Name: The shadow university
ISBN: 9780060977726

The shadow university

Universities still set themselves apart from American society, but now they do so by enforcing their own politically correct world-view through censorship, double standards, and a judicial system without due process. The Shadow University is a stinging indictment of the covert system of justice on college campuses, exposing the widespread reliance on kangaroo courts and arbitrary punishment to coerce students and faculty into conformity. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, staunch civil libertarians and active defenders of free inquiry on campus, lay bare the totalitarian mindset that undergirds speech codes, conduct codes, and "campus life" bureaucracies, through which a cadre of deans and counselors indoctrinate students and faculty in an ideology that favors group rights over individual rights, sacrificing free speech and academic freedom to spare the sensitivities of currently favored groups.

What Hacker News says

mherdegOct 2016

Yeah, I found that blog post really thought provoking.

I think the core idea was that "it is a virtue to tolerate the outgroup" often means, in American middle-class culture, "if you are on Team Republican, do not stop associating with members of Team Democrat, no matter how much your friends and media tell you all those people are evil idiots" and vice versa.

This is an interesting normative take on what you might call the "filter bubble moral panic" of the 2000s, a growing fear that people who don't agree with each other are experiencing totally separate and disconnected realities.

The thing everyone's afraid of seems to be that in this new world, democracy will effectively become impossible because the ruling majority party will always be ignorant of (or totally unsympathetic to) the interests of the minority. Is the risk overblown? I dunno; how actually bad is a government shutdown, a half-year delay in Zika containment funding, etc.? Hard to say if these times are really worse and if "ignoring the other team" is really to blame.

Some other content in this vein that was interesting reading:

* The Shadow University -- a 1999 nonfiction book of essays about how, at American universities, concepts like "academic freedom" and "the marketplace of ideas" have entered a tension with other concepts (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060977728)

* The Five Geek Social Fallacies -- a 2003 essay influential among some software-as-a-lifestyle people I know, which argues most memorably that is is a popular fallacy to believe "ostracizers are evil", http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

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s_q_bMar 2016

Atty. Silverglate is very much not a fraud.

He's the author of "The Shadow University" which was one of the most disruptive blows that's been struck against the large-endowment administrations in the past few decades.

I actually happen to know one of the subjects of Mr. Silverglate's case studies, Nicholas Hermandorffer, who later wrote his thesis on the topic. In my view, his experience was represented accurately and fully, and Mr. Hermandorffer's accounts were closely aligned with phone records, texts, emails, etc., as well as physical evidence.

He's also head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which ranks universities on their free speech rights, as well as informs students that they sacrifice Constitutional protection to a certain extent living in University housing, as well as provides information on the rights one does retain and how to invoke them.

You seem like somebody with an axe to grind. I wouldn't put too much faith in this guy.

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