Episode Details

Last week, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT refused to condemn calls for Jewish genocide as bullying or harassment. While horrible antisemitic speech and behavior have long been defended on their campuses, this debacle occurred before the United States Congress. The presidents attempted to appeal to free speech rights, differentiating between speech and conduct via statements obviously crafted by lawyers. Their comments shocked and outraged many. UPenn’s president resigned, after initially attempting to walk back her comments. Harvard’s president quickly apologized, while the MIT board of directors issued a statement in support of their president. 

Recently, the pseudonymous Tyler Durden documented the scope of the left’s stranglehold on academia at the ZeroHedge website. A new survey by The Harvard Crimson found that more than three-quarters of surveyed Harvard faculty identified as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while just 2.9% identified as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Another study by Kevin Tobia at Georgetown University and Eric Martínez of MIT found that just 9% of law school professors at the nation’s top 50 law schools identify as conservative. A survey conducted last year by The College Fix found that 33 out of 65 academic departments across the nation lacked a single Republican professor.  

Given this virtual monopoly, progressive academics should be confident enough to allow dissenting voices on campus every now and then. However, after years of conservative speakers being canceled and shouted down, it is clear that many progressives only wish to hear their own voices. Some professors have even resorted to denouncing free speech as a threat to their campus dominance. 

Recently, a pair of faculty members from Arizona State University wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled (I am not making this up) “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free-Speech Rhetoric! It concedes too much to right-wing agendas.” In the piece, Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell argue that “calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose,” which, according to them, is “the production of expert knowledge and understanding.” Not all opinions ought to be heard, they argue, even opinions from dissenting experts, because “not all opinions are equally valid.” 

The timing of their piece, just prior to the testimonies of the three Ivy League presidents, must be divinely determined.  

According to these professors, opinions that are valid are “the product of rigorous and reliable disciplines” like the humanities, which include and often prioritize “the study of race and gender.” These departments, insist Amesbury and O’Donnell, are not part of the “public sphere,” a “speaker’s corner,” or even a “marketplace of ideas.” Instead, these departments and their campuses are sites of production for “expert knowledge and understanding,” and should therefore be exempt from free speech