Speak Now, or Forever Hold Your Speech
Posted on December 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Or something.
Drew Faust said today, according to the Crimson, that she would consider creating a committee to investigate free speech at Harvard.
Faustâs announcement at the meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences came in the midst of an ongoing clash between anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory â82 and law professor Alan M. Dershowitz. Matory has claimed that critics of Israel like himself âtremble in fearâ from repercussions for their views and urged his colleagues to pass a one-sentence affirmation of âcivil dialogue.â
….Dershowitz told the professors that a research assistant had identified 54 events held at Harvard with anti-Israel perspectives since the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004.
I wonder if it was one of the research assistants described in 02138’s piece, “A Million Little Writers,” which discusses, among other things, Dershowitz’s reliance on research assistants?
The meeting was bogged down by countless amendments, vote counts, and quibbles over nitty-gritty details of the rules of order. Landscape studies professor John R. Stilgoe quipped, âIâm very happy…we decided not to broadcast these,â referring to the Facultyâs rejection of a proposal to broadcast meetings over radio.
I wish the Crimson had quoted Faust, because it’s a little hard to know how serious her statement is, or if it’s just a palliative.
If it’s serious, she’s making a big mistake (this has been a not-so-hot day for DGF).
A committee to investigate free speech?
6 Responses
12/13/2007 8:36 am
Yes, that’s rich (if I may). What will the task force talk about? How will they stay awake? I have a feeling that the proposal was a feeble attempt to make this go away. Anyone notice a trend in new FAS appointments?
12/13/2007 11:01 am
In FAS, these are the guidelines. They are excellent and should have been the end of the conversation.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/
~secfas/public/FreeSpeech.html
These were voted by the Faculty. Note that they call for the existence of a Free Speech Committee. It existed for awhile but has not been kept up. Plainly we need it. Faust is reviving it, but wants to raise it to a University committee (otherwise how would it deal with Dershowitz?). For that she has to make a show of consultation at least.
So yes, it is a way of making the immediate issue go away, but it is actually very much like a structure that should have existed all along, so stuff like this would not have to be dealt with in an ad hoc way.
The most serious claim in Tuesday’s discussion was that free speech is not just for the thick-skinned — which is a way of restricting the free speech of others, by suggesting that if what they say would hurt my feelings, they should not say it. That is so wrong, it is shocking that anyone on the Harvard faculty is confused about it. No one needs free speech rights to say nice things; their only purpose is to protect the right to offend. So yes, the committee has some educational work to do, at a minimum.
12/13/2007 6:27 pm
The task force on free speech should include the professional schools. It is there that the freedom to speak up about declining standards has been most seriously curtailed.
12/13/2007 8:03 pm
which professional schools have declining standards. Do tell.
12/13/2007 9:35 pm
probably the same schools with declining application numbers.
12/15/2007 2:23 pm
Just to firm up 10:01’s post: the committee is not designed to “investigate free speech at Harvard.” It would be an Advisory Committee on Free Speech, and “its tasks would be to discuss ambiguities in applying these Guidelines [i.e. the 1990 Free Speech Guidelines] in the future and to introduce these values to new generations of the University Community. This could include meetings with administrators and others to discuss the difficulty of striking appropriate balances of rights in hard cases. Protection of free speech in our community requires not only guidelines but a process for continuing a moral discourse that is vital to our existence.” [I’m quoting from the 1990 Free Speech Guidelines]
It’s a pity that the committee was allowed to lapse in recent years.