This eye-opening and deeply learned exposé of the violations of individual rights on campuses is now more than 10 years old. Fortunately, the authors created a foundation (FIRE: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to advance the cause of free speech and individual rights on the nation's campuses. A visit to the FIRE website reveals that the kinds of problems that prompted "The Shadow University" still plague our institutions of higher education. Although the book's emphasis is on free speech, both it and FIRE demonstrate how freedom of conscience and religion, the right to due process, and inalienable rights of free expression are linked together.
Despite its age, "The Shadow University" still remains an excellent place to begin understanding these issues. Not only does the book detail the "celebrated causes" of its moment in time, which now in 2012 seem a little dated (especially as it rests so much on the water buffalo case at Penn, now coming on 20 years old). It also provides a thorough history of the underlying legal issues that support constitutional rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and due process protections. While Kors and Silverglate (an educator and a lawyer) provide eloquent and ringing defenses of basic human rights and freedoms, they are also quite savvy about how institutions work--and know that such endorsements, however inspiring (and they are), will not change how institutions work without political pressure.
At one point, they write that the "high-handedness demonstrated by private college administrators often betrays an exaggerated sense of legal invulnerability," a claim that is clearly false. Their own analysis shows, rather, that college administrators are slaves to lawyers and trustees preoccupied with risk management and protecting their schools' reputations: "The primary goal of modern academic administrators is to buy peace during their tenure and to preserve the appearance of competence on their watch...." Given this reality, those who care about individual rights on campus must borrow a page from their opponents (those willing to trample rights in order to achieve certain political goals) and make the lives of institutions very uncomfortable when they abridge essential individual rights. "The Shadow University" and FIRE do just this--and have been successful at publicizing violations.
Those who would ignore individual rights, however, proceed apace. Witness the "Dear Colleague" letter of April, 2011, in which the Office of Civil Rights required all institutions of higher learning to reduce their standard for evidence for adjudicating sexual harassment claims (including rape) to a mere preponderance of the evidence. FIRE has protested this letter vigorously, but colleges and universities are in the process of rearranging their grievance procedures and guidelines to comply with this outrageous demand for fear of losing federal funding, which would be a devastating outcome for any school.
Such escalation of the infringement of due process and individual rights makes me long for a revised version or new edition of "The Shadow University." These are problems about which no freedom-loving person can afford to feel complacent. Students and faculty in today's universities are still deeply confused about the reach and importance of freedom of speech, often imagining that one person's right not to be offended trumps another person's right to think and speak freely. It would be good to have a new version of "The Shadow University" that reflects the particular issues we face in the twenty-first century (e.g., changing definitions of sex and gender, social media, in addition to the steady erosion of respect for personal integrity that is represented in the "Dear Colleague" letter). Such a new edition could serve as a rallying cry today in the way that this classic study did for students and faculty of the 90s.
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