The Shadow University

by Alan Charles Kors and HARVEY A SILVERGLATE

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060977728
• ISBN13: 9780060977726
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Shocking eye-opener

"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.

Free Speech for All!

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.

Terrific Exploration Of Dark Side Of Political Correctness

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 a

Thoroughly researched, definitive treatment of the subject

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 co

A masterpiece! Accurate, in-depth, and passionate.

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.