reviews 498 College & Research Libraries parently, some effort in this direction is being made at the University of Iceland and in the Nordic countries, at Aberystwith, and in Australia through the National Office of Overseas Skills Recog­ nition. U.S. schools have had a large num­ ber of foreign students as have had, pre­ sumably established schools in other coun­ tries. Where these students go after gradu­ ation and what influence they may have on library development in their own coun­ tries remain something of a mystery. Included are articles that address the demographic characteristics of students, but none that really answer the questions of why students come to the schools in the first place or why they choose a par­ ticular school over others. There are also curricular questions that need to be in­ vestigated. Each of these volumes deals with academic traditions that differ, sometimes radically, but there does seem to be an international consensus on a com­ mon core of library and information stud­ ies that has been created either through cultural transfer or because this particu­ lar knowledge has been found to be es­ sential to the work of all librarians. The articles presented in this series re­ veal a, perhaps inevitable, time lag be- Index to advertisers Amer. Economic Association 462 Archival Products 503 Assoc. of Christian Librarians 505 Biosis 439 Blackwell’s Book Services 453 Bowker 411 CHOICE 476, 492 CQ Books 404 EBSCO Cover 4 Endocrine Society 477 Greenwood Publishing 403 Haworth Press Cover 3 ISI 407 Library Technologies 463 M. Moleiro Editor 425 OCLC 506 Oxford University Press 478 SPARC Cover 2 September 1999 tween the point they were completed and when they were published. The “snap­ shot” envisioned by Roy is more accu­ rately a sort of time-lapse photographic series of library education in the 1990s. As such, these volumes might be reason­ able acquisitions for libraries serving LIS schools or for institutions with an active interest in comparative education. In many cases, much of the information pre­ sented in these volumes will be available in libraries collecting comprehensively in these fields, however, the personal nature of this series’ essays make them unique. It is unfortunate that the series ends with these volumes. Poor sales have forced the publisher to abandon the project. At an average price of almost $100 per volume, this is not a surprising de­ velopment. At present, the volume on Africa edited by the late Michael Wise will be published by IFLA and the volume on the Arab Gulf States also should be com­ pleted and published by Mansell this year. Developments in Central and South America, the rest of Western and Eastern Europe as well as planned volumes for India and Southeast Asia will not be pub­ lished. However, the idea behind this se­ ries is valuable enough to be continued. Perhaps other volumes would make a fit­ ting project for several Library Trends is­ sues, which would be the more natural format and, at the institutional subscrip­ tion rate of $75 for four quarterly issues, would be a much more affordable venue for this work. —Lee Shiflett, Louisiana State University. Kors, Alan Charles, and Harvey A. Silverglate. The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Cam­ puses. New York: Free Press, 1998. 415p. $27.50 (ISBN 0684853213). LC 98­ 8728. Readers looking for an engaging polemic on political correctness run amuck on our nation’s campuses will be delighted to find The Shadow University. Kors and Silverglate provide scores of detailed, appropriately spun, and sufficiently alarmist accounts of cases in which cam­ Book Reviews 499 pus speech codes have been used in an attempt to restrict expressions of racism, sexism, and other forms of intolerance on college campuses. The book abounds with quotable sound bites (e.g., “the Free Speech movement … of the ’60s and ’70s evolved … into the speech code move­ ment of the ’80s and ’90s”). It was writ­ ten to alert unsuspecting future tuition- payers and other concerned citizens to what the authors claim are the increasing number of draconian attacks from politi­ cally correct college administrators on the freedom of speech and First Amendment rights of students and faculty. The book is not devoid of some real merit. Kors (a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a central figure in the 1993 “water buffalo” speech code case at his own campus) and Silverglate (a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer in Boston) do make a point about the effi­ cacy of speech codes. The sheer absurdity of many of the cases they present illus­ trate the shortcomings: speech codes are legalistic controls misapplied to a prob­ lem of ideology; the exercise and enforce­ ment of such codes tend to be arbitrary; and they are designed primarily to ac­ commodate the administrative flowcharts and paper-chase procedures of bureau­ crats. The Shadow University will be of value if it contributes to the development of other, nonlegalistic and less bureau­ cratic mechanisms to deal with the very real problems of racism, sexism, ho­ mophobia, and other chauvinistic atti­ tudes too often found within the educa­ tional community. However, those readers who seek the insight that a scholarly analysis might provide on the state of academic freedom and the use of speech codes in higher edu­ cation will be very disappointed, for this book is reduced to diatribe by the gener­ ally ahistoric, anecdotal, and flippant ap­ proach of the authors. Kors and Silverglate refuse to admit that campus communities have legitimate grounds for developing programs and procedures designed to sensitize mem­ bers of the campus community to their collective responsibility to create an aca­ demic environment supportive of every member’s pursuit of knowledge and edu­ cational credentials. Racism, sexism, ho­ mophobia, and other intolerant mind-sets that deny humanity to individuals and groups are very real social problems that perpetuate inequalities and injustices in a very real world. However, Kors and Silverglate would argue (although they never do) that the long, slow, evolving movements throughout history toward human equality and justice are all beside the point. According to them, the only thing worth any struggle or advocacy is the absolutist’s interpretation of the right to freedom of speech. They side with a Harvard Law School scholar who writes: “if the Constitution forces government to allow people to march, speak and write in favor of peace, brotherhood, and jus­ tice, then it must also require the govern­ ment to allow them to advocate hatred, racism, and even genocide.” However, some people believe otherwise and in their (sophomorically entitled) chapter “Marcuse’s Revenge,” Kors and Silverglate introduce the reader to the views of Herbert Marcuse, Richard Delgado, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, Catherine MacKinnon, and Stanley Fish, all of whom advocate a qualified approach to free speech and First Amendment rights. This is the most interesting chapter in the book, but also the most frustrating. It is interesting because Kors and Silverglate introduce Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “repressive tolerance.” The idea is most enlightening, and Marcuse’s essay elabo­ rating it should be read by everyone in­ terested in the question of free speech. (See the collection of essays in A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff et al. [Boston: Beacon Pr., 1969].) The chap­ ter is frustrating because Kors and Silverglate make absolutely no attempt to provide any reasoned or sustained counterargument. Of course, an argument against Marcuse, Delgado, and the oth­ ers would require a rigorous and histori­ cal examination of the social role and 500 College & Research Libraries “value” of hatred, racism, genocide, and sexism. Such a counterargument, how­ ever, would place Kors and Silverglate in the uncomfortable, but honest, position of arguing publicly in support of the very real “benefits” of hatred-based ideologies. For example, managers have long found racism very useful in playing off one group of ill-treated workers against an­ other group in order to maintain exploit­ ative (and profit-enhancing) working conditions. Class-based elitism has long sustained power and wealth in the hands of the few. National and religious chau­ vinism has long supported war indus­ tries. Sexism has long relegated women to low-worth positions that benefit men economically and psychologically. Rather than attempt a reasoned, rigorous, or his­ torically based counterargument to Marcuse and the others, Kors and Silverglate merely propound and repeat ad nauseam their simple belief in the in­ fallibility of the absolutist approach to freedom of speech. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this book is the bald disdain the authors express toward those who recog­ nize the injustice of racism, sexism, and so on. For example, in the chapter “‘Shut Up,’ They Reasoned: Silencing Students,” the sexual harassment policy dealing with speech and nonverbal expression at the University of Maryland-College Park is described. Kors and Silverglate quote from a list of the nonverbal behaviors pro­ hibited: “leering and ogling with sugges­ tive overtones; licking lips or teeth; hold­ ing food provocatively; [and] lewd ges­ tures, such as hand or sign language to denote sexual activity.” This is followed immediately by a remark characteristic of the authors: “As if dry lips or American Sign Language were not trouble enough…” It is almost incomprehensible that two grown men seem incapable of recognizing the difference between the licking of lips as a sexually suggestive gesture and the licking of lips that are dry. And it is terribly disturbing that these two grown men should be either so ignorant or so insensitive to equate the richness of September 1999 American Sign Language with the crudity of juvenile gestures. Kors and Silverglate would do well to recall that their hero John Stuart Mill re­ stricted the granting of liberty to children, minors, and barbarians, for these have not attained the maturity of mind required for the exercise of liberty. This is a disappointing book. It belongs in academic library collections only be­ cause it is about the college community. Public libraries need not bother acquir­ ing a copy; instead, they should use in­ terlibrary loan. —Elaine Harger, W. Haywood Burns School, New York. Meadow, Charles T. Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media. Landham, Md.: Scarecrow Pr., 1998. 292p. $45, alk. pa­ per, cloth (ISBN 0-8108-3507-X); $24.50, paper (ISBN: 0-8108-3508-8). LC 98­ 16854. Ink into Bits is a very readable, survey-style, lightly documented introduction to the communication and media issues result­ ing from the shift from print to electronic publishing. It is one person’s viewpoint and one person’s priorities, about which the author is very straightforward. Meadow, Professor Emeritus of the Uni­ versity of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Studies, has written extensively in the field of information science. The breadth and di­ versity of topics he has addressed is evi­ dent in the list of essays included in this volume: “Changing Media in a Changing World”; “Media and Information”; “Some Media History”; “Special Place of Books and Writing in Our Culture”; “Represent­ ing and Presenting Information”; “Linear Text and Hypertext”; “Interacting with In­ formation Machines”; “Multimedia”; “ModernTelecommunications: The Infor­ mation Highway”; “Distribution”; “Com­ prehension”; “Adoption of New Technol­ ogy”; “Markets”; “Protecting the Customer”; “Thinking about Change”; and “Thinking about the Future.” This book is a bit of a hybrid. On the one hand, it is extremely basic and textbooklike, often presenting fascinating tidbits of information such as the fact that