"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."

- Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law School

"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."

- The New York Times Book Review, "P.C. 101," by Sam Tanenhaus, November 8, 1998

The Shadow University, written by two long-time friends and civil liberties advocates -- one more liberal, the other more conservative -- illuminates the attack on liberty that has dominated our nation's college campuses for nearly two decades.

This book shows how the best aspects of the 1960's -- free speech, equality of rights, respect for private conscience, and a sense of undergraduate liberties and adult responsibilities -- have died on our campuses. What is left of that heady decade are its worst part: self-appointed "progressives" who seek to enforce moral and political orthodoxies through abuse and coercion rather than reason. In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power.

The Shadow University, published by The Free Press in hardcover in 1998 and, the following year, by HarperPerennial in paperback -- both still in print -- is yet more relevant since 9/11. Faculty members who eagerly dismantled the structures of liberty in the 1980s and 1990s have now discovered that one reaps what one sows, and that censorship is a weapon that, if tolerated, all sides may use.  If the past twenty years proves anything, it is that liberty is non-partisan and an essential way of being human, morally, politically, and intellectually.

The Shadow University is an urgent call to all those concerned with liberty -- liberals, conservatives, and everything in between -- to join together in defense of liberty for the next generation, by restoring free speech, equality of rights, fair procedures, and respect for private conscience and individuality on our colleges and universities.

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Last updated on 09 September 2004
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