|
|
Praise for THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY:As disinfectants, the authors realize they don't come close to scrubbing clean the combustible scrap heap of the debate over 'political correctness' and its ramifications. But they try. Their main contention -- that universities have sinister double infrastructures that repress free speech and should be exposed -- is full of fiery rhetoric and outrage. And, it should be noted, their argument, though contentious, is not without merit. What they add, in effect, are two lines of analysis -- strict legal history of cases and precedents throughout the past century, and a narrative account of incidents in the past decade or so from across the country. The legal rendering is straightforward, and the stories are hard to argue with. Presented in a clear light, the incidents are outrageous enough without the authors needing to add their emphasis. The secretive committee meetings, the favoritism, the backstabbing and the sanctimoniousness are all just there, especially in the water buffalo case.-- The Forward, "Speech Battles Rattle Ivory Towers, 5 Years After 'Water Buffalo' Flap," by Beth Pinsker, October 16, 1998 Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania,
and Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer, deliver the unexpected....
Students and faculty members with the temerity to challenge the new orthodoxy
are not dealt with kindly.... Most usefully, Kors and Silverglate provide an
unsparing picture of how campus authorities settle these cases.... To their
credit, Kors and Silverglate are old-fashioned civil libertarians who support
everyone's right to sound off.... The abuses they describe need fixing, and this
cogent book should help. An eye-opening and well-documented exposé about what could happen to your
children when they are sent to even the best colleges in the country. Kors and
Silverglate demonstrate that when these colleges, purportedly devoted to liberal
education, treat students in disciplinary proceedings, they make the notorious
Star Chamber seem liberal in comparison. A wake-up call for parents, students,
and professors alike. A massive, irresistible manifesto for student rights. Kors and Silverglate
show how the cultural left's assault on individual liberties is effectively
transforming the academy into 'an island of oppression in a sea of freedom.'
Convincingly argued, authoritatively documented in moving human detail, it is a
momentous achievement. Unlike most critics of political correctness, Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A.
Silverglate have no political agenda of their own to advance, except the
preservation of liberty. They take seriously the obligation to defend the rights
of all individuals, adversaries as well as friends. The Shadow University is a
scrupulously fair, painstakingly documented account of repression on America's
campuses, where students and faculty members are regularly denied fundamental
rights of speech, conscience, and due process. I never knew it was quite this
bad. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate tell a chilling tale of
university administrators turned Grand Inquisitors, of students and faculty
stripped of their basic due process rights, of a freshman orientation system
intended to indoctrinate and intimidate. They expose higher education's
underbelly: the assault on liberty and true academic freedom (waged in the name
of political correctness and group rights) that is occurring at so many of our
nation's colleges and universities. Kors and Silverglate document precisely how
inhospitable campuses are today to the pursuit of knowledge and the debate of
ideas. Many of America's colleges and universities, including the most prestigious,
have largely abandoned a respect for free speech, due process, honesty from on
high, and the very concept of intellectual freedom. In The Shadow University,
Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate have created the most far-ranging
and in-depth report on the appalling state of American higher education, and
their vivid, specific stories should shame those in charge of shaping the minds
and spirits of the next generation.
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." So states the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and the cornerstone to the Bill of Rights. The courts have long extended the injunction on Congress to all governments throughout the land. Why, then, have universities recently implemented speech and conduct codes abridging students' freedom of speech? This is the central question of Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate's The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. Carefully researched, laden with examples and clearly written, The Shadow University is a thundering statement for the freedom of speech. It is also a booming denouncement of the academy's overt rejection of that freedom. Kors and Silverglate start from a specific example, the infamous "water buffalo" affair at the University of Pennsylvania (for a brief summary, please read "Crimes of the Mind?" on pages 12-13 of this issue). Kors, a history professor at Penn, served as advisor to the student, Eden Jacobowitz. With several examples as poignant as the Jacobowitz case, Kors and Silverglate detail what they call an assault on liberty on college campuses. "Universities have become the enemy of a free society," they write, "and it is time for the citizens of that society to recognize this scandal of enormous proportions and to hold these institutions to account." It is an assault they find especially troubling because, of all places, universities should by virtue of their educational missions have the most open, not the most limited, inquiry. Kors and Silverglate examine the fabric of academic freedom and find it in tatters. They also find that academic freedom has rarely been a blanket freedom; instead, it has usually been a restricted one. Twenty years ago, the authors observed, Princeton University prohibited the Labor party from distributing leaflets on campus; today, Harvard keeps televangelist interviewers off campus. "The music may change," Kors and Silverglate write, "but the melody of selective academic freedom lingers on." The authors' understanding that freedom of speech belongs to no one party, ideology or religion sets their book apart from conservative critiques of the academy. Granted, the objects of their moral outrage are usually administrators enslaved to the multiculturalist mindset, but it is not their worldview but their tactics to which the authors object. The multiculturalists are those who are responsible for curtailing freedom now. Had this book been written earlier, the authors would have set themselves in moral opposition to the McCarthyists. "Our goal is not to fabricate and glorify a past that never was," they write, "but to call the present to account." Having come of age in the 1960s, the authors are especially shocked that their peers are behind the current muzzling of speech on campus. "How is it," they ask, "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?" The short answer to their question is the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who gained popularity during the 1960s demonstrations. Marcuse wrote of an alternative liberty, placing libertarian ideas of liberty and tolerance on end. He spoke of a "liberating tolerance" that required "intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left." The intolerance would apply to words and deeds; Marcuse wanted "the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc." This, of course, required "apparently undemocratic means." This Marcusean intolerance spawned the current betrayal of liberty. Part of that intolerance requires an intolerance of those who defend free speech (and they rarely do so until a controversial speaker comes along, because only then is the principle of free speech ever questioned). As Kors and Silverglate write,
"No one who defends trial by jury over popular justice in a murder trial is called a defender of murder; such a person is seen by all, as a defender of trial by jury. The defender of free speech, however, is forever being told, on American campuses, that he or she is seeking, specifically, to make the campus safe for "racism," "sexism," or "homophobia.""There is also a view that free speech itself is racist, sexist, the whole litany. This view is surely driving speech codes. The authors quote Barbara White, a professor of women's studies at University of New Hampshire, who wrote to several groups at the university that "strict construction of the First Amendment is just another yoke around our necks." There is also another view, less ideological in its worldview but just as despicable in its application. That is the job-preserving mentality of administrators. Their zealotry is in careerism; they are the least likely, as Kors and Silverglate write, to "sacrifice their careers" for principles. "Self-serving spinelessness, not ideology, is what led to the current catastrophe in our universities," they write. The reason why conservatives, libertarians and Christians tend to be the least served by campus speech codes and illiberal policies is because, as Kors and Silverglate write, "Republicans, moderates, evangelicals, assimilationist blacks or Hispanics, and devout Catholics don't occupy buildings or cause disruptions that will bring the media to campus. The improbable cry "the Lutherans are really mad" will not send administrators into panic. ... Individualists do not frighten administrators. The self-appointed militants who claim to speak on behalf of all blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, and feminist women do frighten them."There are ways to lead the academy out of the Marcusean bog, the authors assert. Lawsuits have been one way, but each suit serves only to drag a single institution kicking and screaming towards the Constitution. The best way is to shame abusive universities into reform, as the authors write, "loudly and publicly, raising the stakes for careerists or ideologues." It requires applying Justice Louis D. Brandeis' insight that "sunlight is the most powerful of all disinfectants." It will take courageous students, faculty, parents and even administrators. Concluding with Penn, the site of some of the worst free-speech abuses in recent American history, the authors detail how "sunlight" worked. It culminated in 1995, when the new president of Penn, Judith Rodin, was installed. She sent a letter to Penn parents and alumni with the boast that, "Today at Penn, the content of student speech is no longer a basis for disciplinary action." Kors and Silverglate note the "gracious integrity" of Rodin's use of the phrase "no longer." Jon Sanders (jsanders@popeinstitute.org) is editor of Clarion, a free monthly magazine on higher education published by the Pope Center for Higher Education Reform in Research Triangle Park, NC, a program of the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, NC. This review was published in the November 1998 issue of Clarion.
The only limitation I can recall was time. I had the acute sense that this freedom was vastly greater than what you'd find in the so-called Real World. And so I couldn't help feeling that I'd better take advantage of all this freedom, because once I graduated I might not be able to think and speak so freely. Let us jump forward to January 13, l993. Eden Jacobowitz is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. As he's writing an English paper, some female students start singing outside his window. He calls down to them to be quiet. They don't hush in the slightest. "Shut up, you water buffalo!" he shouts. The women sing about going to a party. "If you want a party, there's a zoo a mile from here," Jacobowitz shoots back. It turns out that the women are black. They complain to the university. And although Jacobowitz had no knowledge these women were black and "water buffalo" is not widely regarded as an invective favored by racists, Penn decided to prosecute Jacobowitz for violating its policy on racial harassment. Jacobowitz enlisted the help of Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at Penn --- and now the co-author of this book. And he managed to endure an investigation and prosecution that sounds more like Stalinist Russia than America. The chronology of the "water buffalo" incident is worth the price of the book. It reads briskly --- indeed, it's almost an outline for a movie (OK, a TV movie) that would expose Political Correctness for the disaster it is. And this incident isn't, as Kors and co-author Harvey Silverglate point out, isolated in any way. On another campus, a student laughs at an "inappropriate" remark and is sentenced to "sensitivity" training. A professor disagrees with a feminist curriculum; he's investigated for expressing his opinion. And a Catholic residence adviser gets fired for declining to wear a gay/lesbian symbol. In a chapter called "Marcuse's Revenge," Kors and Silverglate go beyond chronicling these absurd inquisitions to ask: How did this happen? What they find will be extremely upsetting to old-line liberals like me. PC started, they say, with progressives --- the political and cultural Left is to blame. And the genesis is an essay by Herbert Marcuse, whose name has been almost forgotten in the last 25 years. In the 1960s, Marcuse wrote about "repressive tolerance." If anything can be said, he wrote, then ideas might appear to be neutral. Not so. Broad free speech, for Marcuse, actually favors the government, the rich and the powerful; the sheer volume of all those ideas neutralizes the ability of the poor and radical to make important distinctions and act on them. Freedom is thus a kind of drug. So how do you achieve true freedom? First, by removing ideas that cripple the disenfranchised. This, he said, would create a superior, more authentic tolerance. These ideas have gained almost no supporters in the Real World. They have, somehow, become part of the very fabric of university life in America. The odds that this will become a college textbook are slight. Better get a copy of The Shadow University now --- before it becomes the next Tropic of Cancer or Lady Chatterly's Lover. -- Jesse Kornbluth, Editorial Drector, America Online. Review copyright America Online. Used by permission.
Comments from reviews of THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY:from Publishers Weekly, 9/7/98:"...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." from the Washington Post Education Review 7/26/98: from ALA Booklist, 9/1/98 (a *starred* review): from Kirkus Reviews, 9/1/98: from Amazon.com, John J. Miller: |