In mid-June, Lawrence D. Bobo – Harvard University dean of the social sciences, professor of social sciences, and professor of sociology – published a Harvard Crimson op-ed that reinforced well-founded suspicions that powerful university administrators favor restricting speech with which they disagree. Understanding the roots of the academy’s censorious spirit and devising remedies are crucial to furnishing an education that suits students’ rights and responsibilities in a free and democratic nation.
In “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits,” Bobo posed two questions: “Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?”
Dean Bobo’s chilling answers – “Yes it is and yes it does” – dismayed friends of free speech at Harvard and beyond.
Speech must operate within well-recognized outer limits such as harassment, defamation, true threats, and incitement to immediate violence. Since when, though, does the intensity and persuasiveness of faculty criticism of their institutions determine the permissibility of expression at universities, which are supposedly devoted to preserving, discovering, and disseminating knowledge and driven by robust exchange of opinion? […]
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