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

by Alan Charles Kors, HARVEY A SILVERGLATE, Press The Free

Universities once believed themselves to be sacred enclaves, where students and professors could debate the issues of the day and arrive at a better understanding of the human condition. Today, sadly, this ideal of the university is being quietly betrayed from within. Universities still set themselves apart from American society, but now they do so by enforcing their own politically correct worldview through censorship, double standards and a judicial system without due process. Faculty and students who threaten the prevailing norms may be forced to undergo "thought reform."In a surreptitious about-face, universities have become the enemy of a free society, and the time has come to hold these institutions to account.

The Shadow University is a stinging indictment of the covert system of justice on college campuses, exposing the widespread reliance of n kangaroo courts and arbitrary punishment to coerce students and faculty into conformity. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, staunch civil libertarians and active defenders of free inquiry on campus, lay bare the totalitarian mindset that undergirds speech codes, conduct codes, and "campus life" bureaucracies, through which a cadre of deans and counselors indoctrinate students and faculty in an ideology that favors group rights over individual rights, sacrificing free speech and academic freedom to spare the sensitivities of currently favored groups.

From Maine to California, at public and private universities alike, liberty and fairness are the first casualties as teachers and students find themselves in the dock, presumed guilty until proven innocent and often forbidden to cross-examine their accusers. Kors and Silverglate introduce us to many of those who have firsthand experience of The Shadow University, including:


The student at the center of the 1993 "Water Buffalo" case at the University of Pennsylvania who was brought up on charges of racial harassment after calling a group of rowdy students "water buffalo" -- even though the terms has no racial connotations.
The Catholic residence adviser who was fired for refusing, on the grounds of religious conscience, to wear a symbol of lesbian and gay causes
The professor who was investigated for sexual harassment when he disagreed with campus feminists about curriculum issues
The student who was punished for laughing at a statement deemed offensive to others and who was ordered to undergo "sensitivity training" as a result.
The Shadow University unmasks a chilling reality for parent who entrust their sons and daughters to the authority of such institutions, for thinking people who recognize that vigorous debate is the only sure path to truth, and for all Americans who realize that when even one citizen is deprived of liberty, we are all diminished.

Genres: Politics, Education, Nonfiction, History, Cultural, Law, Academia

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Kors graduated A.B. summa cum laude at Princeton University in 1964, and received his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in European history at Harvard University.
Kors has written on the history of skeptical, atheistic, and materialist thought in 17th and 18th-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002.
Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey A. Silverglate – and served from 2000 to 2006 as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Reviews

[Patrick Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

2021-09-13 - starting again into this very unsettling, but insightful book. The effects that Marcuse's writing has wrought are so disturbing and pervasive as to be scary. Several of his acolytes and their work are well described. The detail, and precision can be difficult. But then Kors brings the net effect back to simple clarity. Beautiful. I'm building more momentum on this now...

2021-03-10 - I started this a couple weeks ago and paused a few days ago. The book is pretty heavy - some parts are easy to read and very compelling, while other parts (so far) are quite detailed, philosophical, legal or historical, and I have a tough time digesting. But all are important.

The opening intro chapter was amazing and it alone was worth the price of the book. What a harrowing, sad, but uplifting story of the "water buffalo incident" at UPenn.

The next chapter on the legal aspects and current (up to the book's publication -1998) of freedom of speech, was very revealing, very carefully done - but made me need to rest.

I ploughed on with the next chapter on Herbert Marcuse... and then needed a break, for sure. I will return, since the effects of Marcuse's perverted philosophy has wrecked more than enough havoc in academia and beyond that the need to try to grasp the effects of his work is necessary, for sure.

[Sean Rosenthal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Quotes:

"Freedom dies in the heart and will before it dies in the law."

-Alan Kors & Harvey Silverglate, the Shadow University


"Academic notions and programs of diversity and multiculturalism are marked, almost everywhere, by dogmatic and partisan definitions or models...A white male student who lost a father in Vietnam is deemed strong enough by racial definition to hear a professor call his late father a 'baby killer,' whereas a woman or black must be protected from the punch line of a joke."

-Alan Kors & Harvey Silverglate, the Shadow University

[Brett Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book, but...

Unexpected turns and shocking realizations of what a fundamentalist sector of America has implemented makes this book read like a chilling spy novel. The reader hesitates to turn each page, fearful but driven to see just what happens next. The roots of modern, institutionalized hypocrisy hang in a harsh light from the very beginning of chapter one and the Water Buffalo Affair at the University Of Pennsylvania. Quotes of university administrators and their staggering leaps in the illogical, cloaked in language that could only be from another world peppers speech, writings and vindictive suppression created by those directing The New Left and their movements at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan.

Old meanings of classical liberal education have been evacuated by totalitarian regimes revealed as virtually controlling every university in America and determined to crush equal rights in favor of protecting their own dogma of “selected rights” like some fanatic religion. The New Left makes no bones about their despotic intent as chapter four and Marcuse's Revenge shows.

As a staff member of a Big Ten university I witnessed the same duplicity, double standards and mental acrobatics committed to protect new orthodoxies as those exposed in this book - and observed nearly every day. Such lack of principle and lifting the blindfold of Lady Justice is quite acceptable as it perpetually satisfies a vendetta. Apparently the Fundamentalist Left is as willing to commit their sins as any adulterous Jimmy Swaggart or fraudulent Jim and Tammy Fae Baker on the Right because their own personal ends justify any means. And this from those very people who embraced free speech and other Constitutional guarantees, until they had the power to discard them, suppressing other views, declaring the Constitution void. Precisely the type of wicked preferential treatment afforded to the Klan in ugly years past is now embraced by those who protested such ignorance and vulgarity.

Read this book, but be prepared to see obfuscating language of new movements for the violent assaults they are.

[Skylar Burris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides a detailed look at the development of speech codes, the restrictions on academic freedom, and the firing or suspension of professors and the harsh discipline of students for saying politically incorrect things in the late 1980s and 1990s. It questions the justice of university disciplinary systems and describes a culture of increasing tyranny on American campuses. Published in 1998, it’s now out of date, but I’ve only now gotten around to reading it. (At least I don’t recall reading it before. I discovered an autographed copy in my library and don't recall when or why I met one of the authors.) I graduated college in December of 1996, and so I remember hearing reports on some of the incidents described in this book; my own school did not seem as deeply plagued by the problems outlined here, though there was enough of an emphasis on political correctness to be annoying if not tyrannical. This book could likely serve to be updated, given that the trend toward censoring speech, driving for conformity of thought, and disciplining students and professors for not towing the line has only grown stronger. But reading the book now did serve as a reminder that we began down this road two decades ago. The text was a little too detailed, and the writing is not particularly engrossing stylistically, so it was not an easy read, and I admit to some amount of skimming.

[Adam Balshan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing evident is the book's non-partisan nature. In the vastly polemicized culture of today, this political work rests firmly in the center of the traditional left-right continuum, but near the good guys' end of the libertarian-authoritarian continuum.

Chapter 2 went into unnecessarily long detail about the history of free speech cases in America, trailing away from the purpose of the book; a summary would have been sufficient. The basics were crucial however, as later chapters lay out case after case of the wretched state of liberty on our campuses.
Overall, an essential compilation of case studies. Only 4 stars due to little to no organization whatsoever of accounts. Little summarization, logical order or segueing from one story to another.

After reading the abundant evidence in this book, coupled with infringements of Constitutional rights elsewhere in society, I can no longer call the USA a free country.

[Jon]

This book makes me really happy to be out of the academic world. If it's an accurate depiction of college life in the US today, I for one am not going to blame the kids for choosing binge drinking and hook-up culture....Crucially, the authors trace the rise of political correctness on campus to two factors: the influence of 60s-era Marxist thinkers, most notably Herbert Marcuse, and the extremist views of identity-politics-oriented campus groups. The result is a stifling environment where dissent is taboo, where paranoia reigns. And I thought frat boys and ROTC were a pain....

[Quinndara · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an important subject and one the author covers in detail. However, his writing--sentences that never seemed to end--made getting the information something of a chore. Daily, in the news, I see evidence of his concerns: the betrayal of freedom of speech and liberty on college campuses across America.

[Timothy Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being written in 1998, this has, of course, been a little outdated, but I believe the precepts can still apply. There is a need, in both general society but especially on college/university campuses, to allow for discourse and discussion, and even unpopular opinion, in our lives and student's lives. As it says in the text, "A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it is lost." And that applies especially on campuses where free discussion and debate and discourse are hallmarks of expanding understanding and integrating the viewpoint of others.

[Erin the Avid Reader ⚜BFF's with the Cheshire Cat⚜ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very dull book on a highly important subject matter that’s plagued the US for decades. A shame, it had s great opening. Was just way too dry and pompous as it continued.

[Dr G · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book. Several reviewers have complained that it is heavy going and too academic. Certainly, it is not an easy book to slip through. However, I would suggest that the point of the book's theme is so significant that the perils of scrupulous substantiation and explanation are worth the consequences.

I do have a minor quibble (well, not really; just a puzzlement): The book appears to have been printed by some sort of photocopying technology. This means, first, that the print is sometimes a little fuzzy on the page, with letters often lacking uniform blackness, or even having small blank sections. Secondly, very strangely, Page 1 was printed on the left-hand page; I don't think I have ever had another book where that occurred.

Essentially, the book examines the way universities throughout the US have sought to "protect" specific demographics on their campuses from "offence" at written or spoken comments, including anything from explicitly hostile to lacking in respect. On the face of it, there is some justification for protecting members of these demographics, given that they have suffered from unequal or discriminatory treatment in the past.

There has been a general spreading of campus regulations about these matters such that virtually all campuses are now subject to similar regulations and policing structures. One is tempted to think that much of this trend has derived from a determination never to be accused of racism or sexism or a few other naughty -isms.

One of the very significant problems with this development has been that the university bureaucracies have frequently ignored the sorts of rights and processes that the constitution and two hundred years of legal decision-making have evolved for the protection of the population at large. The bureaucracies have blithely taken the roles of policeman, judge and jury, with no accountability to any principle or authority. The result has been that members of the "protected" demographics have been encouraged to report what they see as transgressions, and the accused parties have very few of the rights to defend themselves that they would have in the courts. Several instances are cited of the "offensive" speech being misunderstood so that the "culprit" was, simply, wrongly accused.

It is an interesting element of this alarming trend that, while Blacks have been protected, Jewish people have often not been.

Kors and Silverglate have provided very thorough detail to support their arguments and thus have probably reduced the readability of the work, while strengthening its arguments. Nevertheless, the text is cogent and readable. Many of their comments bear quoting at length:

“In a nation whose future depends upon an education and freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power. Our institutions of higher education greet freshmen not as individuals on the threshold of adulthood, but as embodiments of group identity, largely defined in terms of blood and history, who are to be infantilized at every turn. In a nation whose sole depends upon the values of individual rights and responsibilities, and upon equal justice under law, our students are being educated in so-called group rights and responsibilities, and in double standards to redress partisan definitions of historical wrongs.”
“The ‘60s may be long past for most Americans, with various and diverse legacies left behind, but strangely enough, the best aspects of that decade’s idealistic agenda have died on our campuses – free speech, equality of rights, respect for private conscience and individuation, and a sense of undergraduate liberties and adult responsibilities. What remain of the ‘60s on our campuses are its worst sides: intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy, the self-appointed power of self-designated ‘progressives’ to set everyone else’s moral agenda, and, saddest of all, the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their theological vision and desire.”
“it seems surprising, at first glance, that the most potent and far-ranging assault on the First Amendment’s central principle – content neutrality – has come not from politicians protecting power or reputations, nor from government agencies protecting their notions of decency or security, but, rather from America’s universities, where academic freedom has been thought to require more liberty and tolerance than in the ‘real world’, not less. More startling yet, this assault comes above all from the political and cultural Left, which, since World War I, has been the prime beneficiary of the move toward near-absolute constitutional protection for speech. Indeed, the legal doctrine of free speech has focused crucially on the rights of revolutionaries, counterculturalists, anti-war protesters, visionaries, prophets of doom, progressives, and, generally, dissidents from the dominant Western capitalist system. How is it, then, that today’s most vocal critics of the First Amendment are in the academy and on the Left, the heirs, in fact, of the generation that, thirty-five years ago, gave us the Free Speech movement?”
“Human history teaches that those who wield power rarely see their own abuse of it. This failing pervades the entire ideological, political, cultural, and historical spectrum. It is not an issue of left and right, but of human ethical incapacity.” /….Those who exercise power, in any domain, tend to compare their actual power to their ultimate goals, usually concluding from this that they barely have any power at all, and, certainly, they are not abusing what little they have. Further, most of us sadly develop the capacity to treat the suffering, oppression, or legal inequality of individuals or groups whom we see as obstacles to our own goals or visions – or even with whom we merely feel little affinity – as abstractions or exaggerations without concrete human immediacy.”
“What an astonishing expectation (and power) to give to students: the belief that, if they belong to a protected category, they have a right to four years of never being offended. What an extraordinary power to give to administrators and tribunals: the prerogative to punish the free speech and expression of people to whom they choose to assign the stains and guilt of historical oppression, while being free, themselves, to use whatever rhetoric they wish against the bearers of such stains.”
“We all should have learned from witchcraft trials, courts of Star Chamber, and various inquisitions that justice suffers under tribunals with special moral missions. Such tribunal is, established to deal with alleged offences so awful that regular procedures are inadequate to resolve them, receive a message that invites overzealous persecution: They have a transcendent duty to redress a singular evil. At universities, one begins with flawed procedures and goes downhill from there.”

[Bennett Seacrist]

I started reading this a few years ago and just started reading it again. It's a pretty shocking book about just how universities, which claim to promote individual thinking, diversity, etc. are stifling the speech and ideas of those who disagree with the speech and ideas of said universities.

[Will]

Socio-political climate of American universities.

[Lidiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and thought-provoking.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring. Second Semester WBIS. Aka for School. Meh...

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

Subtitle: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. This book is © 1998, seventeen years ago as I type. (Yes, it took a very long time to get to the top of the to-be-read pile. Sue me.)

One author, Alan Charles Kors, is a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania; the other, Harvey Silverglate, is a Massachusetts lawyer. After this book came out, they founded FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, still going strong.

The book starts out with a particularly egregious example: 1993's persecution of Eden Jacobowitz, a student who yelled "Shut up, you water buffalo" out of his UPenn dorm window to a group of boisterous students below. Unfortunately for Eden, the targets of this shouted demand were mostly black females, who complained. Penn administrators demanded a disproportionate and unjust punishment. But unlike most students, Eden fought back. (Prof Kors was his advocate, to his good fortune.) Eventually, it became a national cause célèbre and Penn backed down.

Eden's case had a happy conclusion, but the drawn-out battle, wasteful, draining, and contentious as it was, was its own punishment. And, as Kors and Silverlate show, it was hardly an outlier.

One might expect universities, of all places, to be champions of free and unfettered discussion, due process for accused misbehavior, and tolerance for oddball, unpopular views. But, as Kors and Silverglate show with sometimes mind-numbing recitations of case after case, exactly the opposite is true. Mostly drawing from the 1980s and 1990s, they detail arbitrary penalties and unfair procedures, mostly aimed at the unfortunate minorities deemed to be politically incorrect. They are predictably and justifiably outraged.

The roots of this behavior, the book argues, lie in the 1960s, where are generation of deep thinkers learned Herbert Marcuse's Marxist philosophy, with special attention to his theory of repressive tolerance: the notion that fair treatment of all ideas only benefits capitalistic domination of the masses. Hence, some ideas should be "more equal than others", and there's nothing wrong with people holding "correct" views suppressing rival opinions.

Now, to be fair, only a small (but very vocal) fraction of today's university personnel are true Marcusean social justice warriors. But the strident oft find allies with the spineless. In this case, go-along-to-get-along administrators whose primary interest is in keeping controversy and contention (with its attendant bad publicity) to a minimum.

The results, over and over, are episodes that seem like they could spring from a novel co-written by Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Ayn Rand: secretive and power-drunk villains deploy their full arbitrary powers against (at best) minor infractions and offenses. As in Eden's case, the good guys usually prevail, but only after excruciating legal procedures and publicity.

There are a lot of New Hampshire roots in the book, going back to 1942's Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, based on an incident that happened just up the street in Rochester, which generated the regrettable "fighting words" limitation on First Amendment rights. There was also Wooley v. Maynard, the irony-inspired case of the free thinker who got in trouble for taping over the "Live Free or Die" motto on his license plates.

New Hampshire's university system is also (sadly) well-represented here, going back to the 1950s, the state's efforts to hassle then-professor Paul Sweezy about his (acknowledged) Marxist views and associates is discussed. In more modern times, there was UNH's efforts to discipline Professor J. Donald Silva for allegedly creating a “hostile and offensive environment” in his classroom with his (um) colorful analogies and examples. Up north at Plymouth State, Leroy Young, a graphic design professor was summarily canned after allegations of sexual harassment of his students. (I'm not sure how Young's suit against Plymouth and USNH turned out.)

[Well after the book came out, UNH showed that it hadn't learned much about free expression by evicting a student who posted a satirical flier in his dorm's elevator. UNH continues to have a red light rating from FIRE for its unconsitutionally overbroad policy on "sexual harassment".]

So: while you might expect a 17-year-old book on then-current events to be dated, it turns out (regrettably) not to be at all. The mentalities and procedures it describes are still in vogue in American higher ed, as any look at recent headlines shows. (See, for example: here; here; here, all easily-found stories from the past few weeks.) Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, or as President Eisenhower [never actually] said: things are more like they are today than they've ever been before.

A relatively new wrinkle is the Obama Administration's aggressive (and probably unconstitutional, but what's new) push to force schools and colleges to cut back on due process and free speech via an expansive interpretation of its authority granted by anti-discrimination statutes, like the famous Title IX. This book doesn't cover that, obviously, but it's easy to see how it could be the source for Volume II.

[RiyriaReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dryly written account of an important and interesting topic. The way information is presented is just as important as the information itself if your goal is to make people pay attention and absorb it.

[Jonathan]

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