Mark Lusk
International Programs
UM-Missoula
This book will certainly explain why some professors have been concerned about free speech and fair play on university campuses. For faculty who haven't noticed the steady erosion of liberty at America's universities, this volume is a good prescription.
Alan Kors, a professor of history at Penn, and Harvey Silverglate, a Cambridge attorney, have summarized a series of trends that reveal a university system sliding toward conformity and "Newspeak." Several previous books by conservative authors have documented the erosion of the curriculum, the loss of the western canon, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the trend in the humanities toward post-modern nihilism. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, one of the better known, is an erudite critique of the typical college curriculum and a powerful attack on the radicalization of the idea of equality, but the book is replete with "cheap shots" and is condescending in tone. Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals similarly assaulted the politically correct curriculum and the former radicals who he believes to have invented it.
In contrast to Bloom and Kimball, the authors of The Shadow University are well known liberals. Their alarm is not so much over the loss of the western canon or the political fashions of the day in the humanities, but over the erosion of free speech spearheaded by faculty and administrators dead set on pursuing a political agenda using the university as the medium.
The authors begin the book with a thorough legal introduction to free speech and academic freedom in a democratic society. They review case law and principles in language that is accessible to non-lawyers. Then, chapter by chapter, they show how these two principles have been gradually undermined by campus speech codes, censorship, group rights, double standards, and suspension of due process.
What the authors object to the most is not the politicization of the campus, but the narrowing scope of the dialogue. They argue that arbitrary disciplinary proceedings, censorship of conservative speech, and ideological indoctrination all underpin an Orwellian shift toward a single point of view on the typical campus--one that is multicultural, "sensitive," liberal, secular, feminist, "diverse," and politically correct. The authors deplore the infantilization of students disguised as sensitivity training and attack the paternalism that presumes to impose a particular set of values on students. An issue that particularly raises their temperature is the limiting of so-called "offensive speech," commonly defined as anything a listener may find offensive. In contrast is their civil libertarian perspective that a key reason for protecting speech in general is to protect unpopular speech in particular. They also argue that campus speech codes use a double standard in which speech that is deemed by the listener to be Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic, discriminatory, or ethnocentric is off limits, yet speech by conservatives, Christians, libertarians, and traditionalists is often sanctioned as "offensive."
Multiculturalism comes in for a drubbing as well, for as Kors and Silverglate point out, it isn't multicultural at all:
Academic notions and programs of diversity and multiculturalism are marked, almost everywhere, by dogmatic and partisan definitions and models. Despite the talk of "celebrating" diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture, nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural south. These are not "multicultural." All that the social engineers of diversity mean, in fact, is the appreciation, celebration, and study of those people who think exactly as they do about the nature and cause of oppression. Academic diversity and multi-culturalism have remarkably narrow limits--race, gender, "oppressed," ethnicity, and sexual preference--as articulated by self-proclaimed progressives. The academic use of the terms "diversity" and "multicultural" has become a politicized perversion of language. (192-3)
What aspects of higher education specifically irk Kors and Silverglate enough to write a book about? One example is all black dorms, such as at Cornell, or all Asian dorms, such as at U. Mass, which explicitly exclude white residents. Can one imagine the reverse? Presumably this is done to "accommodate the special needs of a minority," yet it is in flagrant violation of the Civil Rights Act. Or what about ambiguous yet punitive speech codes that forbid any speech which offends the sensitivities of the listener such as "verbal behavior" that produces "feelings of impotence," "anger" or "disenfranchisement" (Bowdoin College)? Or speech that causes a loss of "self-esteem [or] a vague sense of danger" (Colby College) or even "inappropriately directed laughter," "inconsiderate jokes," and "stereotyping" (U Conn). Or what about the repeated theft and destruction of the conservative student paper The Dartmouth Review? In this case the university contended that the theft was not against student conduct code and an official university spokesman explained that The Dartmouth Review was "litter." Or what about Carnegie Mellon University which fired a conservative Catholic residential adviser because he refused to wear a pink triangle (symbol of gay persecution) during mandated gay and lesbian sensitivity training because it violated his Catholic conscience and his right to control his own speech? It is hard to imagine that one could fill over 400 pages with similar examples, yet the authors do so entertainingly.
Finally, Kors and Silverglate are worried that the idea of individual merit and rights are diminished in an environment that stresses the rights and achievements of groups. They fret over the arbitrary proceedings that discipline students without due process. And they think that faculty who are not particularly supportive of these trends are too timid to challenge the status quo.
There have been many good books that have documented the dementia on campus of late--this is one of the better ones.