Silverglate: Harvard policies in need of an overhaul

Karl Marx, despite his failings as an economist, did make a few observations containing a kernel of wisdom. My favorite: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

University of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Charles Kors and I authored, “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses” in 1998, and the following year we co-founded the civil liberties non-profit The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (www.thefire.org), I considered its description of the trajectory of institutions of higher education to be a true American tragedy. Speech codes were de rigueur, and veritable “kangaroo courts” were established to enforce them.

Currently, Sarah Lawrence College Professor Samuel Abrams and I are working on a sequel, and as I ponder the present situation on our college campuses, I discern farce. The farce is particularly acute at Harvard, where I attended law school – so acute that I have decided to launch a long-shot petition candidacy for the Harvard Board of Overseers, the university’s second most powerful, and only alumni-elected, governing body.

My history as a candidate over the years is not a happy one. I first decided to run in 2009 when I needed 250 alumni signatures to gain a place on the ballot. I easily obtained them. I came very close to winning and believe that I would have landed a seat had the Harvard Alumni Association, which runs the election, not denied me the right to have it disseminate all the candidates’ policy positions to the alumni body. That was a right, the Association informed me, according only to the “official” candidates nominated by the Association.

With little fanfare, the Association then promptly raised the number of nominating signatures to the current 3,238 – Harvard’s version of “candidate suppression.” I am now faced with the daunting task of having to obtain these alumni signatures by Jan. 31. (On Jan. 16, I wrote to Penny Pritzker, senior fellow on Harvard’s governing board, asking her to use her position to extend that deadline by one month.)

I am now taking a stab at getting on the ballot, and this time I think I have a decent shot. The trends set out by Prof. Kors and me in 1998 have now come to fruition, as demonstrated by the woes and dysfunctionality besetting Harvard, including the disastrous aftermath of its recent (and, at six months, shortest-lived) President Claudine Gay’s appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Work Force. When asked a question concerning free speech on Harvard’s campus and the raucous and seemingly antisemitic demonstrations by Palestinian students and their allies, she gave a perfectly acceptable response confirming the demonstrators’ academic freedom rights. However, she appeared unable to explain and elucidate that position.

This inability was well understood by all who had followed her career as Dean of the Faculty: She was Harvard’s leading advocate for the woeful trend toward “diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion,” which, given the restrictive speech codes used to enforce these goals, shreds any notion of academic freedom, as well as intellectual diversity.

As one wag put it succinctly, Harvard – the lead plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court case that shredded affirmative action in college admissions – wants to accept students who all think alike but look quite different from one another.

In addition to these academic goals, I would work toward implementing other salient reforms.

For one thing, I would study the number and roles of Harvard’s administrators, estimated by FIRE to outnumber the faculty three-to-one. I would also give the faculty a larger role in determining university-wide policies aimed at making them more compatible with academic undertakings. (A start in this direction has already been initiated by the creation of The Council on Academic Freedom under the leadership of five senior faculty members.) I would also forbid the punishment of any student or professor whose words are deemed insulting or demeaning to any groups or individuals – that is, I would seek the abolition of “speech codes” and the kangaroo courts that enforce them. (Students need to be educated, not coddled.)

Harvard is now at a crossroads. It can continue to fight what increasingly has become a losing battle for a campus that seeks to train its students in ideological conformity to the diversity mantra, or it can return to its roots exemplified by its motto “veritas’ – the search for truth. I hope that Harvard’s alumni body gives me the opportunity to work for a new beginning for our nation’s oldest university.

Harvey Silverglate is a criminal defense, civil liberties and academic freedom lawyer and author in Cambridge