An examination of the struggle over campus speech codes
The Shadow University:
The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses
Alan Charles Kors '64 and Harvey A. Silverglate '64
Simon and Schuster
$27.50
In a nation
whose future depends on an education in freedom, colleges
and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship,
and self-righteous abuse of power," declare Alan Charles Kors '64
and Harvey A. Silverglate '64 in their new book,
The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's
Campuses. "Universities have become the enemies of free society, and it is time to recognize this scandal of
enormous proportions and to hold these institutions to account."
It's a provocative thesis with which to open any book, but Kors (a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania) and Silverglate (a criminal defense attorney and civil liberties litigator) proceed to document a disheartening array of instances where overbroad speech codes banning putatively "offensive" speech have been enlisted to dampen legitimate inquiry and dissent by students and faculty around the country: a Yale student is punished for "harassment and intimidation" for distributing a handout satirizing Gay Jeans Day; a female University of Nebraska instructor teaching human sexuality is charged by a male student with sexual harassment when, while demonstrating the use of condoms, she jokes that men, like basketball players, "dribble before they shoot;" at dozens of schools, students and faculty are railroaded into confessions of guilt and "sensitivity training" thought-reform by Star Chamber discipline committees.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the examples involve students and faculty on the conservative end of the ideological spectrum. But Kors and Silverglates' argument for the importance of protecting the expression of unpopular thought and scholarship at universities is principled, thorough, and carefully apolitical (Silverglate, in fact, is active with the ACLU). Besides, it's hardly their fault that the intellectual underpinnings of politically correct censorship have been provided by critical race and gender theorists like Richard Delgado, Catherine MacKinnon, Stanley Fish, and old-fashioned radicals like the late Herbert Marcuse. In one of the book's strongest chapters, Kors and Silverglate artfully skewer the absurd notion, proffered by the above scholars, that only by restricting the speech of white men can minorities and women participate equally in civil discourse. And their devastating critique of doublethinking speech codes, which simultaneously promise dedication to open inquiry while defining "offensive" as anything the offendee wants it to be, should prompt Princeton's Dean of the College to take another look at the university's handbook on the subject, "Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities."
Unfortunately, having crafted an eloquent critique of campus speech codes and judicial procedures, the authors then use it to bludgeon "feminists, multiculturalists, the Left, and self-proclaimed progressives" -- read: damn liberals -- who have perpetrated what they later call "the generational swindle of the '60s." The blame-it-on-the-boomers riff runs throughout: too many members of that generation, they say, "turn out to have supported free speech not because they embraced a value, but because they believed the movement to be useful to their entire 'progressive' agenda." (Most of the Free Speechers of the 1960s didn't become repressive ideologues; most of them joined Silverglate at the ACLU.)
The authors' bitterness might be explained by the fact that both were personally involved in a number of the cases cited in their book; Kors was the faculty adviser to University of Pennsylvania student Eden Jacobowitz during the notorious 1993 'water buffalo' incident, which is the subject of the first chapter. Unfortunately, these experiences have given the book its main defects: a strident, even hysterical tone that undermines the authors' otherwise careful arguments, and no small degree of antiliberal paranoia. On the whole, the authors vastly overstate their case. American universities "the enemies of free society?" Please. There are whole branches of the academy -- the sciences come to mind -- which remained more or less unscathed by radical political correctness, and for which the authors cite no examples. And the relatively few cases they do cite (and even the dozens more they claim to know of), egregious as they are, do not a Stalinesque national terror make.
Nevertheless this is an important book. While Kors and Silverglate miscast the villains, the vast majority of the injustices they catalogue would not seem out of place in the works of Kafka or Orwell -- and the "shadow university," while not yet as endemic as Kors and Silverglate make it out to be, certainly looks to be on its way.
-- Nicholas Confessore '98
Nicholas Confessore is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.
The Bitter Fruits:
The Civil War Comes to a Small Town in Pennsylvania
David G. Colwell '51
Cumberland County Historical Society
$41.95
David G. Colwell '51 describes the impact of the Civil War on his ancestral town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, particularly as it affected his great-grandparents, James Smith Colwell 1839 and his wife, Anne. With the outbreak of war in 1861, the 48-year-old Colwell, a prosperous lawyer, enlisted to fight for the Union. Anne, who was 20 years his junior, had grown up in Baltimore and harbored sympathies for the South. She also resented his decision to go off to war without asking her views on the matter, leaving her at home with sole responsibility for raising their four small children.
In the first of 179 extant letters James and Anne wrote each other during their separation, she suggested half-jokingly that "this terrible war was only a diabolical plot...to deprive good wives of their husbands." She often chastised him for not resigning his commission and returning home, and there were periods when she was too depressed to write. The letters are filled with the quotidian details of home and camp life: she tells him how the children are doing in school and what she's planted in the garden, he tells her about foraging for supplies and constructing a furnace to warm his tent.
They also write about politics and the transformations wrought by the war. In Anne's last letter, dated September 18, 1862, she despairs over the casualties of recent fighting but takes solace in knowing he is still well. She did not know that he had died the day before, killed by a Confederate shell at Antietam.
-- J.I. Merritt '66
(Cumberland County Historical Society, P.O. Box 626, Carlisle, PA 17013.)
Bring Us the Old People
Marisa Kantor Stark '95
Coffee House Press
$22.95
In the author's statement accompanying Bring Us the Old People, Marisa Kantor Stark '95 explains how as an undergraduate she used to visit a Jewish nursing home. She got to know some of the residents there -- including one elderly woman with an extraordinary story to tell. The story captured Stark's imagination, and she wrote it down. It would provide the basis for her accomplished first novel.
Bring Us the Old People is narrated by Maime, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor abandoned to a nursing home by her nephew. Maime describes the mundanity of her life in an institution where bingo is the week's highlight, and recalls important moments from her past: the religious rituals her parents observed in Poland; her troubled marriage to a good-looking but unloving husband; the root cellar she hid in during World War II; her efforts to make a new life in postwar America. Other novelists have handled similar subject matter, but what makes this novel original is Maime's brave, detailed, and convincing voice: "I always had lots of people. Gott is good to me, wherever I was I always find friends and I always make friends. This is important for people that are coming from another country. The people here don't know me so much but still I'm making friends."
The story unfurls slowly in 45 short chapters that alternate between past and present. It's a storytelling method that requires patience from the reader, but the wait pays off. Gradually Maime's life takes shape, and the awful decision Maime was forced to make during World War II -- a decision she's struggled with through the rest of her life -- is revealed, leading to a powerful conclusion.
In recent years Stephen Spielberg and others have undertaken the documenting of Holocaust survivor's experiences. Here, Stark pursues a similar project. At the same time she raises contemporary questions about the way western societies treat their sick and elderly. Bring Us the Old People makes a strong case against locking away the voices of those we might learn from.
-- Tamsin Todd '92
Web Sightings
Internet privacy
www.osu.edu/units/law/swire1/pspriv.htm
The rise of online commerce and "white pages" listings (complete with maps to your front door) has huge privacy implications. Is your credit-card number at risk? Can snoops and stalkers find you? Peter Swire '80 provides a one-stop overview of financial and other worries at his Internet privacy site, www.osu.edu/units/law/swire1/pspriv.htm. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University, generously shares his own legal and technical knowledge of online privacy, particularly as they involve banking and finance. The site highlights the new book he coauthored for the Brookings Institution, None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce, and the European Privacy Directive ($16.95). The site also collects basic privacy legislation from Europe and the U.S. Links go to pro-privacy organizations and some fringe sites, e.g., www.thecodex.com, a surveillance/security/encryption site sure to push borderline paranoids over the edge. Regarding Swire and Ohio State's own privacy practices, the home page says, "Privacy Policy: No personally identifiable information is collected at this web site." Decide for yourself the implications of "personally."
-- Van Wallach '80
For two years now, the new literary and science journal Oxymoron has taken on a topic to, in the words of its editor, turn "inside out, upside down," and present as new. This year the inverted topic is "the fringe," described as "the unassimilated, the unnoticed, the road not taken."
Editor Ed Binkowski '70 *74 calls the annual journal a "patchwork quilt" of essays which gives the reader "a fuller picture of a topic." Open the pages and you'll read about life on the fringe; fringe fashion, fringe genes, and fringe careers are some of the subjects explored. Studying the fringe, says Binkowski, can help people understand what it means to be on the outside, to be told it doesn't count.
Binkowski, a statistics professor at Hunter College in New York City, became the editor of Oxymoron by chance after family friend and publisher Patricia Hagood approached him for ideas for contributors to the first volume, which focused, coincidentally, on "chance."
How does Oxymoron know it has a good topic? "Whatever has as many different possible resonances, as many different possible takes," says Binkowski. "A theme works when you can play with it."
Binkowski searches for contributors who would play, or click well with the topic, and are distinguished in their field: Edward Tenner '65, a freelance intellectual, writes about the relationship between dogs and bears; William Everdell '65, dean of humanities at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, explores the idea of history seen through the eyes of a peripheral country; and James Romm *88, a classics professor at Fordham University, examines the outer edges of the known world as envisioned by ancient Greeks.
Other Princetonians include Thomas Vogt, a professor of molecular biology; Steven Vogel '83; and Duke biologist Steven Brower *72. "Speed" is the topic of next year's issue, coming in June; Walt Litz '51, professor of English, emeritus, has signed on as a contributor.
-- Melissa Kaye
A hand-printed edition of The Bangle
Shown above is a page replicated from The Bangle, a privately published volume of sonnets by Paul Muldoon, the Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor of Humanities. The limited-edition volume was printed on a hand-operated cylinder press in the new Typography Studio at 185 Nassau Street. The press, neglected for some years, was recently repaired and is available for students interested in printing and graphic arts, although there is no formal course in typography. The idea of printing The Bangle on the hand press was suggested by Muldoon, who worked closely with John Bidwell, curator of graphic arts, as a way to reinaugurate the press. According to Bidwell, the project took a huge amount of time. "We started in February, and the books were printed in September," he says. "It is a substantial project that shows what can be done on the press."
The 30 sonnets that make up The Bangle are linked together (forming a metaphorical bangle) by three broad themes -- the aborted attempt on the part of Muldoon's father to immigrate to Australia, Aeneas's struggle in carrying his father out of Troy, and the disdain of a waiter at a sidewalk cafe in Paris toward a man (Muldoon) who orders one expensive delight after another.
(For more information about The Bangle or the press, write John Bidwell, Graphic Arts, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.)
Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, by Robert R. Bowie '31 and Richard H. Immerman (Oxford, $49.95) -- Using recently declassified contemporary documents, the authors demonstrate that Eisenhower deserves the principal credit for developing a strategy to address issues unique to the nuclear era. Bowie is a professor, emeritus, and former director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Immerman is a professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University.
Geologic Trips: San Francisco and the Bay Area, by Ted Konigsmark *58 (Bored Feet Publications, P.O. Box 1832, Mendocino, CA, 95460, $13.95) -- Written for the nongeologist, this book profiles Bay Area scenic landmarks and explains the geological processes that formed northern California's Coast Ranges. Konigsmark is an oil geologist.
Kinetic Theory in the Earth Sciences, by Antonio C. Lasaga '71 (Princeton University Press, $99.50) -- The first comprehensive treatment of the field of geochemical kinetics, covering the principles needed for the study of the rates and mechanisms of earth science and material processes. Lasaga is a professor of geochemistry at Yale.
And Not Afraid To Dare: The Stories of Ten African-American Women, by Tonya Bolden '81 (Scholastic, $16.95) -- Biographical portraits of African-American women who triumphed over racism and sexism to fulfill their aspirations and realize their dreams. Bolden is the author of three other books.
The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, by Alexander Nehamas (University of California, $29.95) -- A reevaluation of Socrates's place in the Western philosophical tradition, showing his influence on Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Nehamas is Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities and a professor of philosophy and comparative literature.
Risk in the Afternoon: Some of the Pleasures and Perils of Foxchasing, by William Prickett '47 (Red Fox Publishing, $30; 302-376-0908) -- A series of recollections about foxhunting from a self-described "run and jump" Saturday foxhunter. Prickett has pursued the sport for decades.