, and the revelance of traditional studies in Western History,arts and literature in what is increasingly referred to as a multicultural society. D'Souza takes a conservative positions on all these issues, arguing especially for the importance of retaining a core curriculum grounded in the western tradition as the best way to educate students.
The fame D'Souza achieved with the success of his book made him a much-demanded lecturer and contributor to the nation's more prestigious op-ed pages. He has written extensively for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.

Sources:
Ravitch, Diane. "Race and Sex on Campus," Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1991. Gall, Susan B. and Zia, Helen. "Notable Asian Americans". Copyright 1995.

Homepage of Dinesh D'Souza.
Dinesh D'Souza Biography.
Very interesting Article by W.B.Allen--"Who Created Dinesh D'souza?."

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