The stated themes of Donald Downs's book are ones with which most readers of this journal will be sympathetic: Intellectual freedom is the most important commodity academics have; it is under siege on a variety of fronts; some of these fronts might appear innocent but are often only the thin edge of the wedge; and faculty must recognize these threats and organize themselves to resist. This is a timely reminder, for there are many threats to academic freedom facing us today: Campus Watch, which has posted online the dossiers of professors who supposedly sympathize with Islamic terrorists and encourages students to “inform” on their professors for alleged anti-American sentiments; David Horowitz's so-called academic bill of rights, which targets professors who supposedly display that favorite shibboleth of the right wing, “liberal bias”; the Patriot Act; and government surveillance and wiretapping. Moreover, the strength of these efforts to suppress speech is frightening: Well funded, but not very thoughtful, they often hijack the truth in vitriolic hatred of academics.

Unfortunately, the bulk of this book takes us in a direction opposite the one his urgent title suggests. Although Downs acknowledges some of the aforementioned dangers in his eloquently written preface, the book focuses on events that happened in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, in response to race- and sex-harassment codes on various university campuses. His focus is not on dangers to the academy from the outside but on dangers from within, and he cites “political correctness” as the prime enemy. He claims that the lessons we can learn from the events surrounding the defeat of these codes will help us figure out how to deal with the new assaults on intellectual freedom. But that conclusion is harder to grasp, because he excludes from his analysis a consideration of the role of political power.

One could argue that the reason for this lack is that the book is really a memoir; Downs teaches, after all, at the University of Wisconsin, the subject of the majority of the chapters in the book, and he is writing primarily about his own efforts to defeat that university's speech code. His book is more a narrative of events than an intellectual analysis of the concepts and ideals at work. And as a narrative, it is obviously rather one-sided, reflecting the author's own experiences and perspectives.

A memoir is not really the kind of book that Perspectives on Politics would be reviewing, much less featuring in a symposium, however. And in his preface and conclusion, Downs tries to link his own experience to a broader social phenomenon, to go beyond memoir to quasi-academic study. Hence, there is a chapter on my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania, one on Berkeley, and one on Columbia. This is where things become more problematic. The Penn chapter, for instance, is filled with a narrative of events that is skewed by ideology. Downs relies on Penn law professor Alan Kors as his primary source (with some references to various campus publications and the Chronicle of Higher Education), complaining that my colleague Sheldon Hackney, Penn's president at the time, and others at Penn would not consent to be interviewed. Yet Hackney has written a book about the incident himself, and fairness would suggest reliance on it as well. Downs cites it only a few times in a rather patronizing tone, preferring to rely on Kors, who is more sympathetic to the story Downs wishes to tell.

This is the sort of thing that makes me, as a scholar, suspicious of the rest of the book. The advocates of university procedures to serve victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or racism are uniformly presented by Downs as extremists, devious radical ideologues, and Machiavellian “master strategists” (p. 252), while those interested in maintaining the status quo are described as heroic defenders of basic human liberties. In the Columbia chapter, rape victims are reduced to “accusers,” advocates are “activists,” and a lawyer who is more concerned with the accused than the victim is described as “brilliant” (p. 75) without any evidence to back up that assessment. Downs mocks a Wisconsin colleague's accounts of victimization by racist epithets, claiming that his “dramatic” style during a faculty senate debate over a harassment code, rather than the validity of his argument, “assured our defeat” (p. 208).

Downs's justification for these selective narratives is, as in the Penn chapter, that relevant people refused to be interviewed. But are we not, as social scientists, supposed to write the book to which the evidence leads us? If we are faced with difficulties in gathering reliable data, are we not obliged to reconfigure our thesis?

Perhaps even more troubling than the unreliability of the narrative is the book's inadequate analysis of the concept of free speech, of power, of the dynamics of academic and intellectual communities, and of the ambiguity in which the principle of in loco parentis places colleges and universities. These ideas are mentioned in passing at various points, but never seriously discussed.

For the record, I do not really trust harassment codes, for the reasons that Downs illustrates: They do not accomplish what they are supposed to, for they are enforced through processes that are too often secret and potentially corrupt by administrators who are not really qualified to oversee them. But that is a matter of incompetent administration, not ideological bias. Any procedure can be perverted, including due process.

The idea behind these codes is something else. And that is to level the playing field of power. In an intellectual community that depends on the free expression of ideas, the power dynamics that systematically silence certain people by virtue of who they are is self-defeating, if not self-contradictory. Women and minorities are still less likely to speak in class, less likely to be called on by professors, less likely to assume campus leadership positions. Certainly, Downs does not expect us to believe that this is because the marketplace of ideas really works, that the deck is not stacked, or that more speech would somehow fix this. As vital as the First Amendment is, we must acknowledge that it is more often used to shore up the power of those who already have it. The liberal ideal is that free speech allows the minority, the person with the unpopular view, to be empowered to speak up. But that is not generally what happens. The First Amendment is more often used to protect pornographers who want to beat up and rape women for fun and profit or it is used to protect Nazis and Klansmen (as Downs showed in his first and much better book, Nazis in Skokie, 1985).

One could argue that free speech is what enabled the civil rights and feminist movements, but did it? Free speech did not prevent Martin Luther King, Jr., from getting killed, or black freedom marchers from being beaten, burned, and arrested; it does not keep women from getting harassed or passed over for tenure and promotion. At best, speech is one of a group of ideals, such as equality, democracy, recognition, and diversity, that animate the claims of disadvantaged groups. All of these ideals, not just free speech, are needed if the academy is to be truly inclusive and accessible to all.

The Millian notion of equal liberty is at the heart of Downs's book, though it is unacknowledged. The liberal saying that my right to swing my fist ends where the other guy's nose begins means that the more people there are in a given space, all swinging their arms, the less freely they can swing them. White, professional, heterosexual males, who have been used to swinging their fists wherever they wish, are now constrained by the fact that they have less room because women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities are seeking to share their space. This is a classic principle of liberalism that Downs seems to misunderstand: For everyone to have equally free speech, each of us must exert more self-control and limit ourselves from the freedom that we used to have at others' expense. Understandably, those in power do not want to do that.

Power also defines the terms of the debate, a point that Downs also misses. For instance, he relabels harassment codes as “speech codes,” which then enables him to shift the reader's perspective of events in a misleading manner. For example, he discusses an incident of a colleague at Wisconsin saying “Seig heil, comrades!” to graduate students who were being rude to him. Is that needed? Because one student was “part Gypsy, and the other's wife was Jewish,” they brought a charge of racial harassment against the professor, and Downs complains that it should have been seen as an issue of “uncolleagiality,” rather than as harassment (p. 28). Supposedly, the professor was unaware of the students' racial ties, but does that really make a difference? This is not talk radio, after all; it is the university, where faculty wield considerable power over students and where such antagonistic expression is bound to silence students dependent on these faculty for approval of their examinations, dissertations, letters of recommendation, and ultimately jobs. Courtesy and respect must go both ways.

The Penn case illustrates these points as well. As Downs describes it, some African American sorority sisters were engaging in very loud celebrating outside a dormitory late at night, and several male residents of the dorm shouted insults at them, including “Black bitches,” “Black asses,” and the most infamous insult: “Shut up, you water buffalo, if you want a party there's a zoo a mile from here.” The women entered the dorm, demanded to know who shouted the insults, and were referred to the Jewish freshman who shouted the water buffalo insult. A charge of racial harassment was brought before the university judicial administrator and the student was faced with the possibility of expulsion (pp. 169 ff).

The question of how this got out of hand is certainly puzzling and dismaying. As Downs quotes my colleague Will Harris, the student's insult did not even violate Penn's code (p. 175). But Downs ignores the larger issue of how the terms of “speech,” “racism,” and “harassment” got defined in this case in favor of focusing on how the university seemed to run roughshod over an 18-year-old kid who ended up being the scapegoat for pent-up hurt and anger on a campus where racism and sexism were too commonly encountered. He says that it was “widely understood” that the slur was not racist (pp. 17, 170–71). But among which audience: the white administrators who prosecuted the case or the white faculty who defended the white male student? Certainly not among the African American female students. Indeed, the ease with which undergraduate white men shouted “black bitches” out their dormitory windows—instead of, say, “Hey, keep it down, we're trying to study/sleep,” or even (imagine this!) walking downstairs to ask the women to be quiet—suggests the disturbing normalization of racist and sexist attitudes among these students and the freedom and power that they felt to express those attitudes at will. Furthermore, that particular insult invokes a long racist “tradition” of considering African Americans as animals rather than people. So it was not unreasonable for the women to interpret such comments as racist, whether the white students admitted to such intentions or not.

Whether this amounts to full-scale racial harassment is extremely dubious, and the fact that the student offered to apologize should have ended it, as Downs suggests, perhaps with some campuswide race awareness discussions. At the same time, however, escalating this incident into a “free speech” issue, and a case of “progressive censorship,” is at least as problematic. Labeling insults as “free speech,” though perhaps in keeping with the law, nevertheless trivializes the importance of speech and makes speech the universal stand-in for bad behavior. In the academy, in particular, the importance of speech has to do with the vitality of intellectual diversity, the Millian insight that unpopular ideas might have some truth in them. Hence, when Downs claims that “the single most important point in this book” is that “a problem arises when philosophical and political differences are dealt with not by discussion and debate but by the recourse or reference to coercive, punitive measures and powers that in effect ‘criminalize’ disagreement” (p. 215), he expresses a philosophy with which all readers of this journal undoubtedly agree. But exactly how is calling someone a water buffalo a “philosophical or political difference?” Did the student put forth an argument defending this choice of insult on political or philosophical grounds? Did Downs's colleague do so when he called his students “feminazis” (p. 30)? Not as far as Downs's narrative reveals. As a result, his elevation of these acts to “philosophical disagreement” or “political difference”—both of which would be defensible under a free speech rubric—seems rather disingenuous. But it illustrates the ways in which power operates in this issue: Who gets to say what constitutes free speech, who gets to define harassment, are usually not the victims but the people with power to protect.

Harassment codes no doubt have drawbacks. But the solution is not simply to get rid of the codes because that just leaves racism and sexism in place. Rather, we need to establish different ways of challenging the power of race and gender privilege in the academy, to create more space for women and minorities to enter the marketplace of ideas, to be listened to and heard. It is too bad that Downs did not write about that, because that would be an appropriate focus for the organized faculty efforts that he says should be marshaled against censorship. Instead, it looks as if in his view, free speech is not for everybody—just for those who already have it. I have confidence that this is not what he intended. But given his constricted approach, skeptical readers can hardly be blamed for wondering.