By some counts, women are now a majority on American campuses, receiving most of the degrees, which dispels the notion that the educational system favors boys and oppresses girls. The trend toward more women in higher education is to be applauded and encouraged, but it also calls for a warning.

Colleges and universities like to portray themselves in glowing terms as bastions of knowledge; strongholds of free inquiry, free speech, and due process; forums for the disinterested pursuit of truth and understanding, where the great issues of the day can be debated and the leaders of tomorrow prepared for service. In today’s conditions, these claims qualify as false advertising. A more accurate picture can be found in The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, a recent book by Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate.

In this portrait, the most thorough to date, American campuses emerge as bastions of political correctness; hostile to free inquiry and free speech; star chambers hostile to due process; and propagandists for notions such as group rights and oppression studies. Instead of a spirit of inquiry, thought control, slogans, and rigid speech codes prevail, enforced by politically correct administrators who have become veritable inquisitors. Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and Silvergate, an attorney who taught at Harvard Law School, have carefully documented their case.

Here, in great detail, is the incredible ordeal of Eden Jacobowitz, whose complaint about some noisy students became a legal marathon. Also at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of militant students kidnapped a student named O’Flanagan—mistaking him for someone else—and subjected him to violent racial abuse. No one was punished for the assault; likewise, administrators have failed to take action against those who have stolen and trashed conservative student newspapers.

On another campus, however, when a student laughed at a statement deemed offensive to others—note that he did not make the statement, he only laughed at it—he was ordered to undergo mandatory sensitivity training. At the University of Cincinnati, a sensitivity trainer publicly humiliated a female professor because she was white, blond, and had blue eyes. Under current campus orthodoxies of group identity, these features, over which she had no control, mean that she is a privileged member of an oppressor class. The many other detailed accounts include a professor investigated for sexual harassment after he disagreed with campus feminists about curriculum issues.

The authors are particularly adept at exposing the fallacies of multiculturalism, a prevailing campus orthodoxy. And they explain that on many campuses, accusations of a “hostile environment” have become equated with guilt. Of course, the definition of a “hostile environment” is highly subjective, depending on the views of those claiming to be offended.

Ironically, the campus itself has become a hostile environment to what universities should stand for: truth, knowledge, individual liberty, sanctity of conscience, the quest for truth, and legal equality. As Wendy Kaminer, Alan Dershowitz, Linda Chavez, Christina Hoff Summers, and other readers of this book discovered, the situation is much worse than they imagined. To adapt a saying, corrupt campuses have consequences.

That is why The Shadow University should be studied carefully by legislators, policymakers, and parents. Prospective students, male and female, will find it an enlightening primer.

Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.