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The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses

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University administration grows even when faculty size remains constant (at MIT, the administrator-to-faculty ratio doubled in the 20 years from 1969 to 1989). The obvious result is a rise in the cost of university education. The less obvious result is that university administrations begin to do all kinds of things that they aren't qualified to do. Kors and Silverglate focus on administrators limiting freedom of speech, starting with rules that are poorly drafted and ending with internal court systems that afford defendants very few rights.

The famous University of Pennsylvania "water buffalo" case is here. MIT puts in a fairly impressive showing, notably our decision to pay administrators to watch porn movies to decide whether they were obscene. Under this policy, proposed in 1984, Dean James Tewhey prosecuted an MIT undergrad for showing Deep Throat, a film held by the Massachusetts courts to be acceptable under Cambridge's community standards. Under MIT rules, the undergrad, Adam Dershowitz, was not entitled to legal representation before the MIT Committee on Discipline (COD). However, he could bring a relative, so he asked his uncle, Alan Dershowitz, to come down the street from Harvard Law School. This resulted in an acquittal for young Dershowitz and some changes in MIT policy. COD hearings would no longer be open to the student press, students would no longer be entitled to bring a relative, and it would henceforth be forbidden to tape-record proceedings.

[Note: Tewhey is actually my favorite MIT administrator of all time because, after years of giving students lectures on how to run their romantic lives, his own affair with another MIT employee turned sour. They were both married (to other people). She accused him of following her around and harassing her. They both got restraining orders from the Massachusetts courts against each other. She asked MIT to fire him for harassing her. With about as much due process as Tewhey had ever given any of the students, MIT fired him. Or we said that we did. But then it turned out that we were paying him for not working for about a year after we'd allegedly fired him. And then he sued MIT in Middlesex Superior Court for wrongful discharge. And then we sort of lost track of James Tewhey.]

Kors is a scholar and Silverglate is a civil rights lawer. So the book differs from what a journalist might have written in the provision of philosophical and legal underpinnings for all of the newsworthy cases. Most interestingly, the roots of speech limits on campus are traced back to Herbert Marcuse (the only philosopher ever to appear on the cover of TIME Magazine). Marcuse argued that as long as society was oppressed by the powerful, free speech does not help the weak. True toleration and liberation could only be achieved by withdrawing "toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the gorunds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medicare care, etc."

I was recommending the book to a friend and she asked "Who is it written for?" We thought about it for awhile. It can't be the administrators because they presumably enjoy the status quo. It can't be the students because they are just passing through the university in order to pick up a credential. It can't be the professors because they've mostly abdicated control of the university to the administrators. Most faculty see themselves either as employees of a bureaucracy vastly more powerful than themselves or as low-grade autonomous entrepreneurs only loosely connected to the university.

In fact, there might not be anyone in the United States whose has both the power and the inclination to redress any of the wrongs outlined in the 400 pages of The Shadow University. That is a thought much scarier than any in the book itself.

Those holding their breath for a book that exposes the sad state of liberty on America's campuses can finally breathe easily. Silverglate and Kors do an superb job of unveiling the lack of due process in university judicial systems, the predominance of (left-wing/Stalinist) politics in the day-to-day affairs of student-life administrators, and what parents, students, and University Trustees should do to bring back a humane environment at American universities. My own Alma Mater was (rightly) excoriated in the book. The passion of the authors is contagious-- You will get angry when you read the treatment accorded to professors and students at hundreds of Universities, from Amherst to Yale, and you will realize that the Political Correctness movement is not a dying fad, it's the institutionalized orthodoxy. This is required reading for every student and university professor who cares about academic freedom, fairness, and freedom of speech. The debate about PC will never be the same again.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is a student or faculty member at a college (especially if they speak on controversial issues, publish in the campus media, or are actually facing charges), for any lawyer who is called upon to defend such a student or faculty member, and also for college administrators who may benefit from being reminded that their actions and policies are subject to review by the real courts and may very well be found wanting.

Although incredibly thoroughly researched, this is by no means a dry book. The stories it tells are of real people who, usually quite innocently, became caught up in a theatre of the absurd, half Kafkaesque and half Stalinesque, not of their own making and certainly anything they expected. It is also a deeply moving book, paying due tribute to many courageous people who, when faced with an option to confess their "sins" in secret, chose instead to fight a vigorous and invariably costly defense of their own precious liberty.

Nearly anyone unfamiliar with the practices of student "judicial" systems on college campuses is likely to be shocked to find out what really goes on in institutions theoretically devoted to the pursuit of truth and learning. Indeed, the more one is familiar with the standards of ordinary justice which have evolved through vast experience in the real courts, the more one will be appalled to read these accounts of trials without charge, rules which use words that do not mean what any reasonable person would expect them to mean, offenses defined so as to preclude any possibility of a defense, explicit infringements of the right to believe as one chooses and to speak as one believes, and other gross denials of due process.

Those who are familiar with these systems firsthand will recognize many of the egregious practices meticulously documented by the authors, and it is something of a surprise even to us that sacrificing of students to some sort of bizarrely ideological "higher purpose" has become more than commonplace, and is now nearly universal. Not only students but faculty -- including tenured faculty -- have been railroaded, fired, and disgraced, and the authors document numerous cases where both students and faculty have been forced to turn to the real courts for justice and remedy, generally with success.

The overriding lesson of this book is that the real courts, operating under real rules of evidence and procedure and with real judges, are overcoming an historical reluctance to intervene in the affairs of public and private colleges. This change is a direct result of the increasing tendency over the past decade or two for colleges to violate the most basic standards of fundamental fairness in dealing with "internal" matters, thus bringing themselves into conflict with the real law. What the authors here convincingly demonstrate is that such abuses are now struck down with regularity once exposed to public view, either through real court proceedings or, on occasion, through media attention.

It is no exaggeration to say that many college "judicial" systems operate within an Orwellian netherworld where some students can steal and destroy entire press runs of a student newspaper and face no consequences, while other students can be suspended and expelled for speaking in such a way as to hurt someone's feelings. It is difficult to believe, perhaps, but those who have seen these systems close up know that the authors are perfectly on the mark. If there is any doubt, the voluminous citations of court documents and other evidence presented here should remove it.

The Shadow University by Kors and Silverglate presents a meticulously documented and chilling account of the infringements on free speech, free association, free thought, and due process forced onto students and politically incorrect faculty at some of this country's most prestigious colleges and universities. It also shows how shallow are the efforts of campuses to showcase "diversity" of culture when the real role of a college or university should be to present and protect diversity of ideas.

The book documents how the lack of basic civil rights on campuses is generally unknown outside of the closed academic society and how courts have consistently ruled against the colleges and universities on basic constitutional grounds when their policies, such as speech codes, have been challenged.

The stories recounted in the book show the duplicity and hypocrisy of many college administrators and some faculty. Fortunately, common sense and a faith in basic rights of free speech and due process can correct the problem, but only if enough people recognize the threat to freedom on campus. This book should be required reading for all college administrators, trustees, and faculty, as well as being highly recommended for all students and parents. We owe Kors & Silvergate (and groups such as the ACLU) a great debt of gratitude for their efforts to restore and preserve freedom on campus.

Each generation seems destined to learn the dangerous consequences of allowing any infringement of free speech, and based both on the themes of the authors and the content of the review comments herein it is obvious there is much to concern lovers of liberty. Students of history understand that usurping the rights to open dialogue and freedom of expression quickly deteriorates into a frightening loss of all freedoms. Based on a historical perspective, convenient public orthodoxies such as are represented by the prevailing pantheon of politically correct precepts and the associated convenient systematic abrogation of others' rights to speak their versions of the truth without undue interference from others or the state itself always leads to a loss of freedom and individual rights. Freedom is never free, and we must always beware of easy answers that endanger individual liberties and rights.

Many students of history still remember that this is how fascism starts, how it ignites into a burning ideology, with the simple promulgation of the notion that there is only one correct way to see or believe things, disregarding constitutional safeguards by shouting down people and ideas you disagree with, never allowing their ideas to compete in the public marketplace, forcing other people to subscribe to your own notion of what is true, right, and appropriate. The best way to do this is to ensure no one disagreeing with you can gain a public forum to do so. If this doesn't suffice (and it never does, before long one beats down such people to keep them quiet, or one preempts them by arresting them and putting them behind barbed wire to ensure they won't spew their dangerous ideas to infect the rest of the population.

Of course you say, all that is ridiculous; those kinds of things can never happen here. Can I remind you that is what German Jews said about Hitler's preposterous ideas about a "final solution". Once one allows the first little lie, others flow quite easily, until you are deluged in a torrent of convenient untruths, overwhelming you with an impetus of their own. Today in our country feminists routinely shout down males who try to argue logically against their ideas, preferring to call them names like " sexist" and "reactionary" rather than reasonably debate the logic and value of their arguments. Such tendencies border on the fascistic. Whenever reason is shouted down, civility is breached, and raw, subjective emotion rules the roost. And we all know how dangerous raw emotion can be as a basis for public policy. Yet, as the authors poingnantly point out, this is exactly what is happening on our college campuses today.

Sexual harassment laws routinely enforce the logically ludicrous idea that it is the so-called victim who subjectively decides what was intended by a casual comment or action from an alleged harasser, giving the victim a self-interested loaded gun to shoot the reputed assailant with. How can anyone kkknow what is in anther heart or head? Yet in such cases it is the male who must beware, for he can be accused of anything and be left to 'prvie' it is untrue. What happened to the notion of due process of the law, or the presumption of innocence? Finally, proponents of affirmative action passionately refuse to even consider debating the idea that any systematic program of preferential treatment is by its very design a discriminatory policy, which is therefore patently illegal. Yet the courts refuse to face the issue. There is no one left to stand for the truth. Doing so has become too dangerous politically.

The frightening truth is that we really can lose our liberties; we're already taking the first fledgling steps toward a mindless conformity through the social institutionalization of political correctness and by encouraging and formalizing public intolerance for social nonconformists. Males have been so systematically disenfranchised by the spate of laws and regulations giving preferential treatment in employment, educational opportunities, and social legitimacy that they are now punished literally for the terrible crime of being born as biological males. We need to seriously consider the fact that our freedoms are being threatened even as you read this, and as in Hitler's Germany, it is all being done for one political faction's self-interested version of what constitutes the "betterment of society". Ready for the brave new world of political correctness and mandatory conformity? The outlines are spelled out in the frightening neo-fascist trends outlined here in this book.

I first came across this book at a large bookstore near a well-known university in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. (Hmm.) I immediately grabbed it and began to read out of personal interest. I was involved in a sham "judicial" process at the University of Maryland, College Park a couple of years ago. Specifically, it was a racially-charged and frightening harrassment case that was handled so poorly, I subsequently received a written statement from the presiding administrator admitting that the UMCP Department of Resident Life had done a terrible job of handling the situation. ...And I was a complainant, not a defendant! This is all relevant because I thought there were very few other individuals who had a story like mine. I thought these incidents of utter incompetence and university-sanctioned endangerment were limited only to UMCP administration. "Shadow University" suggested that such incidents are common to many campuses across the country; the authors' thoroughly-researched synopses of policies and incidents leave little doubt of that. I can personally attest that the steamroller mentality, alluded to by the authors in their descriptions of administrative zealotry, is very real. As a student, I felt very alone as I attempted to attain basic securities from an administration that was dealthly afraid to discipline minority students for fear of public appearance, retribution by Marcuse from beyond the grave, etc. I don't intend to be overly dramatic.. but my rights, as outlined in our government's most sacred documents, were undermined by ill-equipped administrators (at a middle-tier school) who felt that their own feelings should be enshrined in self-contradictory and selectively enforced policy. While I don't fully agree with the range of libertarian viewpoints put forth by Mr. Kors and Mr. Silverglate in "Shadow University," I certainly have seen the results when the basic ideals they discuss are trampled. This book is immensely valuable to me personally, and it is a valuable starting point for those who are entangled with a situation like mine. I wish I had found this book, and the resources to which it guides the attentive reader, before I graduated from UMCP and moved on to MIT (out of the pan and into the fire). As for the argument that "Shadow University" is little more than a collection of trumped-up isolated incidents... such an assertion is absurd. My experience tells me that the incidents which Kors and Silverglate discuss, and the far greater number of incidents that never wind up in a book, are indicative of an administrative culture that puts political and self-preservation instincts before the basic welfare and fair treatment of students. Of the many administrators with whom I dealt during my problematic times at UMCP, all but one exhibited this type of mindset. There is nothing isolated about the situation at all. Buy it, read it, remember it.

"Shadow University" is like a slap in the face. The authors present well articulated and documented anecdotes of the rampant Political Correctness that plagues America's universities.

Beginning with the "water buffalo" affair, the authors detail the complete lack of due process, the destruction of liberty, and the utter lack of respect for conservative or libertarian views by college administrators.

The last chapter of the book is titled, "Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant." That's exactly what this book serves to do. It throws light on the racism of the "multicult" movement that is systematically destorying higher education in America. I can not offer more praise for this book: story after story will make you enraged if you care about free speech and free thought. It's about time someone exposed the hypocrisy hiding at our campuses. Kors and Silvergate brilliantly do exactly that.

The first time I read this book I missed the controversy at theUniversity of Maryland. I went back to my copy and found the passagein question. Then I went on the college website and found that things are actually worse than depicted. (UMD has a real pearl on its site: the "Diversity Database.") In ten minutes of web surfing I learned that on August 22, 1990, UMD President William E. Kirwan approved a memo and resource handbook for use at UMD to "complement" the existing speech code at UMD. This unbelievable 48-page document outlaws, among other things: "jokes, whistling, leering, ogling, sexual looks, licking lips or teeth, holding or eating food provocatively, lewd gestures, use of the word baby, sweetie, honey, chicks, sexual language..." the list is endless. I must have missed the memo (found nowhere on the UMD site) where President Kirwan rescinds the speech code. Thank you Kors and Silvergate. Your book rocks. I recommend this book to anyone who is blind to the horrendous reality of the politically correct underworld that rules our universities. Be afraid, then work up the courage and fight back: stop donating your dough. END

This book is important and valuable for three main reasons:

1)It effectively refutes the claims that (a) "political correctness" does not exist--it is just a fictitious trend extrapolated from a few isolated incidents, and (b) that even if does exist, it is not very harmful and thus not comparable to McCarthyism. The authors provide numerous examples of people's careers, reputations, and lives being ruined, and argue that even more people are harmed because they are "chilled" by fear of being reprimanded.

(2) It traces the intellectual development of speech codes to the concept of "progressive intolerance" originally posited by Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse. Proponents of speech codes will claim that they merely want to protect people from slurs or egregious ad hominem attacks--thereby stacking the cards in their favor with the use of extreme examples that are difficult to defend. The authors show, however, that such codes are almost inevitably manipulated by leftists to silence criticism, e.g. by equating objections to affirmative action with white supremacy. This, the authors demonstrate, was Marcuse's explicit intention. The authors show how a double standard is applied, thus denying equal protection to groups identified as "regressive"--both white and black conservatives, evangelical Christians, Catholics, opponents of affirmative action, etc.

(3) This book cannot be dismissed as the product of cranky reactionaries. The authors include several examples of abuse to which the "multicultural" left should be sympathetic. They show how speech codes and anti-harassment policies can easily be turned against "progressives" and their causes.

This book is also a primer on free speech, individual liberty under the Constitution, academic freedom, and due process to boot. Narrative and analysis are blended with skill. Some of the examples and quotes are truly frightening. This is perhaps one of the most important books of the decade, and is the antidote to the sophistry of the likes of Stanley Fish, Catharine MacKinnon, Derrick Bell, and Marcuse.

I devoured this book in two marathon sittings. As I attempt to write this review (the book left me "speechless"), phrases like well researched, superbly organized, and spot-on spring to mind. Specifically, I found the discussion of Herbert Marcuse eye-opening and for the first time, I understood the motivations of many who seek to restrict speech on campus. Similarly, although I initially found the authors' discussion of due process tedious and lengthy, I now realize the amount of detail they provided was necessary *and* appropriate. Finally, I was cheered by the authors' final chapter indicating common sense is starting to creep back onto campus.

As an aside, after finishing the book, I regretted never taking a class with Professor Kors.