The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (Hardcover)

~ (Author), (Author) "On the night of January 13, 1993, Eden Jacobowitz, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, had been writing a paper for an English class..." (more)
Key Phrases: water buffalo affair, water buffalo case, official group identity, Supreme Court, United States, Pioneer Fund (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At first glance, this title is just another entry in the roster of books opposed to political correctness at American universities, yet it's surprisingly good--certainly the best of its type since Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education appeared in 1991. Kors and Silverglate are hard-core civil libertarians turned off by the "hidden, systematic assault upon liberty, individualism, dignity, due process, and equality before the law" that they describe as rampant on campuses. Theirs is not so much a brief against academic multiculturalism, but an eye-opening narrative about how the modern university "hands students a moral agenda upon arrival, subjects them to mandatory political reeducation, sends them to sensitivity training, submerges their individuality in official group identity, intrudes upon private conscience, treats them with scandalous inequality, and, when it chooses, suspends or expels them." Through well-told stories and anecdotes (including an excellent chapter-long sketch of the University of Pennsylvania's semi-famous "water buffalo" incident), Kors and Silverglate make their case and make it well. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

The authors of this broadside, both civil libertarians, regard campus speech codes against racist, sexist or homophobic language, as well as multicultural "diversity education" programs, as coercive "academic thought reform." Political correctness at U.S. colleges and universities, they maintain, has led to the emergence of a "shadow university" as administrators, dormitory advisers and officers of student life treat students not as individuals, but as embodiments of abstract groups. Traversing a minefield of thorny issues with passionate conviction, Kors, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, and Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney, charge that the "political and cultural left" is today the worst abuser of the principles of open, equal free speech. They argue that a double standard prevails, whereby self-appointed progressives censor voices deemed offensive to women, feminists, gays, ethnic or racial minorities, while these same "progressives" condone equally offensive speech directed against conservatives, religious Christians and others. What distinguishes this outspoken contribution to a contentious national debate already clotted with combatants is the authors' scathing campus-by-campus tour, documenting what they see as repressive speech codes, sweeping notions of sexual harassment and arbitrary disciplinary hearings against students and faculty that lack due process protection. The authors' well-nigh absolutist defense of robust free speech?even when its content is viciously racist or otherwise hateful?guarantees that their brief will be controversial.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (October 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684853213
• ISBN-13: 978-0684853215
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #616,216 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For whom is it written? Ask yourself., April 29, 2000

By	Philip Greenspun (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

62 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece! Accurate, in-depth, and passionate., September 25, 1998

By A Customer

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.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly researched, definitive treatment of the subject, March 1, 2000

By	Michael Bilow (Providence, RI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses (Paperback)

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.