Indeed, colleges and universities are singular institutions in American life. Whatever jokes or complaints one hears about professors or tuition, the fact remains that we place most of our sons and daughters in the care of colleges and universities. We charge these institutions with preparing future citizens for participation in the life of a free and productive society. We offer them special status and protection in that task, indeed, a wall of immunity from excessive scrutiny. We pay them handsomely, and, with breathtaking trust, almost never ask for an accounting of what we receive in return.
During the antiwar and social protests of the late '60s and early '70s, institutions of higher education were frequently in the spotlight, less for anything they did than for the demonstrations, culture, and lifestyles of the students who attended them. A generational revolution appeared to touch significant numbers of undergraduates, and, while it lasted, it was a major phenomenon and the stuff of daily news. For most citizens, however, the '60s are long over, and, in their minds, universities have returned to calm and ordinary lives (however "ordinary" one can call places populated by eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds). Most students of the '60s have gone on to jobs, families, and significant lives in worlds far from the scenes of their undergraduate moments, and they assume that their peers who stayed on at universities have undergone the same evolutions and adaptations.
During the past several years, however, colleges and universities once again have caught the attention of the public at large. People hear about "political Editorialists and occasional readers of literature on the universities are aware of something deeper going on -- often characterized as "the culture wars" -- but, except to the most committed, the scope of what is happening seems confusing, to be waited out rather than figured out. It is clear that the curriculum in the humanities and social sciences has changed, and that this has something to do with gender, race, and sexuality, but in what ways, precisely, few are sure. Those with their eyes on the behavior of academics in these fields know that there is something of a shouting-match in a very small sauna-lots of noise, heat, and steam, but very little in the way of audience. There seem to be a lot of -isms bandied about -- "racism" and "sexism," to be sure, but also "postmodernism" and "multiculturalism." There are lots of different theories about what these arguments truly mean, if, indeed, they mean anything at all. At any rate, for most high-school seniors, these developments do not even register on the radar screens of their lives. Most incoming students and their parents have the vague sense that there may be a few crazies set loose on campuses, but that it should be easy enough to sort things out and avoid the worst of it.
Among the most politically focused, however, there is a sharper sense of a growing turmoil at universities. On the Left there is a hope that universities are dealing with problems of power and injustice more explicitly and progressively, and a fear that the "excesses" of political correctness might bring such a good endeavor into disrepute. On the Right there is a belief that whole disciplines have transformed the classroom into a pulpit from which supposed "oppression" is analyzed in wholly partisan fashion, transforming students into willing consumers of a politics of "victimization." Across the spectrum, wherever there are individuals who believe that open minds and critical inquiry favor their cause, there is a concern that various academic indoctrinations and posturings may be replacing critical classroom education.
It is vital that citizens understand the deeper crisis of our colleges and universities. Contrary to the expectations of most applicants, colleges and universities are not freer than the society at large. Indeed, they are less free, and that diminution is continuing apace. 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. 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 soul 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. Universities have become the enemy of a free society, and it is time for the citizens of that society to recognize this scandal of enormous proportions and to hold these institutions to account.
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 remains 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 ideological vision and desire.
Universities are administered, above all, not by ideological zealots, but by careerists who have made a Faustian deal. They have preserved the most prestigious, productive, and administratively visible sides of their institutions-the parts, not coincidentally, that the public and potential donors see-from almost all of the depredations of ideological fervor. Physics, fund-raising, athletics, microbiology, the medical schools, mathematics, financial management, physical plant, alumni relations, business, and metallurgy, for example, though no doubt caught up in the currents of our age, are not in the hands of ideological zealots. Rather, whole departments of the liberal arts have been given to those for whom universities represent, in their own minds, the revolutionary agency of our culture, walling them off, so to speak, from the parts of universities that trustees, rightly or wrongly, take most seriously.
Far more significantly for the future of liberty, however, and providing the focus of this book, the university in loco parentis-the university standing in the place of parents-has been given over to the self-appointed progressives to do with what they will. The result has been an emerging tyranny over all aspects of student life -- a tyranny that is far more dangerous than the relatively innocuous parietal rules of ages past. It is a tyranny that seeks to assert absolute control over the souls, the consciences, and the individuality of our students -- in short, a tyranny over the essence of liberty itself.
The real threat to liberty comes from this "shadow university," the structures built, almost without debate or examination, to "educate," or, more precisely, to reeducate, far from the accountability of the classroom. To know the betrayal of liberty on our campuses, one must understand what has become of their divisions of university life and student life, residential advisors, judicial systems, deans of students and their officers, and of their new and profoundly disturbing student rules and regulations. This threat has developed not in the glare of publicity, debate and criticism, as has been the case with new academic disciplines, courses, and pedagogies, but in the shadows. Indeed, few professors, including those most critical of what they see as ideological zealotry at their institutions, are aware of the transformation of the university in loco parentis that has occurred. The shadow university, with its shadow curriculum, dominates freshman orientation, residential programming, extracurricular student life, the promulgation of codes and regulations, and the administration of what passes, on our campuses, for justice.
The ultimate force of the shadow university is its ability to punish students, and, increasingly, to punish faculty behind closed doors, far from public and even campus scrutiny. If professors give biased lectures, grade students down for ideological nonconformity, and favor those who agree with them, these activities ultimately become more broadly known. The shadow university, however, hands students a moral agenda upon arrival, subjects them to mandatory political reeducation, sends them to sensitivity training, submerges their individuality in official group identity, intrudes upon private conscience, treats them with scandalous inequality, and, when it chooses, suspends or expels them. Having grown heady with arbitrary power over students, the shadow university now engages in the systematic intimidation and attempted reeducation of faculty, too. The first imposition, in the classroom, is merely an abuse of a power that generally may be avoided by choice and in any event is not accomplished in secret. The second imposition of the shadow university is inescapable, and is an exercise in something truly chilling: a hidden, systematic assault upon liberty, individualism, dignity, due process, and equality before the law. After finishing this book, no one-academic or nonacademic citizen--should be able to doubt the reality and moral urgency of this phenomenon.
Critics of modern trends at our universities have looked above all to multicultural studies, to the new scholarship, to the therapeutic classroom, to affirmative action, or to conferences on the body or sexuality as sources of their unease or outrage. Reasonable individuals, however, may disagree about every one of these phenomena. That, indeed, is precisely the point: Reasonable (and unreasonable) individuals do disagree about these things, and debate them openly and vociferously. To the extent that one believes that truth or critical perspective emerges from sustained argument, one should be confident that whatever correctives or refutations the intellectual age requires will or, at least, can emerge from these debates.
In the shadow university, however, that precondition of informed change-free and unfettered debate among free individuals-is precisely what has been replaced by censorship, indoctrination, intimidation, official group identity, and groupthink. The issue of whether we shall have intelligent and thoughtful universities can be addressed only if we have free universities, and the shadow university has suppressed that very freedom itself. Speech codes, prohibiting speech that "offends," protect ideologically or politically favored groups, and, what is more important, insulate these groups' self-appointed spokesmen and spokeswomen from criticism and even from the need to participate in debate. Double standards destroy legal equality and all meaningful accountability, teaching the worst imaginable lessons about the appropriate uses of power. Freshman orientations and extracurricular "educational" programming offer partisan and intrusive indoctrination that is the opposite of, and incompatible with, a critical liberal education. Crude justice is administered, in secret, in biased fashion and without that due process that teaches lessons about civilization and the rule of law. Administrators, eager to buy peace and avoid scandal, deny the obvious truth of what is occurring, and, when pressed, invoke false doctrines of being legally bound by absolute confidentiality.
The goal of this book is to expose the shadow university, to let the sunlight shine on it, and to shame. It also is to give courage and a sense of common mission to those who know or suspect such things about our colleges and universities but do not know quite how to prove them or quite what to do. Finally, this book aims to remind citizens about the chasm that has emerged between the modern realities characterizing our institutions of higher education and the timeless but fragile values upon which the survival of freedom depends.