John Tierney is the former long-time New York Times reporter and columnist. He is now a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and can therefore say things like this:
Harvard’s abysmal [FIRE free-speech ranking] is based partly on a series of censorship incidents at the school and partly on its students’ answers to questions in a national survey of 55,000 students. At Harvard, three-quarters of students didn’t feel comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial topic. Seventy percent said that it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, and 30 percent said that using violence to stop a speech was acceptable.
The dismal rating is also based on Harvard’s refusal to adopt a strict policy guaranteeing free speech, like that drawn up by the University of Chicago and adopted by other colleges. Harvard’s guidelines promise free speech but exempt speech that is not “civil” or that shows “grave disrespect for the dignity of others.” Those vague loopholes have enabled a double standard: you’re free to issue public statements vilifying Israel and to put up murals in Harvard Yard no matter how gravely they disrespect Jews, but don’t dare offend progressives with your research findings, political views, or even isolated comments in an interview or blog post.
One incident contributing to Harvard’s record-low FIRE score was its treatment of David Kane, who taught a data-science class in the government department. When Kane invited Charles Murray, the libertarian scholar (and Harvard alumnus) to give an online lecture in 2020, the Crimson started a campaign against both men. It ran a series of articles making evidence-free assertions that Murray’s research was “widely discredited” and airing accusations from activists and a Harvard professor that his work was “racist pseudoscience.”
Gay, then the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was featured in an article headlined “Ahead of Speaker Event, FAS Dean Gay Says Charles Murray’s Work Lacks Academic Merit.” A dean responsible for protecting academic freedom should not, of course, participate in such a smear.
Murray is one of the nation’s most influential researchers, publishing more than a dozen books; his work has been cited tens of thousands of times in academic literature. Gay is a political scientist whose C.V. lists 11 articles and who had the unusual distinction of winning tenure without publishing a book, as David Randall of the National Association of Scholars wrote when Gay was named Harvard’s president last year. He noted that all the articles published in Gay’s career roughly equaled the output in a single year of the economist Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president who lost his job after he offended feminists by accurately describing differences in genetic variability between the sexes.
This passage is excerpted from Tierney’s long and difficult-to-excerpt City Journal column “Harvard’s double standard on free speech.” Please read the whole thing with all of Tierney’s links. For more on Gay, see “Bill Ackman to Harvard: Get your act together.”
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