FIRE might have raised our score — but speech on campus still smells like smoke.
This year, Harvard accomplished the enviable feat of rising from last to 13th-to-last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings. The shift might seem like cause for celebration — but the threats to free speech on our campus loom large.
Yes, Harvard moved up from dead last — but flawed rankings can’t hide the chilling wind blowing against free speech. The University’s recent crackdowns and program suspensions, paired with a federal campaign to police campus speech and DEI, are narrowing the bounds of debate.
It is no secret FIRE’s methodology is imperfect. For one, the rankings are biased against large schools with more media attention — one metric used by FIRE is the absolute number of speakers shouted down on campus, for example. The rankings were also based in part on survey data with a relatively small sample size — in Harvard’s case, 411 for a school of about 24,000. Moreover, the rankings exclude so-called “warning” schools that “do not promise free speech rights, marking Harvard’s previous position at the bottom of the list as a bit of a misnomer.
Harvard’s speech climate rests on two pillars: student culture and University policy. For a time, Harvard undertook measures we applauded for their ability to improve Harvard’s speech climate. In light of those positive moves we called on students to cultivate an environment of respectful disagreement.
This is just what the Harvard student paper, The Crimson, wants you to do (again): “Trust it.”
Three years ago the paper tried to snow us, saying “while it did favor ‘debate and discourse’ which are ‘central to a vibrant intellectual community’ and the ‘lifeblood of academia,’” it doesn’t mean Harvard needed more conservative faculty.
“We find little reason to believe” more right-leaning professors “would increase productive disagreement in any meaningful way,” the editors wrote. Because hey — “liberal professors can disagree.”
Most recently, Crimson Editorial Editor Henry Haidar says the faculty ideological disparity is “not necessarily a bad thing”; after all, he’s “never had a professor attempt to foist their political views onto” a class. (How very Pauline Kael. But at least she was aware of the social circle she inhabited.)