Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Website: http://www.harvard.edu
Type: Private
Federal Circuit: 1st Circuit
Harvard University has been given the speech code rating Red. A red light university has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. Read more here.
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Harvard University: Blacklisting of Final Club, Fraternity, and Sorority Students
May 6, 2016
On May 6, 2016, Harvard University announced that members of independent, single-sex, off-campus organizations would be blacklisted from Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and banned from leadership of on-campus organizations or athletic teams.
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Harvard University: Professor Fired for Newspaper Column
July 16, 2011
On July 16, 2011, in response to a terrorist bombing in Mumbai, India, Harvard University economics professor Subramanian Swamy published a critical column in the Indian Daily News & Analysis newspaper. Swamy’s controversial column offered ideas on how to “negate the political goals of Islamic terrorism in India,” including a call to “[r]emove the masjid [mosque] in Kashi Vishwanath temple and the 300 masjids at other temple sites.” In response, several Harvard students circulated a petition demanding that Harvard terminate Swamy’s employment. Harvard Summer School Dean Donald H. Pfister initially said that Harvard would give the case “serious attention,” prompting […]
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Harvard University: Administration Threatened to Cancel ‘Barely Legal’ Party Due to Event’s Name
May 8, 2008
Harvard University threatened to cancel a party planned by two Harvard student groups simply because of the party’s name: “Barely Legal.” The Latino Men’s Collective (LMC) and Fuerza Latina proposed that a party be held in the Adams House Dining Hall. Adams House administrators agreed to host the party, but once the party was publicized using the “Barely Legal” name, several students complained to the House masters. The student leadership of both LMC and Fuerza Latina publicly stated that they meant no offense by the party’s name and did not intend to glorify or encourage illegal activity. Nevertheless, Adams House […]
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Mohammed Cartoon Controversy: FIRE Response to Intimidation and Newspaper Disputes
February 22, 2006
As a result of worldwide controversy regarding caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, first published in a Danish newspaper, free speech was being openly disregarded on American college campuses. In the weeks following the printing of the cartoon, students, professors, and student publications not only reprinted the controversial cartoons but even created their own satirical cartoons depicting Mohammed. Chilling of speech in relation to the cartoon was found at Century College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and New York University, amongst others.
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Harvard University: Denial of Due Process for Student Acquitted of Criminal Charges
January 4, 2004
A Harvard graduate student was barred from continuing his studies because a fellow student accused him of sexual assault in January of 2002. The student was acquitted on all six counts of rape and assault by Middlesex Superior Court and his accuser was shown to be fabricating parts of her story at the trial. Despite this, Harvard has not readmitted him and has not dropped its own charges against him.
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Harvard University: Due Process Debate
April 1, 2003
In an extremely important victory for fundamental fairness on our nation’s private as well as public campuses, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) dismissed a complaint against Harvard University. Wendy Murphy, a Boston lawyer, had alleged that revisions to Harvard’s disciplinary procedures—changes devised to eliminate baseless charges of misconduct between students—violated federal anti-discrimination laws. The OCR pointedly observed that Harvard’s new procedures are not unlawful, since the law "does not prohibit the use of due process. FIRE actively advised various critics of the old policy on what kinds of changes were needed, and it vigorously […]
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Harvard University: Threat to Discipline Student Newspaper Staff for Publishing Satirical Cartoon
November 19, 2002
The Harbus, a student newspaper at Harvard Business School (HBS), ran an editorial cartoon that criticized the school’s Career Services for severe and chronic technical problems during a crucial week for student job searches. The cartoon showed a computer screen with pop-up announcements about the incompetence and inefficiency of the program. One announcement had two words expressing the exasperation of HBS students: “incompetent morons.” The administration issued a verbal warning, causing the editor-in-chief to resign. Following public criticism by FIRE, HBS issued a statement detailing its regret that the incident chilled free expression on campus and affirmed its commitment to […]
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Harvard University: Proposed Speech Codes
November 12, 2002
Harvard Law School considered adopting a new racial speech guide, under the typical guise of a harassment policy. FIRE chastised this illiberal move by such an elite institution.
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Red Light Policies
Handbook for Students: General Regulations- Harassment
Speech Code Category: Harassment Policies
Last updated: August 19, 2016The College defines racial harassment as actions on the part of an individual or group that demean or abuse another individual or group because of racial or ethnic background. Such actions may include, but are not restricted to, using racial epithets, making racially derogatory remarks, and using racial stereotypes.
Free Speech Guidelines
Speech Code Category: Harassment Policies
Last updated: August 19, 2016There are obligations of civility and respect for others that underlie rational discourse. Racial, sexual, and intense personal harassment not only show grave disrespect for the dignity of others, but also prevent rational discourse. Behavior evidently intended to dishonor such characteristics as race, gender, ethnic group, religious belief, or sexual orientation is contrary to the pursuit of inquiry and education. Such grave disrespect for the dignity of others can be punished under existing procedures because it violates a balance of rights on which the University is based.
Handbook for Students: Regulations for Independent Student Organizations- Publicity and Solicitation
Speech Code Category: Protest and Demonstration Policies
Last updated: August 19, 2016Distribution of printed matter in the Houses, dormitories, Annenberg Hall, or on Harvard property must be approved by the Office of Student Life.
Handbook for Students: Regulations for Independent Student Organizations- Religion
Speech Code Category: Harassment Policies
Last updated: August 19, 2016The ability to express one’s views regarding religion is a significant freedom of speech that the College upholds. In some instances, this type of expression becomes an avenue for persuasion to affiliate with a particular religion. Discussion in this vein is prohibited when the educational and work environment of an individual or the community is jeopardized. Harassment is defined as actions on the part of an individual or group which demean or abuse another individual because of religious beliefs or that continue after the affected individual has requested a termination of that type of discussion. In all instances in which a particular religion sponsors an event or discussion, the individual or group initiating such contact must clearly identify its sponsorship or the sectarian religious nature of its agenda.
Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Policy
Speech Code Category: Harassment Policies
Last updated: August 19, 2016Sexual harassment is unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature, including unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, graphic, or physical conduct of a sexual nature, when: … such conduct is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that it interferes with or limits a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the University’s education or work programs or activities (hostile environment).
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A hostile environment can be created by persistent or pervasive conduct or by a single severe episode. The more severe the conduct, the less need there is to show a repetitive series of incidents to prove a hostile environment. Sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, and domestic and dating violence, is a form of sexual harassment.
In addition, the following conduct may violate this Policy: … Lewd or sexually suggestive comments, jokes, innuendoes, or gestures.
Free Speech Guidelines
Speech Code Category: Advertised Commitments to Free Expression
Last updated: August 19, 2016Free speech is uniquely important to the University because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free interchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning. Curtailment of free speech undercuts the intellectual freedom that defines our purpose. It also deprives some individuals of the right to express unpopular views and others of the right to listen to unpopular views.
Because no other community defines itself so much in terms of knowledge, few others place such a high priority on freedom of speech. As a community, we take certain risks by assigning such a high priority to free speech. We assume that the long-term benefits to our community will outweigh the short-term unpleasant effects of sometimes-noxious views. Because we are a community united by a commitment to rational processes, we do not permit censorship of noxious ideas. We are committed to maintaining a climate in which reason and speech provide the correct response to a disagreeable idea.
Members of the University do not share similar political or philosophical views, nor would such agreement be desirable. They do share, however, a concern for the community defined in terms of free inquiry and dissemination of ideas. Thus, they share a commitment to policies that allow diverse opinions to flourish and to be heard. In the words of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, the University must protect “the rights of its members to organize and join political associations, convene and conduct public meetings, publicly demonstrate and picket in orderly fashion, advocate and publicize opinion by print, sign, and voice.”
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Hard Line on Social Groups
July 13, 2017
By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf at Inside Higher Ed In a continued effort to reduce discrimination among campus groups, a Harvard University faculty committee has recommended fraternities, sororities and other exclusive clubs be shut down and students not be allowed join them, even though they are already off campus and lack university recognition. Read more here.
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Harvard reportedly rescinded admissions offers from at least 10 students for an obscene Facebook chat
June 5, 2017
By Peter Jacobs at Business Insider. Harvard has rescinded admissions offers from at least 10 students, according to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. The prospective members of the Harvard Class of 2021 reportedly were part of a small Facebook chat designed for admitted students to share explicit memes and messages. At one point, according to The Crimson, the group chat was titled “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens. . . .” Read more here.
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Harvard’s ‘pernicious’ war against single-sex clubs shows Penn ‘how not to proceed’
March 23, 2017
By Greg Piper at The College Fix British journalist Toby Young wrote a hilarious and cautionary memoir back in the day about how to blow your opportunities, as he did when he got hired by Vanity Fair and made a lifelong enemy out of Graydon Carter… Read more here.
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Conservative Thought is Silenced on Our Nation’s Campuses
February 6, 2017
by Kayleigh McEnany at The Hill I briskly walked through Belinda Hall and toward my afternoon class at Harvard Law School. My pace slowed as I approached a grouping of signs and a large banner that read, “It’s time to end racism at HLS.” … Read more here.
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Harvard Dean Chickens Out of Blacklisting Male-Only Club Members on Eve of Risky Faculty Vote
February 2, 2017
By Greg Piper at The College Fix Rakesh Khurana talks a big game but runs away when it’s clear that his one-man crusade to socially engineer the Harvard student body will get rebuked by faculty… Read more here.
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Harvard Creates a Blue-Ribbon Committee So It Can Safely Punish Male-Only Clubs
February 2, 2017
By Greg Piper at The College Fix. For every situation in life, there is an instructive scene from The Simpsons… Read more here.
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Anti-Male Club Policy at Harvard Could Be Changed Following Faculty Revolt, President Suggests
November 7, 2016
By Greg Piper at The College Fix Harvard President Drew Faust is starting to rethink the wisdom of imposing sanctions on students who belong to single-sex organizations such as final clubs, widely decried as an attack on students’ freedom of association… Read more here.
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Harvard Faculty Debate Final Club Sanctions
November 2, 2016
By Jonathan Shaw at Harvard Magazine Yesterday’s regular meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) took up a contentious topic: whether undergraduates have a right to join single-gender social organizations, including final clubs, sororities and fraternities, without penalty. At issue is a new policy, announced last May by dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, that would prohibit students who join such single-gender social organizations from holding leadership positions on athletic teams and in recognized student organizations, such as the Undergraduate Council, choral groups, or publications. Such students would also be ineligible for Rhodes scholarships and other fellowships that require institutional […]
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Harvard Allows Women, Not Men, To Evade Single-Sex Club Ban
August 16, 2016
By Blake Neff at The Daily Caller Harvard University has assured a women-only off-campus club it will be allowed to ignore a ban on single-sex club membership, as long as it makes a cosmetic change to its bylaws. It has not extended the privilege to all-male clubs… Read more here.
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Are Final Clubs Too Exclusive for Harvard?
August 2, 2016
By Sarah Maslin Nir at New York Times One midnight near semester’s end on the skirts of Harvard Yard, music thumped and laughs rang out from a colonnaded, Greek-revival mansion, the sort usually seen in Hollywood fantasies about fraternal campus life. But it was the scene outside that suggested something other than a frat party. This was the headquarters of the Fly, an exclusive men’s fellowship known here as a final club. At its side door stood a silver-haired man in tuxedo, checking names against a list of the lucky invited. Eager young women in micro-minis queued up… Read more here.
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Harvard’s Exclusive Men-Only Final Clubs are Drawing Intense Criticism
August 2, 2016
By Abby Jackson at Business Insider At Harvard University, the issue of exclusive, mostly men-only final clubs has roiled emotions on campus over the past year… Read more here.
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Stop Attacking the Education Department for Enforcing Title IX, 80 Advocacy Groups Say
July 13, 2016
By Tyler Kingkade at The Huffington Post A coalition of 80 organizations representing women, the LGBT community and minority groups issued a letter Wednesday defending the U.S. Department of Education’s increased Title IX enforcement efforts… Read more here.
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Ten Colleges And Universities Where Free Speech is in Danger
June 20, 2016
By Kelly McDonald at The Daily Caller These popular schools all have one thing in common: they use vaguely-worded policies to prevent the free exchange of ideas, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Below are ten colleges and universities that FIRE has designated “red light” schools. “A red light university has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech,” FIRE explains… Read more here.
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Where Should the Burden of Proof Lie in Campus Rape Cases?
June 17, 2016
By Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic A college student is accused of rape or sexual harassment by a classmate and denies the allegation. A campus investigation follows. At the end of the process, the presiding administrator must judge whether the charges against the accused have merit… Read more here.
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The Intellectual Clash Over Final Clubs
June 2, 2016
By Marina Bolotnikova at Harvard Magazine HARVARD COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS may not have anticipated the fierce and intensely public debate that would erupt in response to the announcement at the end of April that members of historically male final clubs, Greek organizations, and other off-campus, gender-exclusive social groups would soon face heavy sanctions. The Monday after the policy was announced—in the heart of reading period, and normally an exceptionally difficult time to persuade students to come out of their rooms—hundreds of Harvard women gathered outside Massachusetts Hall in one of the largest protests in the Yard in recent memory. A few weeks later, […]
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Harvard’s Punishment of Single-Sex Club Members Won’t Apply to Those at Student Newspaper
May 26, 2016
By Staff at The College Fix Blacklisted from Harvard student leadership because you are a member of a final club, fraternity or sorority? The Crimson is the place for you!… Read more here.
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Making Exclusive Clubs More Inclusive
May 24, 2016
By Jake New at Inside Higher Ed Looking to end “a system of privilege and oppression,” Northwestern University announced last week that most student groups on campus must begin admitting any interested students by next year or they will lose university funding. That could mean groups like the campus food magazine Spoon University and the student-run marketing firm Form & Function Marketing, which have in the past been selective, would have to take all who want to join… Read more here.
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Dershowitz and Other Professors Decry ‘Pervasive and Severe Infringement’ of Student Rights
May 18, 2016
By Jacob Gershman at The Wall Street Journal A group of law professors are accusing the civil rights office of the U.S. Education Department of taking “unlawful actions” that have led to “pervasive and severe infringements” of speech rights and due-process protections on college campuses… Read more here.
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Due Process and Sex Assaults
May 17, 2016
By Jake New at Inside Higher Ed Citing an erosion of free speech and due process on college campuses, a group of 21 law professors on Monday released an open letter alleging that the U.S. Department of Education has unlawfully expanded how colleges must define and respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment… Read more here.
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Could Single-Sex Final Clubs sue Harvard Over new Restrictions?
May 11, 2016
By Eric Levenson at Boston.com After Harvard issued new restrictions on students who join single-sex social groups, opponents raised the possibility of challenging the university in court on the grounds that Harvard violated the right to free association… Read more here.
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Eroding Student Freedom, one Authoritarian Policy at a Time
May 10, 2016
By Wendy Kaminer at WBUR Harvard University, ultra-exclusive dispenser of lifelong privileges, now claims that “privilege and exclusion (are) at odds with our deepest values.” Seriously. Does this mean that Harvard will begin loosening its admission requirements and start offering free tuition to all undergraduates (with the exception, perhaps, of gazillionaire kids)?… Read more here.
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Students, Activists Decry Harvard Sanctions on Single-Sex Groups
May 10, 2016
By Morgan Chalfant at The Washington Free Beacon Harvard University administrators are facing intense criticism from students and activists after establishing a policy that will sanction students who become members of unrecognized single-sex organizations… Read more here.
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National Fraternity and Sorority Groups Condemn Harvard’s New Policy On Single-Gender Clubs
May 9, 2016
By Tyler Kingkade at The Huffington Post A group of national fraternity associations on Monday criticized Harvard University’s announcement that the Ivy League school will bar members of unrecognized, single-sex social clubs from holding leadership positions on campus… Read more here.
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Angry at Harvard’s Attack on Freedom of Association? Vote! Quickly!
May 9, 2016
By Sasha Volokh at The Washington Post You may have heard about Harvard’s new policy, under which people who join single-gender associations (like fraternities or Harvard’s secretive “finals clubs”, none of which are formally recognized by Harvard) won’t be allowed to be athletic team captains or leaders of student groups and won’t be able to get recommendations for certain scholarships. (Here’s a Harvard Crimson article about it, here’s a post about it from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, here’s a Reason article about it, and here’s a Morning Mix postquestioning whether the ban should apply to all-women groups.)… Read […]
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National Fraternity and Sorority Groups Condemn Harvard’s New Policy on Single-Gender Clubs
May 9, 2016
By Tyler Kingkade at The Huffington Post A group of national fraternity associations on Monday criticized Harvard University’s announcement that the Ivy League school will bar members of unrecognized, single-sex social clubs from holding leadership positions on campus… Read more here.
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Harvard Takes Action Against Final Clubs
May 9, 2016
By Staff at Inside Higher Ed Harvard University announced plans Friday that would discourage students from joining final clubs — off-campus organizations, many of which bar women from membership — and unrecognized fraternities and sororities. Starting with new students next year, those who join these clubs will be barred from leadership positions in other student organizations and on athletic teams, and will not be eligible to be endorsed for top fellowships and scholarships. The move follows debate at Harvard, and a report noting that the clubs create an environment in which many students feel unwelcome and in which sexist treatment is […]
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Harvard to Ban Members of ‘Single-Gender Social Clubs’ From Holding Leadership Positions Across the University
May 7, 2016
By Tré Goins-Phillips at The Blaze Starting with Harvard University’s class 0f 2021, undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender clubs, like fraternities and sororities, will be barred from holding athletic team captaincies and leadership positions in all recognized college groups… Read more here.
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Harvard Will Punish Who Join Fraternities Because They’re ‘Privileged’
May 6, 2016
By Robby Soave at Reason Harvard University President Drew Faust has made the shameful decision to punish students who want to join male-only and female-only clubs… Read more here.
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Harvard to Bar Members of All-Male Clubs From Leading Groups
May 6, 2016
By Collin Binkley at ABC News Students who join Harvard’s male-only social clubs won’t be able to serve as sports captains or leaders of other campus groups starting in fall 2017… Read more here.
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Harvard Imposes PC Blacklist on Off-Campus Groups
May 6, 2016
By Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily One might conclude that is Harvard’s ultimate objective after the ultra-progressive university on Friday announced the imposition of a politically correct blacklist of “single-sex” off-campus organizations… Read more here.
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Harvard Intensifies Battle Against Single-Gender Clubs
May 6, 2016
By Nick Anderson and Justin Wm. Moyer at The Washington Post Harvard University on Friday announced new steps to combat gender discrimination in student social organizations, an action meant to curb the influence of certain venerable, all-male societies known as “final clubs” as well as fraternities, sororities and other groups that accept only men or only women… Read more here.
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Harvard Will Punish Students who Join Single-Sex Clubs
May 6, 2016
By Blake Neff at The Daily Caller Harvard University announced new policies Friday intended to punish any student who joins a single-sex social club… Read more here.
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Jefferson Muzzles go to 50 Colleges and Universities
April 20, 2016
By Eugene Volokh at The Washington Post The Thomas Jefferson Center (with which I’m involved as a member of the board of trustees) has just released its yearlyJefferson Muzzles, so I thought I’d pass along the center’s explanation of who the “winners” are this year. Note that the Ccnter supports academic freedom and free speech broadly, and not just those aspects that are legally protected by the First Amendment; so you’ll see many private institutions mentioned here, even though the First Amendment as such does not restrict private entities, as well as the public institutions to which the First Amendment applies… Read […]
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Why the Activist Left Can’t Help its Intolerance
March 31, 2016
By John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist In ancient Rome, damnatio memoriae was the practice of condemning Roman elites and emperors after death. The phrase means, “the condemnation of memory,” and the idea was to dishonor people by erasing them from history, usually by seizing their property, removing their name from public monuments, and destroying or re-working their statues. As you might imagine, those subject to damnatio memoriae tended to be traitors or deposed emperors—like Maximian, who ruled Rome for a decade before he was forced to commit suicide by Constantine the Great in 310… Read more here.
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Federal Judge Warns of “Decreasing Tolerance for Truly Free Expression” at Colleges
March 29, 2016
By Rebecca Downs at Red Alert Politics Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska, of the U.S. District Court of Southern New York told Harvard Law students that she is concerned with campus “free speech zones,” and other threats to free speech, expression, and debate. Preska was invited by the school’s Federalist Society chapter to discuss “The Sad State of the First Amendment on Campuses Today.”… Read more here.
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The New Dark Ages on Campus
March 15, 2016
By KC Johnson at Commentary Magazine As last fall’s wave of student protests arrived in Durham, North Carolina, a self-described “group of unaffiliated and concerned students” presented the “Demands of Black Voices.” The Duke University activists wanted “bias and diversity training” for many segments of the Duke community, a new university policy “concerning hate speech” toward “students of color,” a new administrator to address the complaints of students of color only, and permission for students of color to miss classes by citing “mental health trauma” from “racial incidents on campus.” Read more here.
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Why Bashing ‘Politically Correct’ Campuses Is Hurting Conservatism
January 18, 2016
By Jim Sleeper at Alternet Look Who’s Complaining Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising — undirected by students, professors or deans but scripted, funded and promoted by people off-campus — that blames liberals for trying to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Speech codes. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. We’ve all read and heard disturbing accounts of such measures’ ubiquity and oppressiveness on campus after campus, their students depicted as demanding them en masse and administrators as rushing to establish them. … Read more here.
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The Phony Debate About Political Correctness
January 14, 2016
By Erica Hellerstein and Judd Legum at Think Progress In 1991, New York Magazine published an influential cover story, titled “Are You Politically Correct?” The headline was splashed across the glossy’s front page in bold red and white letters, followed by a list of supposed “politically correct” questions: … Read more here.
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Senate Chairman Demands Department of Ed Give a Legal Reason for Dumping Due Process
January 8, 2016
By Peter Maxwell at The College Fix Arne Duncan’s temporary replacement isn’t getting a honeymoon from the chairman of a Senate subcommittee, who is upset about the Department of Education’s machinations against colleges. … Read more here.
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Lawsuit: White Student Bragged About Sex with Black Athletes, Then Got Them Expelled for Rape
January 6, 2016
By Robby Soave at Reason.com Two black athletes have sued a private college in Ohio, the University of Findlay, for expelling them without even a semblance of due process after they were accused of rape by a white female student. … Read more here.
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Congressional Appropriators Reward Education Department Wrongdoing
December 26, 2015
By Hans Bader at Examiner.com At Powerline, lawyer Paul Mirengoff described one of the many disturbing provisionsburied in the budget-busting omnibus spending bill recently passed by Congress as part of a compromise with the White House (a monstrosity known as “the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016”). It increases the budget of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which has issued many unvetted and uncodified rules seemingly in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. As he notes, the bill grants OCR a 7 percent budget increase. Mirengoff notes that OCR often ignores the law by “defining perfectly legal conduct […]
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College President Blasts Millennial Students for Being Overly-Sensitive
December 2, 2015
By Vinnie Rotondaro at National Catholic Reporter The president of an evangelical Christian college is making news for writing an open letter that berates “our culture” for teaching American youth to be “self-absorbed and narcissistic.” “Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims,” he wrote. “Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them ‘feel bad’ about themselves, is a ‘hater,’ a ‘bigot,’ an ‘oppressor,’ and a ‘victimizer.’” Dr. Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, wrote the letter after a student told him he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13 — “If I speak in […]
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Trigger Warning Skepticism
December 2, 2015
By Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed Much of the debate thus far over trigger warnings — the flagging of specific course content that might offend or otherwise upset students — has centered on anecdotes, some of them obviously controversial. At Oberlin College, for example, proposed trigger warning guidelines said that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart might merit a trigger warning. The idea upset many professors who said labeling it as excessively violent could undermine the experience of reading the novel. And some Columbia University students’ request that Ovid’sMetamorphoses be flagged as a poem about rape earned similar criticism. Supporters of trigger […]
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How Parents can Avoid Spending Thousands on Colleges that Host Student Storm-Troopers
December 1, 2015
By Thomas Sowell at New York Post Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate pre-emptive surrender by college administrators — such as at the University of Missouri recently — bring back memories of the 1960s for those of us old enough to remember what it was like being there and seeing firsthand how painful events unfolded. At Harvard back in 1969, students seized control of the administration building and began releasing to the media information from confidential personnel files of professors. But when university president Nathan Pusey called in the police […]
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Freedom Of Speech More Unwelcome Among Liberal Students, Faculty
November 22, 2015
By Kathryn Watson at The Daily Caller Liberal college students and faculty members are far more likely to disinvite a campus speaker than conservatives, but conservatives succeed slightly more often, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education database, which defends students’ and professors’ First Amendment rights, documented 286 efforts to disinvite scheduled campus speakers between 2000 and 2014. One hundred and sixty student groups and faculty “from the left” of the speaker tried to disinvite the individual during the period, according to FIRE. Only 96 students and faculty “from the right” of the […]
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Ivy League Schools Stomp On Freedom Of Speech
November 20, 2015
By Kathryn Watson at The Daily Caller Five of the nation’s eight Ivy League schools impose huge restrictions on the First Amendment speech rights of their students, according to ratings from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). As allegations of racial discrimination fuel campus protests and spark free-speech challenges across the country, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University and Princeton University all receive “red light” ratings — the worst in FIRE’s red, yellow and green light rating system — for having policies that significantly restrict free expression. Yale University and Dartmouth College both receive “yellow light” ratings for […]
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How Sexual Harassment Codes Threaten Academic Freedom
October 23, 2015
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason.com In its zeal to spread “gender justice,” the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) threatens to stifle academic freedom and infantilize women, says feminist legal expert and New York Law School Professor Nadine Strossen. At a recent talk at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the former American Civil Liberties Union head warned that current campus policies to curb sexual harassment are overbroad and dangerous. And while “safety”-mongering students deserve some of the blame, bureaucrats are the biggest progenitors of this paranoid style in American academia. “By threatening to pull […]
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‘Do As I Say, Not As I Do,’ Lectures Harvard Law School Dean
May 29, 2015
By Harvey Silverglate at WGBH News University administrators walk a fine line between placating their politically-correct academic constituencies as well as their big-dollar alumni and donors. Consequently, it is a rare institution that espouses a clear and consistent message. But the electronic age is making it harder for blatant pandering to go undetected, as Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow is likely to learn. Dean Minow published a co-authored (with Michael McConnell, director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center) opinion piece that appeared in The Boston Globe on the morning of Harvard’s Commencement, a day when many important Harvard supporters […]
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Harvard Faculty Backs Democrats 96% of the Time, Says School Paper
May 1, 2015
By Maxim Lott at Fox News Republicans running for president might as well skip any fundraisers at Ivy League universities like Harvard, where a new analysis shows 96 percent of faculty donations over the last three years went to Democrats. Academia in general, and the elite northeastern schools in particular, have long been seen as a bastion for left-wing professors. Nationally, about two-thirds of college professors say they are liberal and less than a tenth identify themselves as conservative, according to one study. The imbalance at Harvard, uncovered by the student newspaper Harvard Crimson surprised even Harvard administrators. “If someone gets in trouble […]
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Reminder To Harvard Law: Department of Ed’s Rape Standards Aren’t Enforceable
December 31, 2014
By Greg Piper at The College Fix The university that’s “probably best equipped” to challenge the legal basis for the Department of Education’s slanted sexual-assault guidelines has just given up, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education says. This week Harvard Law School resolved a Title IX investigation by the department’s Office for Civil Rights by, among other things, lowering its evidence standard in investigations to “preponderance” from the higher “clear and convincing” standard, as The College Fix noted. The school should have stood up to the office, citing the procedural irregularities that accompanied its supposedly binding guidance from 2011, […]
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Harvard Students Push To End Rape Law Classes, Arguing Discomfort
December 22, 2014
By Michael F. Haverluck at OneNewsNow In the wake of college students recently claiming that they were too traumatized to finish their final exams because of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury rulings, students at Harvard Law School are pushing their professors to stop teaching about law dealing with sexual violence so that they won’t have to suffer from any emotional distress. Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk reports that students have specifically pressured her and her colleagues to not include any material in their exam questions about sexual violence as a means of protecting sensitive students from […]
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‘Trigger Warnings’ Prevent Professors From Teaching Rape Law
December 17, 2014
By Ashley Dobson at Red Alert Politics The anti-rape culture movement and an excessive need for “trigger warnings” are preventing law professors from doing their job, one professor says. Jeannie Suk, a professor of law at Harvard University, recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker that argues against trigger warning policies which infringe on instructors’ academic freedom and deny students the opportunity to learn about an important area of the law. Suk said that it has become almost impossible to teach rape law in the classroom because of possibly offending or “triggering” students. From Suk’s piece: “Students seem more anxious about […]
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Harvard Liberals Hate New Campus Sex Laws
October 19, 2014
By Cathy Young at The Daily Beast The increasingly contentious debate about the proper response to sexual assault on college campuses took a new turn on Oct. 15, when The Boston Globe ran an op-ed signed by twenty-eight current and retired Harvard Law School professors expressing “strong objections” to the school’s new Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures. The sharply worded statement not only slammed the university administration for forcing the policy on all of Harvard’s schools without adequate discussion but also charged that the new procedures for handling complaints of sexual misconduct “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process [and] are […]
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Law Professors Attack Harvard’s Stricter Sexual Assault Policies
October 15, 2014
By Natalie Kitroeff at Bloomberg Businessweek Members of the Harvard Law School faculty strongly condemned the university’s new sexual assault policies in an open letter published in the Boston Globe on Oct. 15. The group of 28 law professors said that the approach is unfair to people accused of sexual misconduct and that it “lack[s] the most basic elements of fairness and due process.” Harvard University announced new procedures for handling accusations of sexual assault in July, including the use of expert investigators to look into allegations of anything from harassment in a lab to rape, according to the Globe. The university, which is one […]
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Liberal Harvard Groupthink Criticized By… Michael Bloomberg?
May 30, 2014
By Robby Soave at Reason Online Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is infamous for his liberty-unfriendly views on racial profiling, gun control and public health. But as the saying goes, even a broken, miserably authoritarian clock is right twice a day. Bloomberg, who delivered the commencement address to Harvard University’s graduating class yesterday, harshly criticized the climate of leftist indoctrination at Ivy League campuses. “There was more disagreement among the old Soviet politburo than there is among Ivy League donors,” he said, noting that 96 percent of Harvard faculty members and administrators donated to President Obama’s re-election campaign. Bloomberg warned that some campuses seem […]
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Harvard Latest School Moving to Oust Graduation Speaker
May 18, 2014
At Fox News In what seems to be a trend, another college is being urged to rescind its invitation to a graduation speaker. This time the school is the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which is scheduled to hold its commencement May 28. The target is Democratic Colorado state Sen. Michael Johnston, an education reformer, who was invited last month to give the school’s 2014 commencement address, the Washington Post reported Saturday. Dozens of students and alumni at the school are unhappy over the selection. They have issued a statement that accuses Johnston of embracing “a vision of education reform that relies heavily […]
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Is Michael Bloomberg Persona Non Grata at Harvard?
March 17, 2014
By Avi Snyder at National Review Online Another day, another college, another effort to protest a commencement speaker. The Harvard Crimson reports that some students have expressed opposition to Harvard’s selection of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg as this year’s commencement speaker. At issue is Bloomberg’s vigorous support for stop-and-frisk policing policies. Harvard College Black Men’s Forum President Rodriguez S. Roberts ’15 also raised questions about the selection of the former mayor. “Harvard’s bringing him to deliver the commencement address could be taken as either an endorsement of this policy or as simple ignorance thereof,” Roberts wrote in an email. “To be honest, […]
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‘Disinvitation Season’ Begins on College Campuses
March 14, 2014
By Adam Kissel at Minding the Campus A college commencement is a splendid time to celebrate student achievement. But it’s “disinvitation season” again, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education observes: the time when intolerant students and faculty advocate against their school’s choice of commencement speaker, sometimes causing the speaker to be disinvited. These power-hungry protesters demonstrate how little they have learned about tolerance in a diverse society where people say and do things that others dislike. And all too often, as at Harvard and at Rutgers, they have learned this intolerance from their own professors. Is former New York mayor […]
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Are US colleges and universities becoming free-speech-free?
March 10, 2014
by Richard Cameron at Communities Digital News WASHINGTON, March 10, 2014 – Earlier this month, a Harvard senior named Sandra Y.L. Corn wrote an opinion piece in the university’s student publication, Crimson, arguing that academic freedom be tossed overboard in favor of an arbitrary standard of ‘academic justice’. The idea was that because Harvard still permits Professors to even discuss ideas, concepts and theories which the majority (or perhaps – bellicose minority) of the student body considers politically incorrect, a narrow, sanitized curriculum should be adopted, which entirely excludes opposing propositions. A tsunami of intolerance among progressives is leaving academic blight in it’s wake […]
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Two Blind Sociologists and an Elephant
March 7, 2013
The easy criticism of a book like Becoming Right is that it falls into the “conservatives in the mist” genre, in which liberal academicians and journalists venture forth into the world of heartland conservatism, Tea Party ferment, or in this case right-wing campus activism only to find their biases confirmed. Some have already accused this book of a similar hackish approach. Yet the label doesn’t quite fit. The thesis here is fairly limited, and the authors, UCSD sociologist Amy Binder and Ph.D. Student Kate Wood, are reasonably fair toward their subjects—though one wonders why they feel the need to put phrases like “politically correct” […]
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Don’t speak: Report ranks 2012’s ‘Worst Colleges for Free Speech’ in the country
April 2, 2012
Last week, the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education released its second-annual “Worst Colleges for Free Speech” list. The Philadelphia-based nonprofit named 12 U.S. colleges and universities that, in its view, continue to impose limits on student speech — even after intense pressure from FIRE and others. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff released the list on his Huffington Post blog. Topping the dozen was the University of Cincinnati, due to a pending civil rights lawsuit filed against them by Young Americans for Liberty, a Ron Paul-inspired activist group. In February, the officially sanctioned student organization was limited to a small “free […]
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Over the Line
December 8, 2011
In an unusual move, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted this week to eliminate two summer school courses in economics because of anti-Muslim statements the instructor made in an op-ed published in India. When word about the op-ed spread in July, some Harvard students demanded that Subramanian Swamy be fired. At the time, Harvard pledged to look into the situation, but noted that it is “central to the mission of a university to protect free speech, including that of Dr. Swamy and of those who disagree with him.” But faculty members this week cited the nature of his statements as […]
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Harvard instructor under fire for anti-terrorism op-ed attacking Muslims
August 1, 2011
A Harvard Summer School economics instructor is under fire and facing calls for his termination after publishing an article calling for strong political action to combat Islamic terrorism in India. On July 16, Harvard instructor Subramanian Swamy wrote an op-ed in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis, “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror,” in response to the July 13th Mumbai bombings that killed 23 people. In the op-ed, Swamy wrote that Muslims in India “are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” The solution, Swamy wrote, is a unified […]
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Harvard Instructor May Face Removal Over Anti-Muslim Op-Ed
July 30, 2011
Subramanian Swamy, a Harvard Summer School economics instructor and a political leader in India, wrote an op-ed called “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror” for the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis on July 16, in response to the July 13th Mumbai bombings that killed 23 people. The article, that “many have called offensive and inflammatory,” according to the Harvard Crimson, has since spurred over 200 people to sign a petition demanding that the administration “repudiate Swamy’s remarks and terminate his association with the University.” In the op-ed in question, Swamy proposes the following response to Islamic terrorism in India: […]
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Harvard backs off media policy
September 2, 2009
By Duff Wilson at The New York Times Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday. “We need to be very careful,” said Dr. Nancy E. Oriol, the dean of students, who helped develop the policy. Promising it would be revised, she said the policy was intended to help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics. But several students said the policy was an attempt to […]
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Harvard’s sad censorship campaign
August 27, 2009
By Jessica Peck Corry at Human Events Poor, poor Harvard. The prestigious institution has once again found itself in the embarrassing position of defending a push for campus censorship. This round’s sad irony: student leaders are now the ones trying to throw the First Amendment out the school bus window. The Harvard Law Review, a student-edited publication claiming President Barack Obama and four current U.S. Supreme Court justices as alumni, recently endorsed a major screw up on its own pages after it ran an eight-page factually-void analysis of the nation’s latest First Amendment case law. The piece, authored and edited by unnamed […]
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Prof. Gates’ Unconstitutional Arrest: There’s a First Amendment right to be rude to a cop
July 28, 2009
By Harvey Silverglate at Forbes Magazine The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said–assuming, for argument’s sake, the officer’s version of events as […]
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Free speech at Harvard
February 25, 2009
ONE OF THE elections I’m fascinated with this year is for . . . Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Why, you say, should we non-Harvard types care about an election for the lesser of Harvard’s two governing boards? Because two outspoken candidates are trying to storm the gates, arguing that the storied university needs to embrace free speech unambiguously, reform its disciplinary procedures, and focus more on its students. And because what happens at Harvard doesn’t stay at Harvard, but rather reverberates throughout the academic world. As co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Cambridge lawyer and writer Harvey […]
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Silverglate seeks spot as university overseer
February 19, 2009
On October 19, 1869, during his inaugural address as President of Harvard College, Charles William Eliot described the central role alumni would play in the governing of the University: “The real function of the Board of Overseers is to stimulate and watch the President and Fellows. The Overseers should always hold towards the Corporation an attitude of suspicious vigilance. They ought always to be pushing and prying.” The Board of Overseers is a group of 30 alumni, five of whom are elected by the over 300,000 University alumni each year to serve six-year terms. This year, alumni will choose a […]
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What you can’t say at Harvard Law School
September 24, 2008
Harvey Silverglate is a lawyer, newspaper columnist, blogger, civil liberties activist and author (“The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses,” written with Alan Charles Kors). I’ve known him for many years, and consider him as close to a free-speech absolutist – in the worthy tradition of former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black – as anyone currently engaged in the never-ending battle against censorship. One doesn’t have to agree with every position Silverglate takes – I doubt he expects that. But it’s good for the culture and the country to have him out there, arguing, badgering, publicizing, provoking. […]
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Network Aims to Help Harassed Campus Conservatives
December 26, 2005
WASHINGTON—Though Christopher Flickinger calls himself “dean” and poses in parodistic photos waving a small American flag and looking stern, he says he’s never been more serious about eliminating what he claims is pervasive anti-conservatism on college campuses today. “When I was on campus, I had no help,” the recent Ohio State University graduate told FOXNews.com. “I was harassed, intimidated, shouted down.” Flickinger, schooled in broadcast journalism, said he wants to provide the support he never had as a lonely conservative in college. That’s why in November he launched the Network of College Conservatives to act in part as “a link […]
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Campus Conscience Police?
December 21, 2005
“Over one’s inner mind, and self, no one has coercive power.” So write attorneys Jordan Lorence and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors of the just-published Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience—that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves—this is welcome news. Political correctness is the belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by […]
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Codes censor speech
September 1, 2005
Given the section you are reading, it should come as no surprise that I describe myself as a very opinionated person. But, as somewhat of a pessimist, my columns usually focus on what’s wrong with policy X or ideology Y, and my usual targets are conservative, right-wing issues. I tend to focus on criticizing the right-wing because of its current political prominence. However, I have a confession to make: There are many liberal left-wing ideas I’m equally unimpressed with, but haven’t written about. For example, I disapprove of gay adoptions, believe immigration laws should be inflexible and feel popular feminists […]
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Polly gaffes
April 16, 2005
By Mark Bergin at World Magazine Scott McConnell disputes the postmodern fads of elementary pedagogy, calling multiculturalism and lax discipline educational stumbling blocks. The former graduate student at Le Moyne College in Syracuse advocates a more traditional classroom—complete with cultural value judgments and corporal punishment. Such ideas, according to Le Moyne officials, merit expulsion. Mr. McConnell’s story tops the Collegiate Network’s 2005 Campus Outrage Awards, an annual listing of ridiculous happenings in academia. The Pollys—so dubbed in mockery of political correctness run amok—are meant to incite more than just chuckles among conservatives. “We want to focus national attention on the absurdity […]
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‘Pollys’ Spotlight Politically Correct Excesses On U.S. Campuses
April 14, 2005
By Jim Brown at Agape Press A higher education watchdog group has unveiled its annual “Campus Outrage Awards,” documenting the worst “absurdities” and most egregious examples of political correctness on college campuses this year. The president of Harvard University receiving a faculty vote of no confidence for suggesting that innate differences might account for some of the inequalities between men and women in certain fields of endeavor; and Duke University hosting a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference with a segment designed to recruit students for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad — those are just two of the dubious honorees […]
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Transparency or a ‘Selig Strategy’?
April 1, 2005
As Commissioner Bud Selig and several prominent players attempted to evade subpoenas for recent House of Representatives hearings on baseball’s steroid problem, Rep. Henry Waxman observed, “What strikes me is that baseball doesn’t want to investigate it and they don’t want us to investigate it.” The California congressman summed up baseball’s policy as “don’t know, don’t tell.” This “Selig Strategy” could also describe the academy’s response to indications that the nation’s humanities and social sciences departments suffer from a lack of intellectual and programmatic diversity. Calls for outside inquiries have been denounced as violations of academic freedom, while few if […]
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2005 Campus Outrage Awards
April 1, 2005
Collegiate Network Duke spends over $50,000 on a tactical training session for activists dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, while a graduate student at LeMoyne College is expelled for writing that light spanking has a legitimate role in classroom discipline. A UNLV professor is engulfed in a whirlwind of controversy after making a remark about the financial planning habits of homosexuals, while a student at Occidental College is convicted of sexually harassing the whole school over the radio. Ward Churchill is defended by the academic community for declaring that victims of the World Trade Center bombing deserved […]
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Free speech on campus
March 24, 2005
LET’S DISPENSE with some tangents right off. It’s a bad idea for teachers to spank students. There’s evidence that women are not innately handicapped when it comes to math and science. And it’s offensive hyperbole to cast the World Trade Center victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns.” But that aside, we don’t have any problems with a student writing a school paper supporting corporal punishment, a university president raising the issue of possible gender differences, and a professor espousing radical ideas. In fact, our society and our universities are better off if faculty and students are allowed to […]
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Insults and the Constitution
March 7, 2005
Insult is powerful. Insult begets both rage and humor, and often at the same time. Consider the dialogue in “Romance,” a new play by David Mamet in New York. A cast of six characters, all of themmen, some gay and at least one of them Jewish, goesafter each other. A Protestant defense lawyer and the Jew he’s in court to defend hate eachother. “You people can’t order a cheese sandwich without mentioning the Holocaust,” shouts the lawyer. “I hired a goy lawyer,” responds his client. “It’s like going to a straight hairdresser.” The satire aims for humor, but it’s humor […]
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Let’s hear all voices
February 10, 2005
What a relief that Assumption University refused to be intimidated by religious zealots. If the venerable Catholic institution at the University of Windsor had buckled under pressure from anti-abortion activists and rescinded its invitation to Stephen Lewis to speak Sunday, it would have been a body blow to free expression and to the U of W’s already shaky credibility. Lewis, arguably the finest orator Canada has produced in half a century, is that rarest of individuals, a prominent ex-politician who chose service to humanity over money-grubbing self-aggrandizement. While his peers scrambled to join corporate boards, feed at the public trough […]
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Colleges value civility over free expression
February 8, 2005
Write about free speech on American college campuses occasionally, and you quickly come to realize that a good many people honor the concept mostly in the breach. Every column defending free expression generates a number of emails with this basic message: Of course I support free speech, I just don’t think someone should be allowed to say that. The anti-speech sentiment is not always couched quite that explicitly, of course. Usually the caveat is about the need to realize just how hurtful a controversial statement is to this group or that, whose self-image or self-confidence or self-worth will be irreparably […]
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Why Feminist Careerists Neutered Larry Summers
February 5, 2005
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male. Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets. Summers’s suggestion — now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies — was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only […]
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Say it ain’t so
January 28, 2005
THE INMATES TOOK over the asylum at Harvard last week, thanks to President Lawrence Summers’s ignominious, ill-considered, and likely ill-fated retreat in the face of an organized assault by highly politicized feminist academics and their allies. At issue were comments Summers made, at a January 14 conference, merely stating the obvious: that genetic differences between the sexes might in part account for women’s underrepresentation in math, science, and engineering, and that research must be conducted to answer the hard questions and devise remedies. He should have known, however, that in the modern academy, it is no longer acceptable to speak […]
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Harvard flap prompts query: How free is campus speech?
January 28, 2005
BOSTON AND CHICAGO – In the two weeks since Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between the sexes may partly account for male dominance in science and math, the ensuing frenzy of discussion has become a kind of national Rorschach test. Editorialists excoriate his sexism or applaud his candor. The National Organization for Women has called for his resignation. Academics are poring over studies that deal with nature, nurture, and gender differences. Dr. Summers’s comments – which he said were intended to provoke discussion about why women were underrepresented in top science posts – have ended up […]
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Campus Christians: not always at ease
January 25, 2005
When Chris Gruener moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin graduate school, he looked forward to experiencing the region’s renowned tolerance of all people and lifestyles. Mr. Gruener was raised in a devout Christian family near Seattle and attended a Baptist high school and a Christian college, where he studied business. His passion, however, was literature, and so he was excited to begin a master’s program in English at Sonoma State University. But during his first semester, a classroom incident put a damper on Gruener’s ardor. While lecturing on James Joyce’s rejection of the church, a professor drew […]
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Speech Codes: Alive and Well at Colleges…
August 1, 2003
By Greg Lukianoff and Harvey Silverglate at The Chronicle of Higher Education Five years ago, a higher-education editor for The New York Times informed one of us, Harvey Silverglate, that Neil L. Rudenstine — then president of Harvard University — had insisted that Harvard did not have, much less enforce, any “speech codes.” Silverglate suggested the editor dig deeper, because virtually any undergraduate could contest the president’s claim. A mere three years earlier, the faculty of the Harvard Law School had adopted “Sexual Harassment Guidelines” targeted at “seriously offensive” speech. The guidelines were passed in response to a heated campus […]
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US review finds no bias in Harvard’s revised policy on sex assault
April 2, 2003
By Jenna Russell at The Boston Globe An eight-month investigation by the US Department of Education concluded yesterday that Harvard College is not violating the rights of students by requiring them to provide ”corroborating information” before it will investigate their complaints of sexual assault. The attorney who asked for the investigation on behalf of Harvard students said she was satisfied with the outcome, and credited the federal inquiry with forcing Harvard to make key changes in its policy. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified Boston attorney Wendy J. Murphy in a letter that it would close its investigation yesterday, after finding […]
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ACLU Sues U. Maryland Over So-Called ‘Free-Speech’ Zones
December 19, 2002
By Sarah Lesher at University Wire
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Harvard Students Protest Crimson Article
March 20, 2001
By Brian MacQuarrie at The Boston Globe CAMBRIDGE — In a clash pitting racial sensitivities against free speech, 100 protesters marched to the Harvard Crimson yesterday and denounced the campus newspaper for publishing an opinion piece that criticized the university’s Asian-American students. ”It’s like Ku Klux Klan propaganda; newspapers wouldn’t print that,” said Alice Wong, 19, a Harvard freshman. In a weekend magazine piece titled ”The Invasian,” Harvard sophomore Justin Fong assailed Asian-American students for what he called a culture of ”self-segregation” at Harvard. Yesterday, after protesters accused him of using hurtful language and perpetuating racist attitudes, Fong, a sixth-generation Asian-American, said […]
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Thought Reform 101
March 1, 2000
At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as “mandatory” for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with “a person of color for a day.” In Swarthmore College’s dormitories, in the fall of 1998, first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some […]
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FIRE to Harvard alumni: Urge Harvard to protect freedom of association
July 26, 2017
Calling all Harvard alumni: Harvard students need your help! As you may already know, two weeks ago, a university committee recommended that students be punished by the Administrative Board if they are believed to have joined any off-campus social club. Not just single-gender clubs, any club at all! FIRE has helped lead the fight against administrators’ plan to blacklist, and now outright discipline, students for joining sororities, fraternities, or final clubs because we believe in the fundamental human right of freedom of association, a right that Harvard promises to its students. This latest recommendation, which would entirely wipe out freedom […]
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In rescinding admission offers over memes, Harvard shows its own poor judgment
July 25, 2017
Last month, Harvard College revealed that it had rescinded its admission offers to 10 incoming freshmen for the students’ involvement in a private group chat where they created and exchanged “obscene” memes. The memes that caused the college to rescind the offers contained a variety of jokes involving race, child abuse, school shootings, the Holocaust, and more. For example, one of the memes had the caption “when you’re tryna sleep but your neighbor is beating his kids” above an image of a cartoon character with an implied erection. Another had the caption “when the mexican kid hangs himself in the […]
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Shocking twist: Harvard club ban had only 7 votes from 27-member committee
July 24, 2017
In the Harvard social organization ban/blacklist saga, it is not an exaggeration to say that each development has been more outrageous than the last. The latest one comes from what former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis described as “the blockbuster news story of the year by the [The Harvard] Crimson.” On Friday, the Crimson reported that the surprising recommendation to ban all social organizations received only 7 votes from the 27-member Committee on the Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations, which had been empaneled to review implementation of last year’s plan to blacklist members of off-campus single-gender clubs. And according to […]
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Harvard students, faculty, alumni, vow fight against ‘deeply disturbing’ social club ban
July 17, 2017
Members of the Harvard community say they will push back against a faculty committee’s recommendation that all exclusive social clubs be banned. In a report released last week by a committee expected to dial back last year’s controversial policy to sanction single-gender clubs like fraternities and sororities, the committee instead doubled down, urging Harvard to eliminate all off-campus social clubs due to their “pernicious influence.” If enacted, noncompliance would prompt formal punishment. “We’re all very disappointed and angered,” said Conor Healy, a rising junior and president of the Harvard College Open Campus Initiative, which advocates for free expression on campus. […]
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Harvard’s Steven Pinker on proposal to ban social clubs: ‘This is a terrible recommendation’
July 13, 2017
Members of the Harvard University community are reacting to news yesterday that a faculty committee recommends the Ivy League institution eliminate all exclusive social clubs. The ban would effectively shutter any Harvard-connected off-campus clubs, including all fraternities and sororities, by the year 2022 — despite Harvard’s continued promises of unfettered freedom of association for its students. In a statement to FIRE, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has detailed his objections to the policy. Among Pinker’s accolades for his groundbreaking work in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, are two Pulitzer Prize nominations and numerous awards from groups like […]
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Harvard committee proposes banning all social clubs; punishing violators
July 12, 2017
Harvard students could soon be banned from joining any private social organization or club. If the recommendations contained in a just-released, 22-page report are enacted, Harvard would extend previously-proposed sanctions against students joining single-gender clubs, to all “fraternities, sororities, and similar organizations,” regardless of their co-ed status. And instead of instituting a blacklist — leaving non-compliant students unable to captain Harvard-recognized sports teams, or be nominated for prestigious scholarships, for example — violators would be subject to formal “disciplinary action.” This latest proposal comes from the same faculty committee empaneled to “revise or replace” a previous, controversial proposal to blacklist […]
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The bell tolls for Harvard President Drew Faust — not the Liberty Bell!
June 16, 2017
This classic FIRE headline marks the news, which broke Wednesday, that Drew Gilpin Faust will be stepping down as president of Harvard University next year. Faust’s decade-long tenure as president has frequently seen the institution set at odds both with FIRE and its own promises to students. A quick and non-exhaustive rundown includes: In 2008, Harvard threatened to cancel a party planned by two Latino student groups because the party was to be called “Barely Legal.” In response to a letter from FIRE, Harvard claimed that it would and should spend time policing party themes because the party was to […]
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About Harvard’s decision to revoke admission offers
June 7, 2017
Having spent the last decade defending student and faculty rights, I’ve learned a couple of things about exactly what type of campus civil liberties violations receive the most media attention. It’s not always what one might expect. For example, I remember feeling shocked that a student’s expulsion over a Facebook post protesting the construction of a parking garage didn’t warrant above-the-fold coverage. I was amazed that students blacklisted for complaining to administrators about being subjected to mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, performed by their peers, somehow didn’t go viral and make its way onto every social media timeline in the country. And […]
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Harvard president defends free speech in commencement speech; Harvard still actively suppresses student rights
May 26, 2017
Yesterday, Harvard celebrated its 366th commencement, and those watching in the audience and at home were treated to an ironic display as Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust gave an address in full support of free speech. The speech includes an eloquent defense of the merits of free speech, making many of the points that FIRE has been making and endorsing since our founding in 1999. Especially compelling is Faust’s nuanced treatment of the cost of freedom of expression, how that cost is necessarily paid for the pursuit of the truth, and the responsibility it places in us as members of […]
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FIRE Q&A: Harvard sorority president Rebecca Ramos
May 2, 2017
Since it was first announced a year ago, FIRE has repeatedly criticized numerous aspects of Harvard University’s plan to sanction members of off-campus, single-gender clubs. The proposal would institute a Communist-era blacklist, barring students in all-male or all-female social organizations like fraternities and sororities from leadership roles in campus clubs, preventing them from captaining sports teams, rendering them ineligible for prestigious scholarship recommendations, and more. While apparently intended to target the controversial, unofficial Harvard men’s final clubs and curb both gender-based inequality and sexual assault on campus, the blanket ban has drawn the ire of a number of student groups, […]
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Harvard anti-gender discrimination policy threatens to violate Title IX by recommending gender discrimination
April 7, 2017
We’ve chronicled the myriad problems with Harvard’s plan to sanction members of single gender organizations, initially proposed last May as as a means of ending “gender-based discrimination [which] is understood as unwise, unenlightened, and untenable.” While a worthy objective, the policy would destroy Harvard students’ right to freedom of association by blacklisting and sanctioning members of off-campus groups like final clubs, fraternities, and sororities. It has also been mired in months of controversy after being introduced with little student or faculty input and, apparently, even less thought about its practical consequences. Never has that been clearer than right now, after […]
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Faculty motion against Harvard blacklist policy kicked to committee led by policy’s architect
March 28, 2017
Dean who drafted controversial sanctions proposal and said he would implement it will head oversight committee. That committee will now review a faculty motion opposing the sanctions. Harvard is poised to advance its discriminatory policy unchecked. A brief flicker of hope in the ongoing saga over Harvard University’s blacklist of single-gender social organizations (which would extend to final clubs, sororities, and fraternities) was snuffed out last week when Harvard’s Faculty Council delegated a motion opposing the sanctions to a committee chaired by the very Harvard administrator who drafted the those sanctions in the first place. Just two weeks ago, David A. […]
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Harvard blacklist saga gets even more unbelievable as dean appoints self to review self
March 9, 2017
The Roman poet Juvenal once posed the question, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Or, as it’s generally said in English, “Who watches the watchmen?” In light of recent developments in the saga of Harvard University’s proposed sanctions against members of single-gender social organizations originally recommended by Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana, Khurana’s answer appears to be: “I will watch myself, thank you very much.” The drafting and implementation of the proposed sanctions that would blacklist members of these single-sex clubs — including students in sororities, fraternities, and final clubs — and, in turn, gut associational rights at the Ivy League […]
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Harvard dean: I will implement ‘nearly all’ of super blacklist
March 6, 2017
In a dark development in the on-going saga of Harvard sanctions on members of “unregistered single-gender social organizations,” Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana today sent Harvard students the 46-page “Final Report of the Implementation Committee for the Policy on Membership in Single Gender Social Organizations” along with a statement that he will be accepting “nearly all” of its recommendations. The report is the one that was kept under lock and key for months, and of which even the committee members who wrote it were denied copies. (No red flags there!) It is also the same report we described as […]
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Original Harvard blacklist committee: How can we make this worse?
February 24, 2017
FIRE has painstakingly covered the proposed sanctions at Harvard that would blacklist members of single-gender organizations such as fraternities, sororities, and “final clubs,” barring them from leadership positions and prestigious programs like the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships. These proposed sanctions eviscerate Harvard students’ freedom of association. FIRE said as much in an open letter earlier this month to the Harvard community printed as a full-page ad in The Harvard Crimson. This proposal is so egregious that it also earned Harvard an entry in our 2017 list of the “10 Worst Schools for Free Speech”. We even detailed how these sanctions […]
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FIRE Announces America’s 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2017
February 22, 2017
PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 22, 2017—More than 92 percent of American colleges maintain speech codes that either clearly restrict—or could too easily be used to restrict—free speech. Each year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) takes a closer look at campus censorship to identify America’s 10 worst colleges for free speech. The 2017 list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech—published today with detailed descriptions at The Huffington Post—includes both public and private institutions. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment. Private colleges on this list are not required by the Constitution to respect student and […]
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Harvard’s Troubled History with Free Association: Part 2
February 7, 2017
Yesterday we brought you the first installment of a two-part series prompted by our open letter to Harvard University published in The Harvard Crimson yesterday. The full-page ad, which ran again today, details the school’s troubling history with freedom of association and links it to current administrative efforts to blacklist student-members of off-campus, single-gender social clubs. In Part 1, we discussed Harvard’s long-hidden 1920 “Secret Court” files—uncovered by an intrepid student journalist in the early 2000s—revealing that Harvard systematically interrogated students about alleged homosexual activity, asking them to make confessions and name associates. At least one suicide was linked to […]
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Harvard’s Troubled History with Free Association: Part 1
February 6, 2017
As you may know, FIRE has been a vocal opponent of Harvard’s proposed blacklist for student members of independent, single-gender organizations including sororities, fraternities, and final clubs. The proposed sanctions for blacklisted students make a mockery of freedom of association at Harvard by barring members of these social clubs from leading sports teams or on-campus organizations and disqualifying them from receiving the dean’s recommendation necessary to apply for prestigious programs like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. What’s more, the policy represents a new milestone in Harvard’s long history of troubling attacks on these rights—a track record of which current students […]
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Harvard: Blacklist Policy Might Be ‘Revised or Replaced’
January 26, 2017
BOSTON, Jan. 26, 2017—Late yesterday, Harvard University announced it will reconsider a policy that would have blacklisted members of independent sororities, fraternities, and “final clubs” from leadership of athletic teams and school organizations, and from recommendations for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has led a national campaign (VIDEO) against the policy since it was unilaterally announced last May by Harvard administrators. The policy would shred students’ freedom of association rights. The decision to reconsider the blacklist policy comes just days before the Harvard College faculty was set to vote on a nondiscrimination resolution […]
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Harvard President to Consider ‘Alternatives’ to Final Club Policy, but Reveals Troubling Views on Freedom of Association
November 7, 2016
After months of criticism over a mandate FIRE and others have denounced as a “deeply objectionable” attack on freedom of association, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust said she may consider alternatives to the controversial new policy that will create a “blacklist” of members of off-campus, single-sex social clubs starting next fall. But Faust’s latest comments, made in a recent interview and reported today in the Harvard Crimson, also reveal the Harvard administration’s misguided understanding of freedom of association generally—views that, while troubling, could provide insight on a path forward for First Amendment advocates at the Ivy League institution. “I’ve […]
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Faculty, Students Take on Harvard Admins over Final Club/Greek Org Blacklist
November 4, 2016
This week, the regularly scheduled meeting of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences was dominated by a discussion of a resolution introduced by 12 faculty members aimed at rolling back the university’s controversial decision earlier this year to deny some leadership and educational opportunities to student members of single-sex final clubs and Greek organizations. As FIRE reported in May, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, acting on the recommendation of Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, announced that beginning with next year’s incoming class, any Harvard student who joins an unrecognized single-sex organization will be banned from captaining intercollegiate sports teams, […]
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Professors Standing Up for Freedom of Association at Harvard
September 13, 2016
Harvard University has faced widespread criticism since its May announcement that it would sanction members of off-campus, single-gender clubs. The administration claims it’s part of an effort to “address deeply rooted gender attitudes, and the related issues of sexual misconduct.” Now a small group of professors say that they hope the Harvard faculty adopt a motion they’ve authored which would prevent the Harvard administration from discriminating against students “on the basis of their organizational memberships.” If it passes, it may just signal hope for the future of freedom of association at Harvard. In an op-ed published today in The Harvard […]
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Harvard to Student Club: Lie About Your Policies and You’ll Be OK
August 16, 2016
Harvard University’s ill-conceived decision to blacklist students who join off-campus, single-sex social organizations continues to backfire, forcing administrators to make exceptions to the overbroad policy. The latest one would permit an off-campus women’s club to remain female-only without violating the policy that supposedly punishes “gender-based discrimination.” This strongly suggests that the real motivation behind the policy is not sex or gender discrimination at all—it’s that the Harvard administration simply doesn’t like certain groups and is willing to be as deceptive as is necessary to try to eliminate them. If you go to Harvard, beware: The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday on […]
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I Condemn the Harvard Club I Almost Joined, But It Has My Support
July 22, 2016
One brisk fall night, my friends and I donned ties and blazers in anticipation. An all-male final club had invited us to an event and dictated our evening’s attire. Dozens of young men populated the small backyard of the turn-of-the-century club house. Food, beer, and handshakes fueled the buzz of nervous socializing. The Club wanted me, and it felt good to be wanted. Over a year later, I have difficulty fathoming the thought of having been so excited at the prospect of membership in the exclusive Club. The culture I encountered repelled me, overwhelming a strong predisposition to embrace the […]
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Harvard Faculty, Students, Alumni Condemn Social Club Blacklist (VIDEO)
July 11, 2016
Harvard University’s announcement that it will blacklist students who join single-gender social organizations—banning them from holding leadership positions in Recognized Independent Student Organizations (ISOs), captaining sports teams, or even getting recommendations for some scholarships—has been criticized by students, faculty, and alumni, including some of Harvard’s biggest names. Economics professor and Harvard president emeritus Larry Summers; cognitive scientist and psychology professor Steven Pinker; and civil rights attorney, author, and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate are among those who talked with FIRE for our latest video (above), and explained why Harvard’s attempt to foster “inclusion” and “address deeply rooted gender attitudes” by punishing […]
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Harvard Faculty and Former President Oppose University’s Threat of Sanctions for Independent Club Members
May 25, 2016
Two weeks ago, FIRE wrote Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust to express our grave concern over the institution’s plan to impose harsh sanctions on students who join independent, single-sex, off-campus organizations. Under the plan, students who join those groups would be prevented from serving in leadership roles in officially recognized organizations or from receiving recommendations for scholarships and fellowships. Today, The Harvard Crimson reports that Harvard faculty have joined FIRE in publicly criticizing the new plan, submitting a sharply-worded motion arguing that students must be able to “exercise their civil right to free assembly without fear that Harvard […]
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Special Treatment? Harvard Exempts ‘The Harvard Crimson’ from Single-Gender Club Policy
May 20, 2016
Harvard University has exempted the school’s daily student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, from its new policy banning members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations from holding leadership positions in Recognized Independent Student Organizations (ISOs). One of the many inevitable implications of Harvard’s recent attack on freedom of association is that without such an exemption, the policy would have allowed Harvard administrators to exert control over the leadership of the school’s best-known independent student newspaper, thereby compromising its editorial independence. According to Crimson president Mariel Klein, however, despite being explicitly listed as an ISO, the paper received an exemption from Dean Rakesh […]
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A Messy End to the Semester: Harvard, Blacklisting, and Curtailing Student Rights
May 17, 2016
Earlier this month, Harvard University announced that students who are members of independent, single-sex organizations off campus will be ineligible for Rhodes and Marshall scholarship recommendations from the dean. The university also prohibited recognized student organizations and athletic teams from choosing these students as their leaders. The rationale? Harvard wants to promote “inclusion” and “address deeply rooted gender attitudes.” As FIRE noted in our letter to Harvard, this attack on students’ freedom of association amounts to nothing more than a blacklist. And, as if that weren’t enough, Harvard’s actions are also inconsistent with its own prior statements. So, what’s happened […]
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‘Gravely Concerned’ Over Social Club Sanctions, FIRE Writes to Harvard
May 12, 2016
FIRE has asked Harvard University to reverse the “illiberal and chilling new policy” aimed at students who join unrecognized single-sex social organizations. The policy would prohibit student-members of an array of clubs—from Harvard’s “final clubs” to any fraternity or sorority—from holding leadership positions in recognized student organizations or on athletic teams and render them ineligible for a dean’s endorsement for the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and other post-graduate scholarships and fellowships. We outlined our serious concerns about Harvard’s new policy in a letter sent to Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust today. FIRE’s letter criticized Harvard’s encroachment on the autonomy […]
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Harvard’s Double Standard on the Role of Student Organizations
May 9, 2016
On Friday afternoon, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Kurana sent a letter to Harvard President Drew Faust, recommending that Harvard take aggressive steps to deter students from joining off-campus, single-sex organizations. That same afternoon, President Faust sent a responsive letter agreeing with the proposal. The exchange had the appearance of a meticulously choreographed, formalistic ritual of a sort usually reserved for meetings of heads of state. As we explained on Friday, Harvard seeks to deter students from joining these unrecognized organizations by prohibiting their members from holding leadership positions on (single-sex!) athletics teams and recognized student organizations, and from receiving Dean’s […]
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Harvard Brings Back the Blacklist for Final Club, Fraternity, Sorority Students
May 6, 2016
BOSTON, May 6, 2016—In a stunning attack on freedom of association, Harvard University announced today that members of independent, single-sex, off-campus organizations will be blacklisted from Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and banned from leadership of on-campus organizations or athletic teams. Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust stated that next year, members of fraternities, sororities, and “final clubs” will begin to be denied these opportunities in an effort to foster “inclusion” and “address deeply rooted gender attitudes.” According to Dean Rakesh Khurana, who recommended the changes, such organizations have been independent from Harvard since 1984. They operate as off-campus entities and do […]
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Harvard Law School Administration Enables, Assists Students in Censoring Peers
March 31, 2016
The 2015–2016 academic year has undoubtedly been one of the busiest for student activism in recent memory, and with that has come free speech triumphs as well as free speech follies. Unfortunately, news from Harvard Law School (HLS) this morning falls squarely in the latter category. In Fall 2015, a group of students calling themselves “Reclaim Harvard Law” (Reclaim) issued a list of demands intended to address race relations on campus to the HLS administration. In mid-February, unsatisfied with HLS’s response, Reclaim began to occupy the lounge in Harvard Law School’s Caspersen Student Center, calling it “Belinda Hall,” until its […]
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As New Lawsuit Alleges Racial Discrimination in Campus Sexual Assault Proceedings, ‘Hunting Ground’ Producers Continue to Blame Film’s Criticism on ‘Threat’ to ‘White Male Power’
January 8, 2016
Amy Ziering, one of the producers of The Hunting Ground—a film that purports to shed light on the issue of campus sexual assault—recently said that the backlash against her film owes to the fact that it poses “a threat to the dominant white male power.” Part of that backlash, according to Ziering, was the “crazy reaction” from Harvard Law School professors like Jeannie Suk and Janet Halley, who were among the signatories to a press release that blasted the film’s portrayal of Harvard Law student Brandon Winston and called the film “propaganda.” In accusing these professors of acting in defense […]
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‘Hunting Ground’ Filmmakers to Harvard Law Profs: Criticizing Our Film Could Create a ‘Hostile Climate’
December 4, 2015
Last month, a group of 19 Harvard Law School professors issued a press release denouncing the film The Hunting Ground as “propaganda” and condemning its “unfair and misleading portrayal” of the case of Harvard Law student Brandon Winston. Winston was dismissed from the law school for an alleged sexual assault, but later reinstated after faculty reversed the decision. According to the professors’ press release: With respect to Mr. Winston, the film gives the impression that he, like others accused in the stories featured in the film, is guilty of sexual assault by force and the use of drugs on his […]
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Harvard Professors Denounce ‘The Hunting Ground’ as ‘Misleading,’ ‘Propaganda’
November 12, 2015
19 professors at Harvard University have written a letter harshly criticizing the popular documentary The Hunting Ground for both its characterization of a Harvard Law School (HLS) student accused of sexual assault and the school’s subsequent investigation into the incident. The film, slated for its television debut on November 19 on CNN, is described by producer Amy Ziering and director Kirby Dick as “a startling exposé of sexual assaults on U.S. campuses, institutional cover-ups and the brutal social toll on victims and their families.” The group of Harvard professors allege the piece is “propaganda” and replete with inaccuracies. In particular, […]
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Strossen Praises FIRE at Harvard Free Press Lecture, Criticizes OCR for Chilling Speech
October 21, 2015
At the annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government earlier this month, former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen expressed grave concerns about the federal government pressuring colleges to adopt unconstitutional policies that infringe on civil liberties. Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School, told the audience that this recent development is among the most troubling of the numerous and pervasive threats to free speech on campuses today. Strossen said: Specifically, I’m referring to the overbroad, unjustified concept of illegal sexual harassment as extending […]
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FIRE Chairman Calls Out Northeast Colleges in Annual ‘Muzzle Awards’
July 6, 2015
Each summer for the past eighteen years, FIRE Co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate has announced the winners of his annual “Campus Muzzle Awards”: colleges and universities in the Northeast stifling campus discourse in particularly outrageous ways. Along with myself and fellow research assistant Timothy Moore, this year, Harvey has written about incidents at Brown University, SUNY Buffalo State, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Norwich University, and Harvard Law School. As always, a key theme is students’ and administrators’ desire to shield themselves from uncomfortable speech or ideas. Regarding the incident at Harvard Law School, Harvey writes: The campus “disinvitation” trend forces […]
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Harvard Students and Faculty Respond to Robin Steinberg Disinvitation
February 25, 2015
Last week, the New York Post reported that two Harvard Law School student groups—the Women’s Law Association (WLA) and the Law and International Development Society (LIDS)—had invited Bronx Defenders Executive Director Robin Steinberg to speak at the school, and that she would be honored in the school’s International Women’s Day Exhibit. According to the Post, New York Police Department union leaders objected, citing Steinberg’s alleged mismanagement and misleading statements relating to an anti-cop rap video that included appearances by Bronx Defenders employees and was filmed, in part, in the Bronx Defenders offices. Mere hours after the Post’s article, the student […]
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Harvard Law Prof Details Complexities of Campus Sexual Assault
February 12, 2015
As colleges and universities continue to struggle to adequately handle allegations of sexual assault on campus, the media is providing an increasing number of attention-grabbing headlines, and many are demanding schools take immediate and harsh action against alleged attackers. Writing for Harvard Law Review this month, Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley asks that readers pause for a moment to appreciate some of the complicated fact patterns, moral dilemmas, and practical questions that demonstrate that sexual misconduct policies and procedures must be guided by careful thought—not just one-sided advocacy. Halley has written before, both on her own and with her […]
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Universities Must Resist Pressure to Find Innocent Students Guilty
January 13, 2015
The many problems with the way Harvard University and other institutions nationwide are handling allegations of sexual assault aren’t new to Torch readers. Campus hearings often fail to provide the accused important procedural safeguards like an opportunity to present evidence on one’s behalf or cross-examine witnesses, and universities don’t have the authority to get guilty students off the street and into jail. In short, the status quo fails everybody. Amidst increasing media attention to these problems, Harvard Law School Professor Nancy Gertner—one of the 28 Harvard Law professors who signed a letter strongly objecting to the university’s new sexual harassment […]
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Former OCR Lawyer Hans Bader Responds to Finding of Title IX Violation at Harvard Law School
January 7, 2015
Last week, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced its finding that Harvard Law School (HLS) failed to comply with Title IX. Former OCR attorney Hans Bader responded to OCR’s findings and resolution agreement with HLS on Examiner.com yesterday, reiterating concerns that he, FIRE, and other due process advocates have raised previously in the context of other institutions and guidance documents from OCR. FIRE has argued before that OCR’s April 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter (DCL) is not binding law, and in fact violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), because it imposes new legal requirements on schools but […]
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Harvard Law Professor: OCR’s Stance on Campus Sex Assault is ‘Madness’
January 2, 2015
On Tuesday, Harvard Law School (HLS) entered into a resolution agreement with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), ending a lengthy investigation into whether the school’s policies violated Title IX. To no one’s surprise, OCR concluded in the letter of findings that accompanied the resolution agreement that the school’s policies were indeed in violation of Title IX. As FIRE discussed when we initially reported on the agreement, OCR’s letter of findings alleged, among other things, that “the Law School improperly used the ‘clear and convincing’ standard of evidence, rather than the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard.” On […]
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Department of Education Finds Harvard Law School Violated Title IX
December 30, 2014
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced today that it has found that Harvard Law School (HLS) failed to comply with Title IX. OCR has posted its letter of findings and resolution agreement with HLS on its website. Among OCR’s key findings is that HLS violated Title IX by using the more robust “clear and convincing evidence” standard of proof in sexual misconduct cases rather than the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard, which requires fact-finders to conclude only that the accused student is 50.01 percent likely to be guilty. Like Princeton University’s recent capitulation on this […]
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Harvard Law Professor: Students Want Profs to Drop Classes on Rape Law
December 16, 2014
According to Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk, she and her colleagues have been pressured by students to avoid writing exam questions involving sexual violence or even teaching about the law regarding sexual violence in order to protect students from potential distress. Like the students arguing they are too traumatized by recent grand jury decisions to complete their final exams, Suk’s account, published in The New Yorker yesterday, is a perverse result of a culture in which intellectual and emotional comfort is prioritized over the core functions of a university. Suk writes about student demands, many of which defy logic […]
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‘New York Times’ Takes a More Thorough Look at Mishandling of Campus Rape
November 17, 2014
In past months, FIRE has criticized The New York Times for failing to adequately consider the repercussions for students’ due process rights when covering the steps that institutions of higher education, lawmakers, and the White House are taking to address the problem of campus sexual assault. Yesterday, however, The New York Times published an op-ed by Yale University law professor Jed Rubenfeld which offered a more complete look at the ways in which colleges and universities are failing on this issue, writing that colleges “are simultaneously failing to punish rapists adequately and branding students sexual assailants when no sexual assault […]
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Law Professor Janet Halley on Why Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy Must Change
November 14, 2014
Harvard Law School Professor Janet Halley has been a strong advocate for due process rights for college and university students accused of sexual assault. On October 15, she joined 27 other Harvard Law faculty members in criticizing Harvard’s new Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures in The Boston Globe, and she provided further analysis of the policy’s problems in a memo released at the end of last month. Writing today on WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog, she urges the university to change its policy and procedures so that they do not continue to chill protected speech and cannot be used to expel students […]
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In Mishandling Sexual Assault Allegations Against Patrick Witt, Yale Failed Everyone
November 7, 2014
Former Yale University quarterback Patrick Witt took to The Boston Globe earlier this week to tell his story of how Yale’s secretive “informal complaint process” changed the course of his life after someone filed an accusation against him “that, if substantiated, would constitute a violation of university policy concerning sexual misconduct.” According to Witt, Yale never formally charged him with any conduct violations or even told Witt specifically what he was alleged to have done; he was simply instructed to avoid his accuser. At no point in the process, as Witt describes it, was a good-faith attempt made to determine […]
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KC Johnson on Harvard’s ‘Disturbingly Opaque’ New Sexual Assault Procedures
July 29, 2014
Yesterday, Brooklyn College Professor KC Johnson shone a spotlight on Harvard University’s new procedures for investigating and adjudicating allegations of campus sexual assault—and there is a lot to be concerned about. The problems start at its adoption of the “preponderance of the evidence” standard but go much deeper, potentially leaving accused students without key information and opportunities to defend themselves against their charges.
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Bloomberg Blasts ‘Disinvitation Season’ in Harvard Commencement Address
June 3, 2014
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a barnburner of a commencement speech last Thursday at Harvard University. In a widely-noted address, Bloomberg, who received an honorary degree, roundly denounced the phenomenon FIRE has labeled “disinvitation season.”
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Harvard School of Ed Dean Responds to Calls to Disinvite Commencement Speaker
May 20, 2014
At the height of “disinvitation season,” it should come as no great surprise that some students and faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) are asking the school to rescind its invitation to planned commencement speaker and Colorado State Senator Michael Johnston. But yesterday, HGSE Dean James Ryan, who selected Johnston for the event, wrote a thoughtful and thorough response to the community standing by his invitation and arguing that commencement speakers should be selected not on ideology, but instead on “whether the person has something of genuine interest and significance to express to our community.”
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‘Harvard Crimson’ Column: Time to Get Rid of Academic Freedom
February 21, 2014
Harvard University student Sandra Y.L. Korn has a provocative column in The Harvard Crimson that has been making the rounds. The column has a bold thesis: We should get rid of academic freedom as our standard for what ideas should be admitted to the university sphere, and replace it with what she terms “academic justice.” In Korn’s concept of academic justice, “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.” The concept of academic freedom Korn seeks to supplant is long-established and enshrined in, among other statements, the American Association […]
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The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2013
December 27, 2013
College is where inquisitive minds go to be exposed to new ways of thinking. But on some campuses, the quest for knowledge is frustrated when administrators censor speech they would prefer be kept out of the marketplace of ideas. To close out the year, we at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) want to highlight some of the worst colleges for free speech since March 2012—the last time we published this list. (Our first list, from 2011, is here.) Most of the schools we include in this year’s list are public colleges or universities bound by the First Amendment. But some of […]
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Harvey Silverglate on the ‘Slow Death of Free Speech at Harvard’
November 5, 2013
Late last month, FIRE co-founder and chairman (and Harvard Law School alumnus) Harvey Silverglate delivered a speech to the Harvard Law School class of 1958 at its 55th reunion. Harvey used the occasion to share an eye-opening series of stories that reveal Harvard University’s accelerating trend of censorship and compelled speech. Harvey started by recalling a case early in his career in which he defended a group of students whose speech would almost certainly be punished under harassment codes today. He reviewed the creation of Harvard Law’s sexual harassment policies, and Harvard Business School’s threatening student journalists over an innocuous cartoon. More recently, […]
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Report on Harvard’s Secret Email Search Released
July 25, 2013
In the fall of 2012, Harvard University administrators secretly searched the email accounts of 16 “resident deans.” They did so in an attempt to catch the resident dean whom they suspected of releasing, to student reporters, an email about how to advise students implicated in the Harvard cheating scandal. In other words, Harvard administrators wanted to plug a leak. Harvard’s faculty email policy promises complete confidentiality in faculty email accounts—except in extraordinary circumstances, in which case the Dean of the Faculty and General Counsel must both approve the searches. Faculty whose email accounts are to be searched are additionally entitled […]
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16th Annual ‘Campus Muzzle’ Awards Feature Yale, Tufts, Harvard
June 27, 2013
The “Muzzles” live! The 16th annual “Campus Muzzle” Awards, previously featured in the now-sadly-defunct Boston Phoenix, have found a new home this year on WGBH News online, as well as in the Portland Phoenix. FIRE co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate awards the Campus Muzzles each year to the worst universities in New England for First Amendment rights. (Harvey’s Campus Muzzles are a sidebar to Dan Kennedy’s Muzzle Awards, which feature his selection of the worst free speech violators off-campus in New England.) This year, Yale University “wins” for its disturbing disregard for free speech on its new overseas campus in […]
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Harvard Communications Office As Large As Its Physics Department
June 3, 2013
According to The Harvard Crimson’s graduation issue, the Harvard Public Affairs and Communications (HPAC) office now employs 59 people—and that figure doesn’t even include the communications staffs of Harvard’s 12 schools. As Daniel Luzer points out at the Washington Monthly, Harvard’s bureaucratic army of message-shapers is now about as large as its physics department. All these administrators need something to do, and, as we’ve written many times on this blog, superfluous administrators too often keep busy by limiting campus free speech and due process rights. At Harvard, the president, provost, vice presidents, and top deans have made work for HPAC […]
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Tyga Comes to Campus: Penn Students Call for Dialogue, Harvard Students Call for Cancellation
April 3, 2013
More than 1,800 Harvard students have signed a Change.org petition asking the Harvard administration to rescind its invitation to hip-hop artist Tyga to headline the university’s annual Yardfest, because of Tyga’s “explicitly and violently misogynistic lyrics.” The petition states: We demand that Harvard rescind its offer to Tyga, because we believe that Harvard should not provide a platform for music that promotes sexism and rape culture. What a missed opportunity this is. Can you imagine the powerful message that Harvard students would have sent the administration—and society at large—by boycotting Tyga’s performance en masse, and by sharing, via social media […]
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Really, Harvard? You Read More Emails? I Mean, Really?
April 3, 2013
Concept of hacker and virus with laptop – Shutterstock For better or for worse, when something happens at Harvard University, it’s news. So it was big news early in March when Harvard admitted that it had secretly scanned faculty members’ emails. As FIRE’s Will Creeley put it in The Huffington Post on March 13, “The secret search, conducted without notice and in apparent violation of institutional policies governing faculty email, was undertaken to identify the source of a leak to the media about the school’s high-profile and widespread cheating case, which resulted in the expulsion of an estimated 70 students.” I […]
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FIRE’s Shibley in ‘Forbes’ on Harvard E-mail Scandal
March 12, 2013
FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley offers his thoughts on the Harvard University e-mail scandal for Forbes this morning. Criticizing Harvard’s emphasis on public relations at the expense of faculty privacy, Robert writes: If a liberal arts education is supposed to be a “marketplace of ideas,” putting message control above all else is anathema. Students and faculty members must be free to explore ideas and to criticize bad decisions, or the marketplace will not function. They can’t do that if they believe that Harvard is going to read their email if they happen to forward something that makes life […]
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If You Work For Harvard, It’s Possible You’re Being Watched By Harvard
March 12, 2013
by Robert Shibley Forbes.com Did you ever get that sneaking suspicion that someone’s watching you? As it turns out, if you work for Harvard University, you might have good reason for it. The fallout from Harvard’s 2012cheating scandal, in which dozens of students werereportedly forced to withdraw from school for cheating on a take-home exam, continued this weekend with the revelation inThe Boston Globe that Harvard administrators scanned the email of 16 “resident deans” to see who might have leaked to the press an internal email about the situation. (Resident deans live in Harvard dorms, teach classes, and sit on the campus […]
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Answering ‘The Harvard Crimson’ on ‘Unconstructive’ Flyers
December 10, 2012
In the wake of a controversy at Harvard University following the anonymous distribution of satirical flyers advertising a fake “final club,” the editorial staff of The Harvard Crimson published a column on the incident last week. Rather than take on Harvard’s condemnatory response to this clearly satirical flyer, and reports that Harvard is actively searching for the flyer’s author(s), the Crimson‘s editors tackle the culture of final clubs. They write: While we too find the flyers tasteless and their use of inflammatory language inappropriate and unconstructive, a response to the prank cannot be properly made without a meaningful appraisal of […]
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Wendy Kaminer Tackles Harvard’s Laugh-Free Culture
December 4, 2012
A controversy over an anonymously distributed flyer that was distributed in several of Harvard’s residence halls is roiling the Harvard community this week. The satirical flyer advertised a fake “final club” called “The Pigeon.” In context, the flyer—with statements such as “Jews need not apply” and “Coloreds OK”—is a biting satire of the exclusivity and old-world roots of final clubs, which are fully independent from Harvard and do not allow female members. As lawyer, author, and FIRE Board of Advisors member Wendy Kaminer notes at WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog, however, the humor seems to have been lost on students. Kaminer notes […]
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Changes to Harvard Student Disciplinary Process Reviewed
November 7, 2012
In 2009–2010, Harvard University’s Administrative Board (widely known as Ad Board) implemented a series of changes to its student disciplinary process. Over the last two weeks, The Harvard Crimson has published a four-part series to evaluate those reforms now that they have been implemented and utilized for nearly 2 years. The first article of the series explores whether the Ad Board’s purpose was more pedagogical or punitive. The second article in the series addresses whether accused Harvard students, who are not permitted representation by lawyers during the disciplinary process, receive adequate counsel. The third piece scrutinizes the change in evidentiary […]
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FIRE Chairman Takes On Harvard’s Renewed Civility Push
September 24, 2012
Writing for Minding the Campus with Juliana DeVries, FIRE Co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate weighs in on new reports of “sensitivity” training for incoming freshmen at Harvard University. As the Harvard Crimson reported earlier this month, Harvard incorporated the sensitivity training into its programming for freshmen this year in lieu of the controversial “kindness” pledge instituted last fall and later modified after extensive criticism. The Crimson quotes Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman defending the new initiative: The Freshman Dean’s Office set aside the controversial freshman pledge this year, opting instead for additional programming for the class of 2016 during Opening […]
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Is Harvard More Repressive Than the Town That Banned Swearing?
July 2, 2012
That’s the question FIRE Chairman and Co-Founder Harvey Silverglate asks in his latest letter to The Boston Globe about Harvard University and the town of Middleborough, Massachusetts, which recently banned curse words (punishment: a $20 fine). Harvey makes the connection between the two: [I]t should come as no surprise that a municipality makes the assumption that it has the legal power and moral authority to dictate what its citizens may not say. Since the mid-1980s our institutions of so-called higher learning have been instituting ever-stricter speech codes that make it a punishable act for one student to offend another by […]
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Compelling ‘Civility’
June 1, 2012
Earlier this week, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) discussed the growing popularity on college campuses of programs aimed at promoting civility. While one might reasonably ask whether there is a connection between exorbitant tuition rates, administrative bloat, and programs such as the “transformational, saturation approach” civility projects discussed in the article, there is no problem from an individual rights standpoint with colleges promoting civility. The individual rights problem, which the article barely even hints at, is that a large number of colleges and universities actually compel civility rather than simply encouraging it. The article focuses […]
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‘Crimson’ Reports on Due Process Concerns as Harvard Revises Sexual Assault Policy
May 14, 2012
Last Friday, The Harvard Crimson updated readers on Harvard University’s ongoing study of its sexual assault policies, noting that the university’s policy options have been affected by the controversial April 4, 2011, “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Zeroing in on the ongoing debate about OCR’s decision to mandate the use of the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof in campus sexual misconduct proceedings, Crimson staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins writes: As Harvard’s peer institutions move to update their sexual misconduct policies by lowering the standard of evidence required for a guilty […]
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Harvard Business School Fails to Live Up to Its Own Standards
May 8, 2012
“The teaching of ethics here is explicit, not implicit,” proclaims the Harvard Business School (HBS) website, as the school sets for itself the goal of constructing “a model of the highest standards essential to responsible leadership in the modern business world.” But the case of Ben Story, a student who recently ran afoul of the HBS administration, seems to demonstrate the illusory nature of the school’s proud claim. A student proudly displayed on the HBS website, Ben Story graduated from UCLA with a degree in theater and hopes to pursue a career that combines business and art, “something in media and entertainment.” […]
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‘Free Speech Week’ Celebrated on Campuses Nationwide
April 13, 2012
FIRE celebrated Free Speech Week last week by teaming up with Students For Liberty to send FIRE speakers and materials to student groups across the country. We’re pleased to announce it was a great success! To mark the occasion, 72 student groups distributed FIRE materials and pocket-sized Constitutions on campus. More than 20 student groups also organized expressive events. Many decided to build Free Speech Walls at schools including American University, Boston University, Harvard University, Kansas State University, Winthrop University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas San Antonio. FIRE’s Campus Freedom Network (CFN) also worked with […]
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Does Harvard Deserve to be on the ‘Worst Colleges’ List?
April 5, 2012
This week, a staff editorial in the Harvard University student newspaper The Harvard Crimson takes issue with FIRE’s inclusion of Harvard in our list of the 12 “Worst Colleges for Free Speech.” Our list, which appeared on The Huffington Post, has generated a good amount of online comments and discussion, student press coverage, and attention in major media outlets. Of course, we understand that folks may disagree vehemently with us when their school appears on the list, and that they may take issue with the criteria we use for naming our “Worst 12.” However, the points raised by the Crimson […]
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‘12 Worst Colleges for Free Speech’ List in the News
March 30, 2012
Tuesday, The Huffington Post released FIRE’s list of the 12 Worst Colleges for Free Speech in 2012. In addition to the social media storm the story generated, the list caught the attention of a number of media outlets: University of Cincinnati’s appearance at the top of the list garnered the attention of Cincinnati City Beat. In “UC Gets Drawn into Free Speech Battle,” University of Cincinnati spokesman Greg Hand mischaracterizes the school’s “free speech zone” policy, so FIRE responded to his claim here. Syracuse, New York, press Syracuse.com, CNYCentral.com, and WSYR–TV (Channel 9 in Syracuse) have noted Syracuse University’s placement […]
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FIRE’s 12 Worst Colleges for Free Speech in 2012
March 27, 2012
Here’s today’s press release: PHILADELPHIA, March 27, 2012—The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released its 2012 list of the 12 Worst Colleges for Free Speech in The Huffington Post today. Harvard is new to the list this year, joining Yale, Syracuse, and the University of Cincinnati at the top of the list. “These colleges and universities have deeply violated the principles that are supposed to animate higher education,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “Sunlight is one of the best disinfectants, and the public needs to know which schools to watch out for.” Although schools appear on the list in no particular […]
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‘Harvard Crimson’ Exposes Violations of Free Speech in Policies Identified by FIRE
January 30, 2012
FIRE’s annual report on campus speech codes has reached more and more college and university campuses since we released it a few weeks ago. Today The Harvard Crimson‘s Rebecca D. Robbins reports on Harvard’s poor, “red light” speech code rating in FIRE’s report. We explained Harvard’s rating in detail a couple of years ago, showing how Harvard’s policies violate its own promises of free expression: Even Harvard’s Free Speech Guidelines [adopted by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in 1990], which extol the university’s unique status and its unique commitment to free speech, take with one hand as they […]
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This Month in FIRE History: Controversy at Harvard Business School
January 19, 2012
Nine years ago this month, FIRE happily announced the resolution of a case at Harvard Business School involving an overzealous administration and an egregious violation of free speech. Unfortunately, almost a decade later, Harvard continues to be host to such violations of liberty. The case began in October 2002, when The Harbus, a student newspaper at Harvard Business School, ran an editorial cartoon that criticized the school’s Career Services office for severe and chronic technical problems during a crucial week for student job searches. The cartoon suggested that members of the office were “incompetent morons.” In response, the school issued […]
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FIRE Speaker in Philadelphia Thursday
January 18, 2012
Tomorrow, January 19, FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel will lead a dinner discussion hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Club of Philadelphia. Adam, a Harvard alumnus, will discuss “Harvard’s Tradition of Oppressing Controversial Speech,” including several recent cases: In 2011, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to fire a professor of economics after he published a controversial op-ed in India. Last fall, the dean of Harvard College instituted a Freshman Pledge stating that “kindness” was “on a par with intellectual attainment” at Harvard, and pressured students to publicly pledge to such official Harvard College values. In 2010, the […]
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FIRE Intervenes at Harvard after Faculty Fires Economics Professor over Political Article Published in India
January 5, 2012
Today, FIRE has asked Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to reverse its action against a controversial economics professor after it canceled all of his courses due to an op-ed he published in India in the wake of last year’s Mumbai terrorist bombings. Although Harvard’s administration had defended Professor Subramanian Swamy’s rights after intervention by FIRE, FAS blatantly and shamefully violated them in its meeting in December. Anyone reading the op-ed will have no trouble detecting why it was controversial, but this action by the Harvard faculty places speech and academic freedom in danger at Harvard. On July 16, 2011, Swamy published an […]
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Harvard Faculty Fires Economics Professor over Political Article Published in India
December 8, 2011
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has effectively fired a controversial economics professor by canceling all of his courses due to an op-ed he published in India in the wake of the July 13 Mumbai terrorist bombing. Although Harvard’s administration had defended Professor Subramanian Swamy’s rights after intervention by FIRE, FAS blatantly and shamefully violated them in its meeting on Tuesday. Anyone reading the op-ed will have no trouble detecting why it was controversial, but this action by the Harvard faculty places speech and academic freedom in danger at Harvard. On July 16, 2011, Swamy published an opinion piece in the Indian newspaper Daily News & Analysis in response to series of […]
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‘Enthusiastic Consent’ at Harvard
October 18, 2011
On Friday, The Harvard Crimson ran an article on the university’s decision to postpone seeking student input into the reform of its sexual misconduct policies. Based on some of those students’ statements to the paper, Harvard should reconsider whether to take their input seriously. Samantha Meier ’12, one of the student representatives appointed to the policy review committee, told the Crimson that Under most legal definitions, forced sexual intercourse can be considered rape or sexual assault only when the victim said “no” or was incapable of doing so due to the influence of drugs or alcohol, according to Meier. Meier said […]
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Victory at Harvard: University Stands Up for Rights of Controversial Professor
September 22, 2011
While Harvard has been the target of much deserved criticism of late due to its stumbles with the new “Class of 2015 Freshman Pledge” pressuring students to commit to vague notions of “kindness” as well as “inclusiveness and civility,” it has acquitted itself better in one recent situation where many students—on their own—have been pushing their own values to a fault. Against student pressure to fire him, Harvard has successfully defended free speech for economics instructor Subramanian Swamy, who published a controversial column in an Indian newspaper advocating drastic solutions to the issue of Islamic terrorism in India. Swamy’s ideas […]
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Joanne Jacobs on the Harvard ‘Kindness’ Pledge
September 19, 2011
Education blogger Joanne Jacobs has a good roundup of commentary on the Harvard “kindness” pledge controversy. Included are comments from FIRE President Greg Lukianoff and Board of Directors member Virginia Postrel. If you can’t think of why anyone could possibly object to a pledge to be kind, this roundup will provide good food for thought.
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Virginia Postrel on Harvard’s Kindness Pledge
September 16, 2011
Author and FIRE Board of Directors member Virginia Postrel’s latest column for Bloomberg View covers the Harvard “kindness” pledge that all freshmen were pressured into signing this year (the signed pledges were to be posted in every dormitory—a plan that has now been abandoned). FIRE has covered the problems with this pledge in several articles and blog entries, as has former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, but Postrel points out a new problem with making kindness king: Meanwhile, to their peers, Harvard students may, if anything, be a little too nice. Some veteran faculty members tell me that the […]
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FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate and Adam Kissel Take on Harvard’s Civility Pledge at ‘Minding the Campus’
September 13, 2011
In an excellent article published today at Minding the Campus, FIRE Co-founder and Board Chairman Harvey Silverglate and FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel take on Harvard College’s recently enacted civility pledge for students. We have written about the pledge here on The Torch, as well as The Huffington Post and PolicyMic. Commenting on Harvard’s unprecedented and ill-conceived move, Harvey and Adam write: Harvard College’s Class of 2015 found something unprecedented awaiting their arrival on campus: an ideological pledge. It was framed as a request for allegiance to certain social and political principles. No such request had been made […]
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Peter in ‘PolicyMic’ on Harvard Freshman Pledge
September 12, 2011
FIRE’s Peter Bonilla has a new article in PolicyMic today discussing Harvard College’s “Class of 2015 Freshman Pledge,” which, as Peter points out, “asks incoming freshmen to sign a statement saying that they are ‘expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility.’” In its 375-year-long history, Harvard has never asked any of its students to sign a pledge to uphold certain values, as former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis pointed out in his own blog entry on the subject. Is that a tradition worth preserving, or does such a pledge […]
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Greg Examines Harvard’s New Civility Pledge in ‘The Huffington Post’
September 8, 2011
FIRE President Greg Lukianoff writes today in The Huffington Post on the introduction of a civility pledge at Harvard College, the undergraduate college at Harvard University. The “Class of 2015 Pledge” commits students to building a “place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.” But as Greg points out, this type of oath has no place in the academy: Higher education is at its best when it understands that bold, free-wheeling intellectual experimentation is what you want to cultivate if you want a genuinely innovative and dynamic environment. […]
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In Unprecedented, Ill-Considered Move, Harvard Pressures Freshmen to Sign Civility Pledge
September 1, 2011
Administrators at Harvard College are pressuring the Class of 2015 to do something no other student class has ever been asked to do in 375 years: Sign a civility pledge. As the Harvard Crimson details in a story this morning, the “Class of 2015 Freshman Pledge” was presented to students before an opening convocation. Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and current Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, has published the full text of the Pledge: At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that “each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, […]
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Harvard, India, Swamy, and the Right to Advocate for Radical Social Change
August 1, 2011
Last week, FIRE wrote Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust after learning from The Harvard Crimson that the university was giving “serious attention” to student calls to fire economics professor Subramanian Swamy because of his expression in a column he wrote for a newspaper in India. The news of FIRE’s involvement has gone worldwide, appearing in the Times of India, Deccan Herald (India), Oman Tribune, North Korea Times (yes, that’s weird), and elsewhere, mainly via an Indo-Asian News Service article based on an update in the Crimson. Swamy’s July 16 column, in response to a terrorist bombing a few days earlier in Mumbai, offered ideas on how to […]
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Harvard Must Remember Free Speech Promises, End Investigation of Professor’s Newspaper Column
July 28, 2011
FIRE has written to Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust after learning from The Harvard Crimson that the university was giving “serious attention” to student calls to fire economics professor Subramanian Swamy because of his expression in a column he wrote for a newspaper in India. On July 16, in the Indian newspaper Daily News & Analysis, Swamy wrote the column in response to a terrorist bombing a few days earlier in Mumbai, offering strongly-worded ideas on how to “negate the political goals of Islamic terrorism in India.” Among his ideas were that India “[e]nact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hinduism to any other religion,” “[r]emove the masjid [mosque] […]
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‘Harvard Law Review’ Note Tackles Complex Issue of Distinguishing Government Versus Private Speech
January 31, 2011
A student note published in the most recent volume of the Harvard Law Review advances a cogent approach to differentiating between government and private speech that would lend clarity to First Amendment law. Unfortunately, the note (Three’s a Crowd – Defending the Binary Approach to Government Speech, 124 Harv. L. Rev. 805 (2011)) supports a very robust usage of the “government speech doctrine” that might prove too deferential to the government. According to the note, With its 2009 decision in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, [129 S. Ct. 1125 (2009)], the Supreme Court held that a Ten Commandments monument placed by a city in a public […]
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Dartmouth Newspaper Notes College’s ‘Green-Light’ Rating and Poor Performance of Ivy Peers
January 6, 2011
Writing for The Dartmouth, student Brendan Woods is pleased to note Dartmouth College’s status as one of the 12 schools in our most recent national survey of college speech codes to receive FIRE’s green-light rating (a designation, by the way, that did not come without a lot of work on FIRE’s part). Most of Dartmouth’s peer institutions, on the other hand, did not make out nearly so well, with the Ivies coming in for particular scrutiny. Brendan writes: Given that free speech is at the heart of the academic process, one would expect colleges and universities to be the most […]
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Silverglate: Why Did Harvard Leave Out Education?
December 13, 2010
In a letter to the editor today in the Boston Globe, FIRE Chairman Harvey Silverglate opines on the historic restructuring of Harvard’s main governing board, asking why the university did not include education in its recent reexamination. Harvard’s focus on capital planning and risk management, Harvey writes, further evinces what he has called the “corporatization” of higher education.
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Harvard-Yale 2010 T-shirt Wars Begin; No Free Speech Casualties … Yet
November 9, 2010
The 2010 Harvard-Yale T-shirt wars are officially under way, in anticipation of the schools’ annual football game on November 20. The Yale Daily News reports that Yale College’s Freshman Class Council (FCC) has released its official design for The Game 2010, a riff on the recent movie The Social Network: The blank space at the end leaves room for Yalies to insert the kindest, most highbrow compliments they can conceive of their intellectual equals at Harvard. (Or, you know, not.) Meanwhile, the Harvard flyby, a blog hosted by The Harvard Crimson, points to this design as the winner of […]
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After Retraction of ‘Media Policy,’ Harvard Med School Updates Faculty Conflict Rules
August 31, 2010
Starting in January 2011, Harvard Medical School (HMS) will change how it regulates the nature and extent of medical industry ties among the school’s 11,017 faculty members, HMS officials announced in late July. The updated policies, the product of a sustained student-led movement, include a ban on faculty accepting personal gifts from medical companies and a requirement to disclose commercial payments of more than $5,000. What’s notable about these changes, at least from FIRE’s vantage point, are not so much the details of the updated HMS conflict-of-interest policies. Rather, the interplay between student activists and HMS administrators—in particular, the seemingly […]
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In Case You Couldn’t Find Harvard’s Free Speech Policy …
August 11, 2010
Yesterday we noticed that Harvard University no longer lists its “Free Speech Guidelines”–Harvard’s decades-long promise of free speech–in its usual place. It used to be at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/public/FreeSpeech.html in a text-searchable HTML file. In case you were looking for it, the only copy we can find right now on Harvard’s website is linked from the bottom of this page in a non-searchable PDF of the 1990 document. Of course, if you want a searchable version, FIRE still has one online here. Meanwhile, Harvard should immediately fix the many embarrassing broken links now strewn about its site, lest vistors be unable to find the Guidelines. […]
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New England Ivies Earn ‘Muzzle Awards’ from FIRE Chairman
July 2, 2010
With Independence Day on the horizon, the Boston Phoenix turns its annual spotlight upon those who have ignored our nation’s founding freedoms. The “Muzzle Awards” are the undesired accolades reserved for the self-appointed censors of New England—politicians, police officers, judges, and public transportation officials, to name a few. This year, in the 13th installment of this award-winning series, special attention is devoted to colleges and universities, courtesy of FIRE Co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate. Harvey focuses the 2010 Campus Muzzle Awards on transgressions at Harvard University (his alma mater) and Yale University, both of which “have helped pave the censorial […]
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Money Talks at Harvard, Even When Speech is Chilled
May 10, 2010
Further proof of the indisputable chilling effect that Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow’s denunciation of the private e-mail of one of her students has had on the community arrived in FIRE’s mailbox last week, in the form of a gracious letter and donation from Harvard employee Gary McGath. His letter reads in relevant part: Enclosed please find a check for $250 payable to FIRE. I am making this special contribution on behalf of the students at Harvard University who have felt the chilling effect of Dean Minow’s denunciation of a student for raising taboo questions in a private e-mail discussion. FIRE thanks Mr. […]
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Dean’s Handling of Harvard Law E-Mail Controversy Continues to Generate Criticism
May 10, 2010
Last week Adam commented on Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow’s denunciation of a student’s e-mail showing openness to the results of research about the role of genetics in differences in intelligence by race, pointing out that the dean’s denunciation was anti-intellectual: For the sake of human inquiry and knowledge a free university in a free society should not place any topic entirely out of bounds for discussion because an academic community, in human humility, does not really commit itself to declaring which view is true until we see the conclusive evidence. Even then, we must acknowledge that we may […]
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Speech Chilled at Harvard Law
May 3, 2010
The prominent law-oriented blog The Volokh Conspiracy has been remarking extensively on the latest speech-related controversy at Harvard Law School (HLS), where Dean Martha Minow publicly mischaracterized and then criticized a private e-mail sent by one of the school’s students to, it seems, a small number of colleagues several months ago. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, in a four-part series on The Volokh Conspiracy that begins here, takes essentially the same view that I took last Friday. The point is that by so strongly criticizing a privately expressed opinion, Dean Minow has declared that certain ideas—even certain academic questions—are not […]
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Minority Views Unsafe at Harvard Law; Dean Betrays Marketplace of Ideas
April 30, 2010
If you value a true marketplace of ideas, beware of Harvard Law School unless you are able to handle being denounced by the dean. According to Dean Martha Minow, it is shameful even to be intellectually open to considering certain scientific questions. The case in point involves a third-year law student who, in a private e-mail to a small number of colleagues, examined the possibility of … well, does it matter to you what the possibility is? Or are some ideas simply so toxic that questions about them cannot ever be asked, the research never done? For the sake of […]
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Beat Harvard – Just Don’t Call Them Sissies
November 24, 2009
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, our various class councils endlessly outdid themselves in the art of emasculating the Princeton tiger, mascot of our archrival. Our depictions of the tiger, emblazoned on T-shirts, ran the gamut from gentle mockery to representations of acts that would be illegal in most if not all of the fifty states. Of course, Penn students bought them in droves, myself included. For Yale University’s Freshman Class Council (FCC), then, to print a F. Scott Fitzgerald quote—”I think of all Harvard men as sissies”—on T-shirts would not seem to invite controversy. After […]
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Withholding of Report on Harvard Disciplinary Body Shows Hypocrisy
November 20, 2009
The Harvard College Administrative Board—the school’s main disciplinary body that applies and enforces “undergraduate academic regulations and standards of social conduct”—has long been the subject of calls for reform. Potential conflicts of interest in student representation, the intimidating structure of Ad Board hearings, and a general lack of transparency have been cited by students and faculty members, as well as campus outsiders, as imperatives for change. So in November 2007 when administrators announced the creation of an Administrative Board Review Committee, it was seen as a major step forward. A year and a half later, the committee’s report was presented […]
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FIRE Chairman on Harvard’s Censorship of Controversial Speaker
October 23, 2009
In this week’s Boston Phoenix, FIRE Co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate weighs in on the latest free speech controversy at Harvard College. An anti-immigration speaker, invited to speak on an undergraduate-organized panel on the future of U.S. immigration, was disinvited last week by student organizers, the Harvard Crimson reported. Samantha pointed out that this latest flap at Harvard was yet another disturbing example of students “unlearning liberty” and actively seeking to suppress unpopular or offensive speech—speech that is constitutionally protected outside the campus gates. Harvey, in large part, echoes this sentiment, but he points to Harvard’s speech codes, “devised by […]
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Harvard Students Unlearn Liberty
October 20, 2009
We speak and write often at FIRE about the phenomenon of college students “unlearning liberty.” In our educational system, students are too often taught by example that censorship is an appropriate response to unpopular or offensive opinions. The result is a disturbing number of cases in which students themselves act as censors. One such incident has just occurred at Harvard University, where anti-illegal-immigration activist Jim Gilchrist was recently uninvited from a student-run conference. According to the Harvard Crimson, Gilchrist was set to participate in a panel on immigration at the Harvard Undergraduate Legal Committee’s annual Public Interest and Law Conference […]
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Harvard Medical School to Drop Policy Restricting Students from Speaking to Media
September 2, 2009
Last night, New York Times journalist Duff Wilson reported that Harvard Medical School (HMS) is dropping a recent policy that seemed to require students to have any and all communications with the media cleared ahead of time by both the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. Wilson consulted with Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of FIRE and Chairman of FIRE’s Board of Directors, and with me yesterday as he investigated the policy, and mentions both FIRE and Harvey in his article. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was right that sunlight is one of the best disinfectants, although […]
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Jessica Corry Weighs in on ‘HLR’ Case Comment at ‘Human Events’
August 28, 2009
Jessica Corry is the latest commentator to criticize the Harvard Law Review (HLR) for its indefensible defense of speech codes, in an article posted yesterday at Human Events. Corry is an attorney and policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Colorado. The HLR, as Torch readers are no doubt aware of by now, published a case comment (pdf) criticizing the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in DeJohn v. Temple University and arguing that speech codes are in fact constitutional. Following a thorough dismantling of its research and analysis by Kelly Sarabyn, the HLR comment has come under attack from […]
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In ‘The Huffington Post,’ Greg Points out Dangers of Pro-Speech Code ‘Harvard Law Review’ Comment
August 21, 2009
In his blog at The Huffington Post, Greg elaborates on an observation made by the Law Librarian Blog (LLB) regarding FIRE’s harsh criticism of a comment defending speech codes in the Harvard Law Review. “Obviously,” LLB comments, “FIRE is trying to minimize the impact the comment may have by all means possible.” Exactly right, says Greg, who then lays out in detail four reasons why this is so: First, despite all the law to the contrary and no less than eight prior decisions ruling speech codes unconstitutional, what some might consider to be the premier law journal in the country […]
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More Fallout from Shoddy Scholarship in Harvard Law Review
August 14, 2009
The reactions to Kelly’s dismantling of a sloppy case comment published in the Harvard Law Review‘s April edition continue to roll in. The comment, published unsigned as per HLR policy, maintained that DeJohn v. Temple University was incorrectly decided, that speech codes on campus are constitutional, and that workplace harassment standards should be applied to the educational setting. Making matters yet worse, the comment’s author and the HLR‘s editors somehow forgot to cite any of the many federal decisions striking down speech codes precisely like the one at issue in DeJohn as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. This incredible oversight […]
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David French on Sloppy Speech Code Comment in ‘Harvard Law Review’
August 11, 2009
In a blog entry penned for Phi Beta Cons yesterday, Alliance Defense Fund Senior Counsel and former FIRE president David French directs his readers to Kelly’s thorough critique of a “Recent Cases” comment published in the Harvard Law Review‘s April edition. Shockingly, the Harvard Law Review comment argues that the precedential speech code decision DeJohn v. Temple, 537 F.3d 301 (3d Cir. 2008) is wrongly decided and that speech codes on public campuses are constitutional. Just as disappointing and surprising as this wrongheaded conclusion, however, are the shoddy arguments the comment slaps together to support it. Kelly’s devastating riposte—which David deems a […]
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‘Harvard Law Review’ Gets Lazy: Prestigious Journal Publishes Article Ignoring Case Law, Defending Speech Codes
August 3, 2009
In its April issue, a case comment in the Harvard Law Review (HLR) analyzes one of FIRE’s favorite legal victories, DeJohn v. Temple University, 537 F.3d 301 (3d Cir. 2008). As Torch readers will remember, in DeJohn, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down Temple University’s broad sexual harassment policy on First Amendment grounds for proscribing a great deal of protected speech. Prior to the ruling, FIRE submitted an amicus brief to the Third Circuit urging it to reach precisely the result it did; and since the landmark victory, we’ve notified colleges across the country that yet another speech code has fallen in court. And we’re not the only ones who think DeJohn was a big deal: Just […]
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Silverglate on Gates Arrest and the First Amendment Right to be Rude
July 30, 2009
FIRE Co-founder Harvey Silverglate, who is also Chairman of FIRE’s Board of Directors, published a terrific piece in Forbes this week on the “First Amendment right to be rude to a cop.” The context was the “unconstitutional arrest” of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., by a city policeman, but the argument is a powerful reminder to college students that they have a First Amendment right to say uncivil things to campus police (and others on campus) as well. Not following lawful orders is one thing, but being rude is another thing entirely—especially when one thinks the officer deserves it—and, […]
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The State of Free Speech on Campus: Harvard University
July 2, 2009
Since January, FIRE has been exposing the speech codes silencing students at America’s most prestigious colleges and universities in our “State of Free Speech on Campus” blog series. Today we come to the final institution in our series: Harvard University. To many, Harvard may be the quintessential liberal arts university. Certainly, the university appears to view itself that way, waxing poetic about the importance of free speech to its core purpose: Because no other community defines itself so much in terms of knowledge, few others place such a high priority on freedom of speech. As a community, we take certain […]
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Rights in the News: FIRE’s Thought Reform Efforts Continue to Resonate
May 1, 2009
It seems like every week we’re reporting that FIRE’s short film on the University of Delaware’s experiment in thought reform has doubled the amount of views received on YouTube from the week before—a trend I’m all too happy to continue. This week the folks at Reason (which—throwback!—published Alan Charles Kors’ article “Thought Reform 101” back in 2000) gave FIRE an extra hand by blogging about the video on their website, helping to push it toward 50,000 views. Thought reform at Delaware was also the subject of Robert’s article this week for Pajamas Media. Robert also discussed Virginia Tech’s efforts at […]
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Harvard and Dartmouth Oppose Petition Candidates and Independent Trustees
April 29, 2009
College and university presidents gathered last week to discuss what they need from trustees in times of economic uncertainty. Difficult discussions often arise, and the best board members are “strong enough to say, ‘No, that is a bad idea,’” a university chancellor explained at the annual meeting of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Principled oversight is an oft-cited value. In practice, however, colleges and universities aren’t always eager to hear—and some actively oppose—independent-minded board members. Such opposition was recently on display at Dartmouth College and Harvard University, which allow alumni to choose representatives in annual governing […]
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Outside Input Unwanted: A Brief History of Petition Candidacies in University Governance
March 24, 2009
In cases of campus speech restrictions, the path to censorship is paved with seemingly benign intent: see, for instance, bans on “rude, disrespectful behavior,” as in the case of Johns Hopkins University (covered extensively yesterday by Samantha). Yet the inherent conflict between free speech and open inquiry on one hand and enforcing “civility” on the other is unmistakably clear—those with the power to define “civility” also define an orthodoxy of conduct. Hopkins is not the only university with a wrongheaded (and at public universities, legally questionable) civility provision. To pick just two examples, Bergen Community College and the University at […]
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Harvey Silverglate Makes Case for Harvard’s Board of Overseers at Forbes.com
March 23, 2009
For weeks now, FIRE—along with a diverse array of supporters—has trumpeted the candidacy of co-founder Harvey Silverglate for Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, for which he was officially nominated in February. Today Harvey makes his case at Forbes.com in an article jointly written with fellow petition candidate Robert Freedman. Driven by the steadfast belief that both Harvard and America’s higher education system “[are] in need of independent oversight from those beyond the ivory gates,” Harvey and Robert cite a laundry list of problems familiar to FIRE supporters: an overly protective and politicized campus culture, “Star Chamber-like disciplinary tribunals,” and the […]
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Rights in the News: Harvey’s Harvard Candidacy Continues to Grab Headlines
February 27, 2009
As April’s election for Harvard University’s Board of Overseers draws nearer, the candidacy of FIRE co-founder and chairman Harvey Silverglate continues to attract attention and enthusiasm. Scot Lehigh’s excellent column in The Boston Globe is just the latest testament to this, as Adam wrote earlier for The Torch (and as the Cato Institute’s Cato @ Liberty blog briefly noted as well). Even unlikely supporters such as this blogger in Falmouth, Nova Scotia have taken notice of Harvey’s candidacy. FIRE expects the energy to continue to rise in the final weeks before voting ballots are sent out to Harvard alumni. Hopefully […]
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‘Boston Globe’ Columnist on Harvey’s Harvard Candidacy
February 25, 2009
The energy around Harvey’s candidacy for Harvard Board of Overseers is growing. Today, Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh shares his excitement on behalf of “non-Harvard types” like himself: Why, you say, should we non-Harvard types care about an election for the lesser of Harvard’s two governing boards? Because two outspoken candidates are trying to storm the gates, arguing that the storied university needs to embrace free speech unambiguously, reform its disciplinary procedures, and focus more on its students. And because what happens at Harvard doesn’t stay at Harvard, but rather reverberates throughout the academic world… These two are energetic and […]
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‘Harvard Law Record’ Discusses Individual Rights with Harvard Board of Overseers Candidates
February 19, 2009
The Harvard Law Record has published a very good interview with Harvey Silverglate, FIRE’s co-founder and Chairman of FIRE’s Board of Directors—and petition candidate for Harvard University’s Board of Overseers—and with petition candidate Robert Freedman. Of course, Harvey and Bob have a lot to say about Harvard in addition to discussing free speech and due process, but here are some excerpts of interest to Torch readers: You have described the Administrative Board [Harvard’s student disciplinary body] as “one of the worst, if not the worst, student disciplinary tribunal in the country.” What will you do to change the way the […]
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FIRE Co-founder Nominated for Harvard Board of Overseers
February 17, 2009
It’s official: Harvey Silverglate, FIRE’s co-founder and chairman, has been nominated as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers, a vital governing body of the University. For the past two months, Harvey has been collecting Harvard alumni signatures to qualify as a candidate, attracting coverage from the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, as well as legal and academic blogs, in the process. Now, the campaign begins for a seat on the inside and an opportunity to change the culture to one of freedom, fairness, and true tolerance of dissenting views. Many thanks are due to those who requested to sign Harvey’s nomination forms. Regular Torch readers, among others, helped Harvey […]
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Attorney Harvey Silverglate fights with FIRE
February 1, 2009
After fighting Harvard University for years over its campus speech policies, 66-year-old civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate is ready to beard the lion in its den to force change at the nation’s most influential university. Silverglate will seek a spot on the school’s powerful 30-member board of overseers, one of its two governing bodies. Its members are elected by the school’s alumni. “I hope to make Harvard a better place,” said Silverglate, a Harvard Law School grad, who needs 219 signatures from Harvard degree-holders to appear on the ballot. “It saddens me that Harvard persists in having, and enforcing, its […]
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Eliminating Unconstitutional Speech Codes: A Nonpartisan Issue
January 14, 2009
Commentators and academic organizations from a variety of political viewpoints have recently denounced campus speech codes, echoing the alarm that FIRE has sounded for the past decade. In a January 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Peter Berkowitz discussed the need for fellow conservatives to find common ground after what many interpreted as a national repudiation of their views in the November elections. Social conservatives and libertarian conservatives, the Hoover Institution research fellow argued, must “concentrate their attention on the constitutional order and the principles that undergird it,” ushering in a new era of constitutional conservatism. One of the leading items on this agenda: A demand that public universities abolish speech codes and […]
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Harvey’s Harvard Board of Overseers Run: A Follow-Up
December 22, 2008
On December 12, we announced that Harvey Silverglate, FIRE’s co-founder and chairman, is running for the Harvard Board of Overseers. Harvey says that he has since been “overwhelmed” by the response. More than 100 Harvard alumni have, upon learning of Harvey’s candidacy, reached out and offered to sign his nomination form, putting him well on his way to gathering the required 219 signatures to qualify as a petition candidate in the April 2009 election. Harvey has also received messages of support from people—Harvard grads and other, and from all ends of the political spectrum—cheering him on and offering support. Todd […]
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Harvard Persists in Supporting Censorship of ‘Barely Legal’ Party
July 7, 2008
At Harvard University, free expression only goes so far. Student publications that publish nude photographs of Harvard students are OK at Harvard, but the words “Barely Legal” are off limits if you want to hold a party with that name with the permission of Harvard’s Adams House. After the Latino Men’s Collective and Fuerza Latina, two Harvard student groups, publicized their party on the Adams House e-mail list using the “Barely Legal” name this spring, several students responded with complaints. The student leadership of both organizations publicly stated that they meant no offense and did not intend to glorify or […]
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Maybe Harvard Thought It Was The ‘Manifestly Illegal’ Party?
June 24, 2008
For better or worse, Harvard University is enshrined in the popular imagination as our nation’s premier liberal arts institution. While I blame Elle Woods, the fact is that every aspect of Harvard’s institutional conduct is examined and imitated by the rest of the academy. Simply put, Harvard is a trend setter. So when Harvard does something foolish- like censoring a proposed student party because of its mildly risque name– it’s kind of a big deal. And that’s exactly what Harvard did during the spring semester, breaking its own extensive promises of an unfettered right to free expression on campus. Here’s […]
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Harvard’s Weak Response Fails to Address Censorship of Party Name
June 11, 2008
Last week, FIRE issued a press release detailing Harvard University’s recent censorship of a party proposed by two student groups due to the party’s name, “Barely Legal.” Specifically, Resident Dean Sharon Howell of the university’s Adams House threatened to reverse the residence hall’s initial acceptance of the party proposed by the Latino Men’s Collective and Fuerza Latina unless the party’s name was changed. Under pressure (and despite making public statements apologizing for any offense the name may have caused), the student groups acceded to Adams House’s demand and changed the party name. Concerned about this coercive censorship, FIRE wrote to […]
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Harvard Censors Student Groups because of Party’s Name
June 5, 2008
As described in FIRE’s press release today, Harvard University imposed a blatant act of censorship and double standard on two of its student groups because they had planned to host a party called “Barely Legal.” As we wrote: In April, the Latino Men’s Collective (LMC) and Fuerza Latina proposed that a party be held in the Adams House Dining Hall. Adams House administrators agreed to host the party—but once the party was publicized using the “Barely Legal” name, several students complained to the House masters. The student leadership of both LMC and Fuerza Latina publicly stated that they meant no […]
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Censorship at Harvard University: Administration Threatened to Cancel ‘Barely Legal’ Party Due to Event’s Name
June 5, 2008
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 5, 2008—Harvard University threatened to cancel a party planned by two Harvard student groups simply because of the party’s name: “Barely Legal.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has asked Harvard to reaffirm its commitment to its students’ right to freedom of expression. “Today is Harvard’s commencement, where students are celebrating their achievements and the completion of study at a world-renowned university. It is a shame that administrators at Harvard have cheapened those degrees by standing by a silly act of censorship and gross double standards,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The truly mild idea […]
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Hypocrisy and the Harvard Faculty
November 16, 2007
FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate has a great blog post over at The Free For All discussing a recent resolution at a Harvard University faculty meeting: The latest head-shaking Harvard story is that anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory introduced a one-sentence resolution at a faculty meeting stating that “this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.” Professor Matory, according to the Harvard Crimson, “has claimed that critics of Israel, like himself, ‘tremble in fear’ of repercussions for their views.” To […]
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U. of Delaware Story Hits Student Press
November 9, 2007
The college media has taken note of FIRE’s recent case at the University of Delaware. This morning, the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian ran a feature story on the controversy. And on Thursday, The Harvard Crimson ran a staff editorial critical of Delaware’s program. The Crimson staff wrote: This is not the stuff of cultural cohesion. Rather, the program at the University of Delaware represents the worst mechanisms for building diversity on a college campus: Its methods were to victimize and criminalize, and its effects were to polarize. […] We are relieved that the University of Delaware program has been […]
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Professor, Examine Thyself
October 8, 2007
Check out Peter Berkowitz’s op ed, “Ethics 101,” in today’s Wall Street Journal. In his article, Berkowitz points out that, while centers to study ethics exist at many campuses across the country, including some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, few spend much time examining ethical issues relating to higher education. He writes: Celebrating its 20th anniversary last spring, the Harvard University Program on Ethics and the Professions is among the nation’s oldest and most distinguished. Yet of the more than 130 public lectures by eminent visitors sponsored over the last two decades by the Harvard ethics program, only three […]
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‘Free Speech and Double Standards’
October 3, 2007
Be sure to check out Stuart Taylor’s hard-hitting piece in the National Journal on “Free Speech and Double Standards” in academia. With regards to Columbia’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Taylor points out: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president and Ahmadinejad’s histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger’s ilk if they were a bit less selective in their devotion to the First Amendment. When a student group recently canceled an event featuring an anti-illegal-immigration speaker for fear of a hecklers’ veto by leftist students, for example, Bollinger had nothing to say. Taylor also brings much-needed […]
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Larry Summers and ‘Academia at Its Worst’
September 19, 2007
It was disappointing to learn that the University of California (UC) withdrew its speaking invitation to former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers after the invitations had gone out. The main pressure appears to have originated with a petition organized by faculty at UC Davis who argued that Summers “has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia.” His defenders, as well as some of his earlier critics at Harvard, criticized the decision in their remarks to the Harvard Crimson. “To deny him the opportunity to speak is … academia at its worst,” Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw told the […]
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Silverglate: Universities Take Over Alumni Magazines
November 17, 2006
Harvey Silverglate, FIRE’s co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors, writes in The Boston Phoenix this week about the alarming trend among major universities towards university-controlled alumni publications. Silverglate points out that just like politicians and major corporations, universities are increasingly concerned about “controlling the message”—a stance that means traditional independent alumni publications become little more than unwanted interference. The result? Alumni are subjected to an avalanche of puff pieces, self-congratulatory blather, and thinly-veiled donation requests. Surveying the alumni publications of Harvard, Boston College, and Boston University, Silverglate discovers that all three gloss over controversies on campus for rosier, […]
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Harvard Football Coach Tosses Player for ‘Mean-spirited Attack’
September 26, 2006
In July I wrote about the increased restrictions student-athletes may face once they join an intercollegiate athletic team. At that time, the Athletic Director at Kent State University had announced that all student-athletes needed to remove their profiles from Facebook.com (he later reversed the decision). I said in the post, “ADs and coaches seem most concerned about the images of the school, the athletic department, and the teams that these [Facebook] profiles can portray.” The Harvard football coach has given further evidence of this phenomenon. The Boston Globe reported this weekend that Coach Tim Murphy cut wide receiver Keegan Toci after […]
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‘Inside Higher Ed’ Reports on Recent Cases of Censorship on Campus
September 12, 2006
As classes begin this fall across the nation, debate over censorship on university campuses continues to rage. Inside Higher Ed had an article yesterday, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, detailing several recent controversies. Some involve the censorship of controversial ideas and figures by the university, others the defense of those ideas. At Brigham Young University, a professor has been relieved of his two courses because of his statements supporting a conspiracy theory that explosives led to the collapse of the World Trade Center. An art exhibit at the University of Maine was shut down by […]
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Journalism Association Condemns Press Freedom Violations
August 16, 2006
Yesterday, the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) reported the August 4 decision by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) to censure a community college in New Jersey for violating freedom of the press. Ocean Community College (OCC) has already been censured by the College Media Advisers, Inc. (CMA), a national organization that advocates for best practices among college media outlets. According to the SPLC, the AEJMC passed the resolution of censure following the OCC Board of Trustees’ December decision not to renew student newspaper advisor Karen Bosley’s contract. Bosley’s “offense” was allowing the newspaper […]
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More Shocking Offensiveness from a College Newspaper
May 9, 2006
With the ongoing censure of and strike at Le Moyne College that FIRE reported on yesterday, FIRE was reminded that there are many reasons that college administrators have decided that a free press is simply not something with which they should have to contend. The Missouri State cartoon we reprinted on the blog yesterday is a great example. Here’s another one, from Harvard Business School in 2003. See if you can figure out what about this cartoon was so offensive that Dean Kim B. Clark of Harvard Business School considered a violation of Harvard’s “community standards code”: This […]
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Harvard Law: A Parody of Freedom
March 27, 2006
Every year, Harvard Law School holds a parody show, called “the Parody,” that lampoons professors, students, and various issues at Harvard Law School. Last year, I blogged about the controversy surrounding the Parody’s satirical song about Professor Lawrence Tribe (sample lyric: “He’s Jesus Christ/He’s Larry Tribe/Not just Harvard’s best professor/But the smartest man alive…”). Well, this year, according to an article in the Harvard Law Record newspaper, controversy once again surrounds the Parody. Assuming this article is not itself a parody (once you read it, you’ll know why I say this), it appears that the big problem this time is […]
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Constructive Criticism for Campus Administrators in ‘The Economist’
March 13, 2006
A fantastic editorial in the latest issue of The Economist (subscription required) warns that many prestigious American universities are coasting on their reputation and no longer deliver the robust marketplace of ideas and innovation they once promised. Instead they end up catering to entrenched interests and so shortchange the vitality and rigor of their students’ education—in other words, they are “run for the convenience of producers rather than their customers.” Of particular note is The Economist’s take on the recent resignation of President Larry Summers at Harvard University and the climate of orthodoxy and censorship that so many colleges […]
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Celebrating One Year of ‘The Torch’
February 28, 2006
One year ago this month, FIRE launched The Torch as a decisive step into the daily debate over civil liberties on campus. The blog format has proved to be a great forum for FIRE staff members to introduce and follow up on FIRE cases, discuss current legal and policy issues affecting campus rights, point out interesting articles and other blog posts, and present FIRE’s reflections on campus controversies that have not been adopted as FIRE cases. We are especially proud of the scrutiny of misguided campus policies that has been generated by The Torch’s “Speech Code of the Month” feature—indeed, […]
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‘If Harvard’s President Can’t Be Provocative, Who Can?’
February 24, 2006
FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff is quoted in the current issue of USA Today responding to the deeply troubling idea that Lawrence Summers’ ouster is some sort of victory for “diversity.” Here’s Greg’s take: Summers’ ouster is a victory for intellectual intolerance, not diversity. Are some arguments now forbidden on campus? And if Harvard’s president can’t be provocative, who can? Read the whole thing in USA Today.
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The Speech Larry Summers Should Have Given
February 24, 2006
FIRE cofounder and board member Harvey Silverglate’s column yesterday in the Boston Phoenix relates the speech that Harvard President Larry Summers, who is stepping down this year in the wake of numerous ideological conflicts with faculty members, “should have given six months ago.” It’s a ringing defense of academic freedom and the right to speak out freely on controversial topics. Too bad Summers never gave it. An excerpt: From the outset, my tenure as Harvard’s president has been punctuated by a series of phony crises. Some of these episodes were blamed on my lack of personal sensitivity, others on my […]
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Harvard mea culpa by rich, white males
February 23, 2006
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers quit his job this week. The real losers in the yearlong controversy over his leadership were rich, powerful white males who have dominated the university’s governing board. Summers put his clumsy foot in the mouth of his well-educated head more than a year ago when he suggested innate differences between women and men are the reason fewer females succeed in math or science. That controversy resulted in a “no confidence” vote on Summers by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in March. But the Harvard Corp., the university’s governing board, kept up its support of […]
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Larry Summers Announces His Resignation from Harvard
February 21, 2006
It’s official; after a rancorous tenure, Harvard President Lawrence Summers resigned today. I share the concerns of Harvard’s Professor Alan Dershowitz (a member of FIRE’s Board of Editors for its series of Guides to Student Rights on Campus) who wrote in the Times Online about the most notorious controversy surrounding Larry Summers. As many will remember, much of the current kerfuffle began when Summers gave a controversial speech indicating that there might be different levels of aptitude for science between men and women at the highest cognitive levels. Professor Dershowitz writes: The problem is that if a university president were […]
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Wendy McElroy Lauds FIRE
December 21, 2005
Friend of FIRE Wendy McElroy has an excellent article on foxnews.com about FIRE’s new Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus. McElroy writes: The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience—that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves—this is welcome news. McElroy makes the case that political correctness, which she describes as the “belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by punishing those who advance them,” has overtaken college campuses, […]
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Truth in Advertising at Harvard
June 15, 2005
At FIRE, one of our core beliefs is that universities must engage in truth in advertising. That is, if a university restricts and/or punishes student or faculty speech, it should say so openly so that prospective students can decide to attend that college or university with full information. Sadly, many colleges and universities do not do this. A look through FIRE’s database of speech codes reveals that many universities with restrictive speech codes advertise themselves to prospective students as bastions of free expression. A striking example of this has just arisen: CNN is reporting that “[a] Harvard brochure sent to […]
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‘Training,’ Not Education
May 31, 2005
I wanted to further highlight FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate’s strong critique of portions of the reports by Harvard’s Task Force on Women Faculty and Task Force on Women in the Sciences and Engineering. Money graphs: The report on women in the sciences and engineering recommends that doctoral students in those fields (and eventually grad students in all departments) be required to complete a training course with a component on gender bias. The report also recommends that search committee members undergo mandatory training in implicit bias. Implicit bias (a concept pioneered by Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, among others) refers to supposed […]
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Silverglate in Sunday’s ‘Boston Globe’
May 31, 2005
Check out FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate’s op-ed, “Thought Reform in Disguise,” in Sunday’s Boston Globe.
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Thought Reform in Disguise
May 29, 2005
THE DEVIL may be in the details of the reports of The Task Force on Women Faculty and The Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering, issued earlier this month at Harvard. Though generally greeted with hosannas, the reports contain recommendations for a form of attitudinal indoctrination that is disturbing. A panicked and compliant atmosphere has settled over Cambridge since mid-January, when Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers got sent to the woodshed for merely suggesting that research be done into whether biological factors might be partially responsible for the dearth of women in the hard sciences and engineering. Predictably, […]
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Summers’ Time and the Livin’ is Easy…
May 17, 2005
Just in before the end of the school year, the Harvard community has now got something to look forward to over the summer—a new “$50 million initiative to address the dearth of female students and faculty in the University’s science departments.” A Harvard Crimson article reported yesterday that the university had just announced the new initiative, which includes the creation of a “new senior administrative post to spearhead an increase in the hiring of female and minority faculty,” and other programs to support women and underrepresented minorities. I wonder if any of this would have come about if President Larry […]
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‘¡Viva el Presidente Summers!’
May 2, 2005
In other news, a debate between two professors organized to address Larry Summers’ January “flap” about “innate differences” took place on Friday, April 22. Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker and Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke engaged in “a showdown of the sexes” to analyze “the data behind University President Lawrence H. Summers’ controversial January comments on women in science.” While The Crimson reports that several audience members thought Spelke “won” the debate with her arguments that discrimination more likely accounts for the under-representation of women in science than does innate gender differences, note that a student “sported a Che-Summers […]
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Students Sift Through Summers’ Spiel
May 2, 2005
In response to the controversy over Harvard University President Larry Summers’ comments on innate gender differences and on Native American history, a couple of students opined on freedom of speech on campus in The Harvard Crimson over the past weeks. Their articles are worth a read. In “The Death of Discourse,” freshman Ashish Agrawal writes: When I received a copy of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Handbook last summer, I did what any diligent Harvard student would do: I read it. Or, to be fair, I skimmed it very carefully, and I found one important morsel. Having just finished […]
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Another Summers Offense Resurfaces—Seven Months Late
April 20, 2005
The headline news story of The Crimson today reports that remarks made by Harvard President Larry Summers back in a September 2004 conference on Native American studies has resurfaced as scholars now report that they were offended, insulted, and appalled by his speech. Summers released the transcript of the speech yesterday. He has been accused of being insensitive and condescending by implying that the genocide of Native Americans was “coincidental” and by criticizing their “dependency” on the government. As reported in The Crimson, Summers has defended himself by saying: “I was attempting to make the point from a policy perspective […]
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‘Harvard Says Nizzo to Snoop Dogg’
April 18, 2005
Harvard decided not to invite Snoop Dogg to perform at an upcoming concert, apparently for cost concerns—and his offensive lyrics about slapping women. (You can also read about this in The Crimson and The Columbia Spectator.)
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FIRE’s French on Fox News Today
March 30, 2005
FIRE President David French will be on Fox News Channel’s Your World w/ Neil Cavuto today at 4:40 p.m. (ET) discussing the controversy surrounding Harvard President Larry Summers. If you’re near a TV, don’t miss it!
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More ‘Mallard Fillmore’
March 30, 2005
For the third day in a row, Mallard Fillmore focuses on the problem of campus speech codes. In recent months, as the Larry Summers, Ward Churchill, and Columbia MEALAC department controversies have dominated the news, I think we are beginning to reach a “tipping point” of public awareness on the problems on our campuses. With the release of a new study demonstrating the overwhelming ideological dominance of the left in university faculties, there is little question that Americans will increasingly set their sights on reforming the Shadow University. As we have often said, FIRE’s goal is to create a true […]
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College free speech shouldn’t be muzzled
March 30, 2005
COLLEGE campuses are supposed to be places that would make Thomas Jefferson and James Madison proud. However, the free exchange of ideas has suffered both from the stranglehold of political correctness and a spiral of silence stifling expression of student views held in opposition to those of their professors. No one ever predicted democracy would be easy, not even Madison or Jefferson. And today, no one can dispute that freedom of speech on college campuses is in danger of petering out. Put into that larger context, a bill proposed by state Sen. Bill Morrow goes in the wrong direction by […]
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Free Speech and Harvard Law
March 28, 2005
I received today a promotional copy of The People v. Harvard Law: How America’s Oldest Law School Turned its Back on Free Speech by Maricopa County, Arizona, District Attorney (and HLS alum) Andrew Peyton Thomas. I’ll be interested to read what Mr. Thomas has to say. As someone who received threatening messages (such as “I want you to die, you f***king fascist”) when I wrote a pro-life letter and as someone who was once shouted down by my own professor during what I thought was a civil debate over abortion, my personal experience with the marketplace of ideas at Harvard […]
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Silence in the Unfair “Marketplace
March 25, 2005
As free speech advocates, sometimes we forget that silence is also a form of speech that people engage in all the time. We have a right to express an opinion and we also have the right to refrain from doing so. What is key here is that a decision to exercise either right should stem from having free will and the opportunity to choose. True freedom of choice and equal opportunity to exercise that freedom, however, comes from having the essential information about and awareness of the freedoms and limits established by the law of the land and the politics […]
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The Latest on Summers: Students (Just Barely) Reject Their Own No-Confidence Vote
March 24, 2005
Here is the latest on the Summers case from the Boston Globe. After the faculty’s vote of “no confidence” in Harvard President Larry Summers, the graduate students decided to have a vote of their own: The graduate student vote of no confidence failed by a margin about as slim as last week’s vote by the faculty passed, with 699 opposed, 608 in favor, 90 abstaining, and 146 saying they needed more information. The vote on the second motion passed by 945 in favor to 362 against, with 149 abstaining and 87 saying they needed more information. Even Pyrrhus himself would […]
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A PC postscript
March 24, 2005
In the meekest of ways, Harvard President Lawrence Summers has become something of a cause celebre among conservatives for challenging the ultra-liberal orthodoxy dominating American universities. It was meek because that wasn’t what Mr. Summers had in mind when he suggested that genetic differences might help explain why more men pursue careers in the hard sciences and mathematics than women. But that’s also the point: By daring to question the conventional thinking of his profession, however it happened, Mr. Summers committed the ultimate sin. For his crimes, Mr. Summers has had to apologize profusely, meet with feminist student and faculty […]
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Sommers Speaks About Summers
March 23, 2005
FIRE Board of Advisors member Christina Hoff Sommers has written an interesting article on the Larry Summers controversy at Harvard. While the bulk of the piece addresses the way in which the media have covered the underlying gender difference debate, the last paragraph resonated with FIRE’s experience and work: Of course, offending feminist professors was not Summers’s only crime. He is outspoken, direct, and does not suffer fools gladly. Not only did he violate the holy dogma of social constructionism, he regularly violates a sacred commandment of modern education: Thou shalt be sensitive, nurturing, and protective of everyone’s self-esteem. Such […]
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A No-Confidence Vote in Academia?
March 16, 2005
In the past few weeks, more scrutiny has been paid to the direction of higher education than perhaps ever before. Driven by the twin pillars of the Ward Churchill affair and the Larry Summers controversy, the American press and public are increasingly taking a look at the state of academia—and they don’t like what they see. A vast number of factors are coming together to prompt people to ask the question “What’s wrong with our colleges?” Just off the top of my head, I can think of a number of contributing factors: attention because of the Churchill and Summers stories, […]
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Makin’ Some Harvard Lemonade
March 8, 2005
As the old saying goes, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” It looks like Harvard President Larry Summers is trying hard to do just that with the lemons being pelted at him after making what some believe are pretty sour remarks about the possibility that innate gender differences explain the lack of women in the field of science. While at the Alumni of Color Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) this weekend, I got the vibe on campus that the anger is not just over what Summers said, but his having said it in light of […]
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Insults and the Constitution
March 7, 2005
There is a nice piece by Suzanne Fields today in the Washington Times. In her column she discusses the recent controversies at Harvard and the University of Alabama. She also quotes from FIRE’s letter on the Ward Churchill case: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org), which revels in its acronym FIRE because it turns up the heat on campuses that attempt to melt down guarantees of free speech, makes this point in a letter to the Interim Chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder: “Supreme Court case law makes it quite clear that ‘if there is a […]
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Jada Pinkett Smith: In Her Own Words
March 3, 2005
What did Jada Pinkett Smith say that caused such outrage at Harvard? I was unable to find a transcript, but thanks to ace blogger Mickey Kaus, we located a Harvard Crimson article that quotes some of her “heteronormative” statements: After being honored, Pinkett Smith gave a warm, teary thanks and shared life lessons with the audience. “Don’t let anybody define who you are,” she said. “Don’t let them put you in a box. Don’t be afraid to break whatever ceiling anybody has put on you.” She told the audience about her childhood with teenage parents both addicted to heroin, but […]
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Harvard Loves Free Speech
March 3, 2005
Some things are beyond parody or comment. Apparently, at Harvard, there is a move to ensure that comments from outside speakers are no longer “heteronormative” (implying that “standard sexual relationships are only between males and females”). The outrage was generated by the notorious cultural firebrand Jada Pinkett Smith, star of such films as Collateral, Matrix: Revolutions, Woo, and The Nutty Professor. Here’s a summary from the Harvard Crimson: After some students were offended by Jada Pinkett Smith’s comments at Saturday’s Cultural Rhythms show, the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race […]
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Dershowitz on Summers
March 1, 2005
Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz (a member of FIRE’s Board of Editors for its series of Guides to student rights on campus), writes in the Times Online about Larry Summers. Dershowitz locates the controversy where it belongs—within the larger context of campus speech policies and censorship: The problem is that if a university president were to be fired because he expressed the views put forward by Summers, it would become only a matter of time before professors, researchers and students would also be subjected to discipline for expressing similar views. Once a point of view becomes an impermissible one on a university […]
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‘The Economist’ on Summers
February 28, 2005
There is an outstanding article (link requires subscription) in The Economist summarizing the Larry Summers fiasco at Harvard. While acknowledging that faculty discontent with Summers predates his speech that mentioned possible innate gender differences at the high end of the math and science world, the article properly notes the chilling effect of the p.c. backlash. Money quotes: Reading the transcript…one begins to wonder what kind of examination of female scientists would not offend some people. Mr Summers does not blame anything on anything; instead, he advances—with plenty of caveats and an uncharacteristic dose of humility—three hypotheses. First, that discrimination and […]
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A Rare Opportunity
February 28, 2005
Over the past month, I think I have been interviewed no less than 50 times by various media outlets—national (ABC, Time, U.S. News & World Report), international (Reuters), regional, and local. The questions most frequently revolve around Larry Summers and Ward Churchill—two men who are calling unprecedented attention to academic freedom in America’s universities. The more I think about their cases, the more I think that we might be enjoying a rare opportunity to do serious damage to a concept that has done more to harm free expression on campus than anything else—the idea that “offensive” speech is somehow less […]
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International News Lights on FIRE
February 25, 2005
What do Larry Summers, Ward Churchill, and David French have in common? They were all featured in an article published on Aljazeera today that discusses academic freedom in the United States. The article mentions recent controversies at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Colorado, and includes statements from David that highlight the issue of free speech on our nation’s campuses. Looks like FIRE’s work is grabbing the world’s attention.
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Are Things Getting Worse?
February 25, 2005
A FIRE supporter writes with an interesting question: Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that your two latest cases (and some of your other more recent reports from other campuses) almost seem to indicate a “ratcheting up” on the part of those who wish to squelch free speech on campus. The brazenness of their actions is breathtaking. The Summers incident at Harvard comes to mind as well. Do you think this might represent some “last gasp” from these folks? Are they trying to get a few more punches in before they lose whatever semblance of control they have left? Their […]
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Free speech furore breaks out in US
February 25, 2005
When Harvard University President Lawrence Summers suggested women might be innately less suited to scientific study than men he crossed a line that critics say is stifling US academic freedom. Summers sparked a furore last month when he theorised that “intrinsic aptitudes” may explain why more men work in the academic sciences than women. Although he said he was intentionally trying to provoke and that he wanted to be proven wrong, his comments brought calls for his resignation from faculty and students who accused him of insensitivity. “Larry Summers is Exhibit A in how you can step into the culture […]
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Harvard Controversy Inspires Student Activism
February 23, 2005
Calling for everything from Larry Summers’ resignation to more benefits for Harvard workers to the “democratization” of the Harvard Corporation, student activists have taken advantage of the public attention garnered by the recent controversy to demand numerous changes on campus at a student-organized “Speak Out for an Anti-Sexist Harvard” rally. “Students for Larry,” a group of students concerned with preserving academic freedom on campus, also turned out to speak in defense of the Harvard president. Summers’ words have clearly provoked public discussion of real issues that impact students, staff, and faculty—but Summers, who only became Harvard as president in 2001, […]
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Marketplace of Fear
February 21, 2005
Last week, we received a long and thoughtful e-mail regarding political uniformity at major universities as well as its consequences for students. The author, a professor, closed his message with the following statement: [P]lease don’t print this—I have too much fear of what would happen to me if my name became too prominent. As a result, I will not print any excerpt of his substantive remarks lest anyone recognize the argument and attribute it to him, nor (of course) will I print his name. I wanted to note the closing comment because it is representative of dozens of similar messages […]
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The Summers Transcript
February 18, 2005
The transcript of Larry Summers’ controversial speech on the relative lack of women faculty in the hard sciences is now available. Here is the first paragraph: I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn’t feel like doing the first. And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we’re […]
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Welcome to ‘The Torch’
February 8, 2005
Today is the first official day of the new FIRE blog. Those who are familiar with weblogs will recognize both the format (the “group blog”) and the tone (slightly more familiar than the formal press releases on our home page). This blog represents FIRE’s decisive step into the daily debate over academic freedom and individual liberty on campus. While our work has had national impact, recent events—such as the Ward Churchill case and the ongoing controversies at Columbia and Harvard—demonstrate the need for FIRE’s unique nonpartisan voice in the blogosphere. Regular contributors will include FIRE Director of Legal and Public […]
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The Re-‘Invasian’
February 7, 2005
The recent firestorm over Larry Summers’ remarks regarding gender and science has caused me to recall a free speech issue from my days as a Harvard undergraduate. One of the most controversial incidents I remember had to do, of course, with “offensive” speech—in particular, an article published by The Harvard Crimson in its weekend magazine, Fifteen Minutes, during spring of 2001. Called “The Invasian,” the article was a satirical commentary on racial self-segregation written by my classmate Juice (a.k.a. Justin Fong). The article sparked so much outrage so quickly that I actually learned about the article when friends attending other universities forwarded […]
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The Censors’ Favorite Team
February 4, 2005
Tens of millions of people across America will watch the Philadelphia Eagles take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX this Sunday night. In a gesture of magnanimity before the big game, those of us at FIRE’s headquarters here in Philadelphia would like to tip our hat to all the New England college administrators we’ve dealt with throughout the years. Not far from New England’s home of Foxboro Stadium near Boston lies Harvard University, home of the Crimson, censorship of business students, and a whole host of due process concerns. Meanwhile, Patriot-supporting administrators at nearby Tufts University in Medford have […]
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Say It Ain’t So!
January 27, 2005
FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate has written an article in the Boston Phoenix on the controversy at Harvard involving Larry Summers. While I am undeniably biased (Harvey is one of my heroes), I consider this the best, most intelligent and most informed article on the topic so far. The saddest aspect of the controversy is that Summers had an opportunity to turn it into a lesson on how open discourse and free inquiry should work. Instead, Summers’s retreat has transformed this incident into an cautionary tale about the risks of opening your mouth on controversial subjects on the modern college campus. […]
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Harvard Seeking Women
January 22, 2005
[NOTE: FIRE’s Co-founder and Vice Chairman Harvey A. Silverglate appears in the video available at CBS News’ online coverage. See the video “Kelly Cobiella reports on the continuing debate….”] A week after he was criticized for suggesting there are biological differences in men’s and women’s scientific abilities, the president of Harvard University said he initiated a new program to recruit women to the prestigious institution. Lawrence H. Summers told The Boston Globe for a story in Saturday’s editions that he has appointed historian Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, to oversee the initiative. The institute […]
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Harvard Injustice: Kafka on the Charles
January 4, 2004
A Harvard graduate student has been barred from continuing his studies because a fellow student accused him of sexual assault in January of 2002. The student was acquitted on all six counts of rape and assault by Middlesex Superior Court last August and his accuser was shown to be fabricating parts of her story at the trial. Despite this, Harvard has not readmitted him and has not dropped its own charges against him. Download FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus.
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Letter from the Office for Civil Rights to Harvard University President Larry Summers, April 1, 2003
April 1, 2003
Dear Dr. Summers: This is to advise you that the Office for Civil Rights has completed our consideration of the above-referenced complaint, which was filed against Harvard University. The Complainant alleged that revisions to the peer dispute administrative procedures of Harvard College (College) discriminated against students, mostly female, who filed complaints of sexual assault. Specifically, the Complainant alleged that the amendments to the grievance procedure would deprive students of access to a prompt and equitable resolution of complaints, as required by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX), by requiring grievants to present information showing “sufficient independent […]
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Letter from Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark to FIRE, January 2, 2003
January 2, 2003
2 January, 2003 Alan Charles Kors Harvey A. Silverglate Foundation for Individual Rights in Education 210 West Washington Square, Suite 303 Philadelphia, PA 19106 Dear Messrs. Kors and Silverglate, Your recent letter touches on fundamental principles that comprise the very essence of a vibrant academic environment such as Harvard Business School. Let me assure you that I believe strongly in freedom of speech and in the independence of the Harbus, which has played a central role on our campus since it was established 65 years ago. Since mid-November, I have sought a wide range of opportunities — including lunches and […]
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FIRE Letter to Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark, November 19, 2002
November 19, 2002
November 19, 2002 Kim B. Clark, Dean Harvard Business School Morgan Hall 125 Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 Dear Dean Clark, As you can see from our Directors and Board of Advisors, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education unites leaders in the fields of civil rights and civil liberties, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of liberty, freedom of religion, academic freedom, due process, legal equality, and, in this case, freedom of speech and expression on America’s college campuses. We are profoundly alarmed by what we have learned from students, news sources, […]
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FIRE Letter to Harvard Law School Dean Robert Clark, November 12, 2002
November 12, 2002
November 12, 2002 Dean Robert Clark Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA 02138 Dear Dean Clark: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”) is a non-profit civil liberties organization dedicated to the promotion of academic freedom, free speech, and fair procedures in American higher education. As you can see from our Board of Advisers, listed on this letterhead and on our Website (www.thefire.org), FIRE is non-partisan and enjoys the advice, support, and respect of public intellectuals, academics, journalists, and others who have in common their concern for these crucial areas of American public life. We are writing to you because […]
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Letter to the Editor
September 20, 2002
To the editors: Your editorial (“Title IX Complaint Questionable,” Sept. 18) exhibits myopic and wishful thinking divorced from “real world” experience. My 35 years in criminal defense and civil liberties litigation give me a very different perspective. While Harvard would do well to re-think all of its disciplinary policies and procedures (not just in sexual assault cases), which have been notoriously deficient for both complainant and defendant for decades, the attempt to superimpose a rational screening mechanism before a case is sent to a full Administrative Board hearing is a step in the right direction. It does not unfairly disadvantage a […]
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