http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2012/01/diana-ecks-betrayal-of-her-own-claimed.html
5.1.12
Diana Eck's betrayal of her own claimed principles - Daniel Schwartz. Harvard Corp., restore Dr. Swamy's courses.
A 2011 Harvard Retrospective
Daniel Schwartz serves as a FIRE Program Associate and works as a Research Assistant and Paralegal for FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate.
The bucolic red-brick environs, falling leaves, and austere columned library bespeak an institution rife with history and a word Chaim Topol popularized with his portrayal of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: "tradition." Indeed, Harvard has developed and grown over its 375 years, forging for itself new qualities with every generation, yet maintaining its identity as a unique backdrop to the education of the country's elite. Harvard has been around longer than the government of the United States—140 years longer—making it the oldest continuous institution founded in the country. Harvard not only teaches American history—it has long produced educated men and women who have helped create American history.
While many wonderful traditions still abound at the most famous of American universities, a new one has developed which can erode any university's fundament, and runs counter to the school's stated purpose. Two events this year—one involving freshmen students, the other a longtime faculty member—remind us that despite the pursuit of "Veritas," Harvard remained in 2011 among the vanguard of the politically correct, embracing a cynical suppression of speech and academic discourse in favor of dishonestly built ideas of comfort.
Swearing an Oath to Kindness
At the outset of the 2011-12 academic year, Harvard College attempted to institute a new tradition when Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman pressured the class of 2015 to sign a pledge placing kindness on par with academic achievement. Former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis broke the news and posted the pledge on his blog. The oath envisions Harvard's commencement exercises as a morality play, reading in full:
At Commencement, the Dean of Harvard College announces to the President, Fellows, and Overseers that "each degree candidate stands ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society." That message serves as a kind of moral compass for the education Harvard College imparts. In the classroom, in extracurricular endeavors, and in the Yard and Houses, students are expected to act with integrity, respect, and industry, and to sustain a community characterized by inclusiveness and civility.
As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.
Dingman enjoined each freshman to sign the pledge and to affix his or her name onto it. The signed document would then be displayed near dormitory entrances, and every person entering would see who had signed and who had not, being informed about who had committed "to upholding the values of the college," and who had not.
Under public pressure, Dingman partly relented, agreeing not to display the signatures on the pledge; but the pledge remains, a constant exposition of Harvard College's moral priorities, promulgating its fundamental belief that "the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment."
The pledge was the first of its kind in Harvard's 375 years; the American Revolution, the Civil War, the war against fascism, and even the fanaticism of McCarthyism had failed to inspire Harvard to institute such a coercive, campus-wide oath (although being a communist and a professor at Harvard in the 1950s would lead to individual infringements on freedom of conscience). Such pledges to values that have not even been studied or evaluated by fresh undergraduates remain odious on their face, as they discourage free inquiry and imply a blind acceptance of orthodoxy through trust in one's moral superiors. A refusal to pledge even to what one already believes becomes a proclamation of principle: we find truth—be it religious, political, or moral—through the free exercise of thought, not by acquiescence to external, chiseled maxims.
The Freshman Pledge was the first of its kind at Harvard, but we can see its roots in Harvard's recent history, when the tradition of prioritizing institutional notions of kindness over academic inquiry commenced. Let us begin around that time when Harvard's current freshmen were born.
Keeping Harvard Law School Comfortable
In 1992, a group of Harvard Law students, in the annual satirical Harvard Law Revue, mocked the scholarship of Prof. Mary Joe Frug and the Harvard Law Review. The HLR had published Frug's partially finished, postmodern, expletive-laden work following her tragic, violent murder. In the Revue, anonymous HLR students printed a scathing parody—attributed to Mary Doe, Rigor Mortis Professor of Law—and circulated it among their colleagues, a limited audience to be sure, and one that would understand the commentary. The parody inevitably got out. Looking back in 2008 on the incident, FIRE co-founder and Chairman of the Board Harvey Silverglate argued in The Boston Phoenix that while the school had at first responded by not curtailing the offensive speech, Harvard soon acquiesced to the outcry of the understandably offended:
Professor David Kennedy pressed the school's disciplinary Administrative Board to bring charges against the parody's authors and the Law Review's editors. He further recommended that the board look into whether those involved might be morally disqualified from becoming lawyers. Kennedy suggested, with apparent seriousness, that the piece posed a threat to women's physical safety and well-being, writing to the Board:
Many women who received this [parody] anonymously in their student box experienced the document's delivery as a direct threat of personal violence — murder of women is held out as trivial and quite palpably possible.
Nonetheless, the parody's authors became lawyers and none were punished—not because the parody was deemed appropriate or benign, but because no harassment rule yet existed under which to punish the parody's writers. Harvard Law acted swiftly to close the loophole, instituting a new, broad sexual harassment policy that prohibited the creation of an "offensive environment," at the ready to subject future satirists to sanction. Parody became harassment and endangerment; the significant cultural and literary uses of satire were ignored amid concerns over taste, morality, and comfort.
Ten years later, concerns over harassment again enabled the quest for a comfortable environment to take precedence over academic pursuits. What unfolded in the spring of 2002 was a saga of constant offense, as expressions of insensitivity, good-faith reaction, and shameful over-reaction piled upon each other to bring the campus to a virtual standstill. It started during the tense run-up to exams, when first-year law student Kiwi Camara used the word "nig" as shorthand in his publicly posted course outline. A black student registered an official complaint, and in response another first-year, Matthias Scholl, emailed her anonymously and poked, "I have actually began [sic] using the 'nigger' word more often than before the incident." This email, too, became public, and Scholl apologized to his 80-person section during Visiting Professor Bernard Harcourt's criminal law class.
Accompanying Scholl during his apology was Professor Charles Nesson, who proposed holding a "mock-trial" with Scholl as the defendant and Nesson his lawyer. As Nesson put it, he wanted "to make the alleged tort into something we use to learn about torts and learn about ourselves and actually do a mock process." Nesson's pedagogic suggestion, however, led to a "firestorm of criticism" and new accusations of racial insensitivity. In a situation spiraling out of control, Nesson declined to pursue the mock trial and even opted to step down for the rest of the semester, leaving outside lecturers to teach the rest of his class.
Nesson duly apologized for his attempt to teach about and through the conflict:
I feel terrible about the emotional upset I have caused, and deeply regret that I have placed students who were already hurt once in the position of having to deal with yet another occasion for apology. I acted with good intention but without due care.
Professor Harcourt summed up the situation without a sense of irony:
There will be no mock trial. This is not a pedagogic moment. The faculty and administration have been meeting all day and are dealing with the situation …. We want to make sure learning continues and that we address this situation properly.
There was to be no teaching in response to the incident at Harvard Law, in order that learning could continue.
In another class, soon after Kiwi Camarra's initial posting, Professor David Rosenberg remarked that "feminism, Marxism and the blacks have contributed nothing to torts." Rosenberg clarified later that by "the blacks" he meant strands of scholarship like critical race theory, but it was too late. Students had complained. Rosenberg agreed to administrative demands that he abdicate part of his course to other professors and that his lectures be videotaped so that—as put by the Harvard Law Record at the time—"students who feel 'uncomfortable' attending will not be required to." The Law School had become ever vigilant to the increasing fragility of its students; attendance to class, with the famed Socratic method and vigorous, at times discomfiting debate, became optional.
The controversy did not end after the summer, as those who felt gravely offended did not believe that enough had been done. The Black Law Students Association published an open letter to the community asking the administration to censure publicly Professors Rosenberg and Nesson in The Harvard Crimson and Harvard Law Bulletin and to ban both professors from teaching first-year law students in the future.
The administration did not further punish the professors but agreed to consider other demands, including the institution of a speech code and the implementation of a new three-hour seminar, "Managing Difficult Conversations," which would encourage students to speak more sensitively about gender and race. Accordingly, the Law School formed a "committee on healthy diversity" to consider a code that would ban "harassing, offensive language" from the classroom.
A new speech code was never voted on or implemented. The administration seemed to agree with Professor Philip Heymann's claim at a meeting about it that "making someone uncomfortable should not be prohibited," that the fearsome discourse that won John Houseman an Oscar for The Paper Chase would not, and should not, disappear. The most exercised students graduated with valuable degrees and more pressing worries; the three-year law school cycle swiftly turned the crisis into history as only faculty members and administrators remembered the career-threatening dangers of politically incorrect speech.
And then a law student wrote an email to continue her dinner conversation with friends in 2009.
Privileging Comfort over Sincere Inquiry
In November of 2009, Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace and her friends engaged in some difficult debate over dinner. She hoped to continue the conversation via a private email clarifying her views:
I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. … This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs …. I don't think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn't mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.
I also don't think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.
…
In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
Please don't pull a Larry Summers on me. [Here, Grace was referring to the academic attacks on Harvard's president in 2005 after he spoke about various reasons for lower "women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions" compared to men's.]
Grace expressed a desire for clarity, conclusive evidence, and scientific analysis. She raised an uncomfortable issue in a thoughtful, scientifically oriented manner. And she was far from the first to consider such questions, or to suffer negative consequences for doing so. Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein posthumously published a bestselling book, The Bell Curve, in 1994 which, among other things, described potential links between race and intelligence; after the publication, his coauthor, political scientist Charles Murray, became, in the words of one commentator, "a tempting target for an attack that was itself motivated as much by political as by scientific differences, and that was almost entirely focused on a side-issue in the book."
In 2005, three professors from the University of Utah collaborated on a study which proclaimed that, through natural selection, Ashkenazi Jews became more verbally and mathematically intelligent than other ethnic groups [disclosure: the author of this piece is an Ashkenazi Jew]. The study became controversial, as most scholars wanted to avoid discussions of race and intelligence. In the New York Times, Harvard Professor Steven Pinker (a member of FIRE's Board of Advisors) noted at the time that "it would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is" but that "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright." One writer at the time noted that, when he reviewed the paper with a wide range of geneticists, "not one dismissed it, but only a handful would discuss it on the record."
PhDs in psychology, political science, and anthropology had all waded into the controversial waters of "race and intelligence"; they asked difficult questions similar to those earnestly pondered by Stephanie Grace, and likewise proclaimed that they could not accept facts simply because they want them to be true. Science allows no such shortcuts.
In April of 2010, after an argument with a fellow student, Grace's angry interlocutor forwarded her November email to the Black Law Students Association. Grace became infamous both on and off campus. Her email reached the Above the Law legal blog and the highly trafficked website Gawker, which published her picture and falsely described her email as a "eugenics light e-mail screed."
Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow seemed to agree, and utilizing an irresponsible distortion of Grace's original message, emailed the entire law school community to declare that such uncomfortable questions have no place in an academic institution:
I am writing this morning to address an email message in which one of our students suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.
This sad and unfortunate incident prompts both reflection and reassertion of important community principles and ideals. We seek to encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech should be accompanied by responsibility. This is a community dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice. The circulation of one student's comment does not reflect the views of the school or the overwhelming majority of the members of this community.
As news of the email emerged yesterday, I met with leaders of our Black Law Students Association to discuss how to address the hurt that this has brought to this community…
Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility. The particular comment in question unfortunately resonates with old and hurtful misconceptions. As an educational institution, we are especially dedicated to exposing to the light of inquiry false views about individuals or groups.
Minow, displaying the same deliberate misreading as Gawker, falsely accused Grace of "suggesting that black people are genetically inferior to white people"; rather, as the Dean must have been aware, Grace was asking for evidence to disprove this very fact. But Minow, and much of the rest of the Harvard Law community, had little interest in Grace's actual questions or potential answers to them. Grace's November email sparked little intellectual engagement; people generally did not respond with the scientific evidence she sought or with other studies that might nuance her premises. Dean Minow was clearly no exception. She declared without evident irony that Harvard dedicates itself to "exposing to the light of inquiry false views" while refusing to engage the person inquiring. She wrote of the importance of "freedom of expression," while excoriating a person expressing herself for failing to accompany "speech [with] responsibility."
The mere suggestion of racism, the mere whiff of a discordant or offensive view, was enough for the dean of Harvard Law School to declare the final truth about such matters in an email to the entire community, to distance the school from a student's private intellectual inquiry, and to publicly shame the inquirer. The message seemed clear: such questions, no matter how earnestly, or privately, pondered, have no place at Harvard Law School.
Stephanie Grace wanted no part of this public controversy. Dean Minow appended Grace's apology to her campus-wide email:
I am deeply sorry for the pain caused by my email. I never intended to cause any harm, and I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back.
I emphatically do not believe that African Americans are genetically inferior in any way. I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive.
Minow's email became a teaching moment: Grace learned that the mere expression of "even a doubt" is enough to cause irredeemable offense. Under incredible pressure, Grace conceded Dean Minow's faulty premise and acquiesced to Minow's distortion of her views, undoubtedly hoping that her apology would make all the trouble disappear so that she could get on with her life.
There is no speech code on the books at Harvard Law intended to shield students from uncomfortable questions about race. But as sure and as invisible as the air HLS students breathe, a code exists, and it is severe: radical dissent and discomfiting inquiry have become a thing of the past. Dean Minow needed no Freshman Pledge; she proved in word and deed her adherence to a philosophy that kindness holds a place above academic inquiry.
As one Harvard Summer School professor would find out in 2011, many of Dean Minow's colleagues in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences feel the same way.
So Long, Swamy
Subramanian Swamy has taught at Harvard Summer School for most of the last forty years. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1965 at age 26, a rising star whom Harvard was only too glad to add to its faculty. Despite a long political career in India, Swamy has maintained a yearly presence in Cambridge, returning each summer to teach economics courses. Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business seems basic enough, and Swamy could claim on-the-ground expertise for Economic Development in India and East Asia. His teaching has consistently been viewed as satisfactory (the only summer school student to complain about his politics this year rated the class favorably), he has faced no discipline for academic misconduct, and for decades his qualifications were deemed acceptable for a high-profile Harvard teaching position. By all accounts he has taught, and taught well, generations of Harvard students.
But the Faculty of Arts and Sciences essentially fired Swamy for expressing his political views in late 2011, singling him out for unprecedented academic scrutiny following an op-ed he wrote on the other side of the world. Three days after the July 13, 2011, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, Swamy published an op-ed in the Indian publication Daily News and Analysis proposing ideas on "how to wipe out Islamic terror." Swamy's piece contained radical, nationalistic prescriptions for the protection of his country against what he saw as four main goals of Islamist terror: the removal of India from Kashmir, the killing of Hindus and destruction of their temples, the turning of India into "Darul Islam," and the attempt to change India's demography through illegal immigration. In response, Swamy advocated renaming India "Hindustan," disenfranchising non-Hindus unless "they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus," and removing more than 300 mosques that had been built over old Hindu temples in strategic locations.
Within a week Harvard students were circulating a petition calling for Swamy's removal. The university administration listened politely and agreed that Swamy's writings were "distressing" but, to the delight of free speech advocates everywhere, Harvard spokesperson Linda Cross emphasized 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." Harvard administrators stood by a professor's right to trumpet recommendations for radical social change, even after 40 faculty members asked the dean of Harvard Summer School to take action to preserve Harvard's "reputation" in the face of the controversy.
Perhaps Harvard administrators were concerned about the slippery slope inherent in punishing what professors call the controversial, the absurd, or the outrageous ideas expressed by their colleagues. Harvard certainly has had its share of controversial professors. Professor of Yiddish Ruth Wisse, before joining Harvard, stated in Commentary Magazine that the "Palestinian Arabs [are] people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery." Harvard later gave Wisse an endowed chair. Just last year, a visiting Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard, Martin Kramer, advocated that the West should stop providing "pro natal subsidies" to the Palestinians, in order to lower their birth rate and "crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men." Amid calls for the visiting scholar's removal, the directors of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs stated that "those who have called upon the Weatherhead Center to dissociate itself from Kramer's views, or to end Kramer's affiliation with the Center, appear not to understand the role of controversy in an academic setting."
The Weatherhead leadership understood that Harvard is not responsible for policing the academic or nonacademic opinions of its scholars. Yes, the word "Harvard" attached to an academic position constructs an elite megaphone, allowing the lucky few who earn it to command an audience when they speak on issues of consequence. But reasonable people do not imagine that Harvard institutionally agrees or possibly could agree with all parts of the huge, conflicting, diverse kaleidoscope of its scholars' views.
Unlike Swamy, neither Wisse nor Kramer faced a crowd of faculty calling for their heads on the ground that their words constituted "incitement" to violence. While they faced criticism in the marketplace of ideas, their right to articulate what some deemed offensive and terrible went essentially unquestioned by their colleagues. But Wisse's article was published in 1988, before such rights had become so watered down by Harvard's desire to promote comfort, inclusiveness, and a particularly restrictive form of "pluralism." Kramer was a visiting scholar whose directors defended him vociferously. Besides, he would not be returning each year to provide a regular reminder of his views or his difficult ideas.
But Swamy would likely come back in 2012 and then 2013, as he did every year, and members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had little interest in upholding its own promises of academic freedom. The same group which pushed President Summers out of office overwhelmingly voted to drop Swamy's courses. Professor of religion Diana Eck led the charge:
Freedom of expression is an essential principle in an academic community, one that we fully support. Notwithstanding our commitment to the robust exchange of ideas, Swamy's op-ed clearly crosses the line into incitement by demonizing an entire religious community, demanding their disenfranchisement, and calling for violence against their places of worship.
Notwithstanding her stated belief in free expression (for those who reject free speech often proclaim love for it in the same breath), Swamy's writing, Professor Eck proclaimed, "undermines Harvard's own commitment to pluralism and civic equality." And when Diana Eck says "pluralism," she means something specific; she is perhaps most famous for her founding of the Pluralism Project, a Harvard Divinity School affiliated center dedicated to studying—and celebrating—religious pluralism in America. Pluralism is not merely "diversity" or the coexistence of differing opinions. Rather, Eck writes:
The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. Dialogue means both speaking and listening, and that process reveals both common understandings and real differences. Dialogue does not mean everyone at the "table" will agree with one another. Pluralism involves the commitment to being at the table—with one's commitments.
Diana Eck's betrayal of her own claimed principles becomes not merely apparent but stark; in her attack on Swamy, she made a mockery of a pluralistic commitment to dialogue, and instead revealed a fundamental fear of actual confrontation with the other. Eck's speech to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences redefined Swamy's opinion as "incitement to violence" in order to expel him and his views from Harvard's marketplace of ideas. But as a scholar of religions, and especially as a scholar of religious dialogue, Eck no doubt understands that one religion often carries with it a concomitant threat to another; successful evangelism of any sort may lead to replacement or destruction of holy places without representing incitement to violence. Direct contradiction is part and parcel to religious dialogue, as interreligious discourse can often be an attempt to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable. But a proclamation that such discourse can, and should, still occur is the very inspiration behind the pluralism project, and the vision that Eck ignores amid her fear of Swamy's ideas. When faced with the outgrowth of her center's own founding principle—the necessity of listening to and engaging with the contradictory—Eck betrays her own "commitment to being at the table," and shuns the radical in the name of her own ideas of safety and comfort.
Thus also began a level of scrutiny of Swamy's academic qualifications that had never before occurred at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences considering summer school courses. Some of the faculty undoubtedly were relieved to recast the controversy in academic terms. Wasn't it true that Swamy had not taught anywhere but Harvard for quite a long time? Wasn't it true that, despite his political stature and other experience and qualifications, he was not publishing in the field of economics? No matter that Swamy was singled out; no matter that Harvard's new-found standards were likely to disqualify other summer school professors.
No matter that Swamy's qualifications had been deemed acceptable by the summer school and by Swamy's Harvard peers in economics for decades. No matter that the faculty committee responsible for summer education, in a 14-0 vote, had approved Swamy's summer courses once again. Philosophy professor Sean Kelly, a member of the committee, explained the earlier endorsement:
Some Council members felt strongly that under no circumstances should an otherwise qualified candidate's political views be a factor in deciding whether to hire him or her to teach. They felt this was especially true in circumstances in which we were given strong assurances … that the political views in question in no way played a role in the candidate's teaching or the substance of his courses. There was some dissatisfaction from these Council members that we were even having a discussion about the issue … [A]ll members agreed that the principle of free speech is one to which a University must be strongly committed, and that it sets a dangerous precedent to fire or refuse to re-hire someone on political grounds alone.
And those council members were prepared to support Swamy's continued presence on the summer school faculty until Diana Eck rose to speak. Most of the council members reversed their votes, suddenly convinced, in Kelly's words, that "the views expressed in Dr. Swamy's Op-Ed amounted to incitement of violence instead of protected political speech."
Such incitement occurred, Kelly implies, despite no mosques having been violently destroyed by masses of incited Indians following the op-ed's publication.
But many members of the faculty likely understand that the op-ed was not a criminal incitement to violence, just as they likely understand that the op-ed falls far short of the standard of "incitement" that has protected the speech of all Harvard faculty (and all Americans) against the government since the Supreme Court announced it in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. According to the law, incitement must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [be] likely to incite or produce such action"; Swamy's op-ed, while containing political prescriptions that members of the faculty might find objectionable, hardly comes close to qualifying.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently ruled that an individual's repeated declaration that the U.S. President should be killed, replete with onomatopoeic words describing the sound of the bullets crashing against the President's car, was protected speech. Dr. Swamy, for his part, had called for the removal of mosques as part of a broader political strategy against terrorism: perhaps an offensive political prescription, but without question "protected political speech." It is almost certain that many, if not most, of the brilliant minds in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences understand the difference between protected speech and unprotected incitement; they understand that Professor Swamy's words were legitimate under the normal principles of academic freedom. Nevertheless, the faculty betrayed principle in support of political correctness, and under the public eye of their colleagues, even those who initially supported Swamy's rights rejected them during the open vote. It was easier for the majority of the faculty to prioritize kindness and a supposed commitment to pluralism—or at least to hew to an academic pretext to help them maintain an illusory adherence to principles of academic discourse—than to respect Harvard's integrity as a true marketplace of ideas.
Conclusion
The American academy is built upon a relatively simple idea: the search for truth, enshrined in the Harvard motto "Veritas," should be held above all else. But in recent years, Harvard has been slowly and steadily eroding its own foundation of free inquiry, as notions of comfort and campus tranquility have taken precedence over the free exercise of ideas. Indeed, while I relate many events above, there were many more about which I could have written. Having included the censoring of a student party because of the event's title, the business school's threat to punish students over a cartoon criticizing administrators, the English department's cancellation of a poetry reading and lecture due to the poet's radically pro-Palestinian views, or the rejection and excoriation of the University's President due largely to an off the record speech, the last ten years at Harvard have seen a continual reaffirmation of the legitimacy and power of the moral censor.
While Harvard since 1636 has been responsible for much of the American academy's growth into the greatest system of intellectual inquiry the world has ever known, it is also proving to be in the vanguard of anti-intellectual censorship, the very thing which, if unchecked, would guarantee the academy's destruction. The free flow of ideas—even offensive, patently unkind ideas—now must avoid dams and boulders erected by Harvard's new dictates of morality. Don't sail in certain directions if you want to save your job, for on the intellectual edge of the world, hic sunt dracones.
Daniel R. Schwartz is a PhD candidate in Russian History at Brandeis University. He serves as a FIRE Program Associate and works as a Research Assistant and Paralegal for FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate.
http://www.thefirelantern.org/a-2011-harvard-retrospective/
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