Harvard

Can Harvard Faculty and Students Trust a Dean Who Wants to Punish Speech?

Harvard Dean of Social Science Lawrence Bobo set off a firestorm last week when he published an article suggesting faculty should be punished for publicly criticizing the university. His position, if implemented, would severely weaken the already fragile state of academic freedom at Harvard. As dean, his significant power over the careers of many faculty […]

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Harvard Dean Bobo’s Appeal to Institutional Loyalty Falls Short

Harvard Dean Lawrence Bobo writes in the Harvard Crimson that faculty speech should have limits. There are, he says, responsibilities as well as rights associated with academic freedom: As Harvard has moved to limit its opining on salient public issues, we must use our voices as faculty responsibly. Do we allow individual faculty with large […]

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Harvard’s ‘Abysmal’ Year Continues

Harvard’s year has been one for the history books. It ranked last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech survey, earning its own category of “abysmal.” It had quite possibly the worst response to Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel in all American higher education. Its former president, Claudine […]

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Rich Students Disproportionally Protest Israel: Should We Fund Elite Universities?

My friend, John Fund, a distinguished journalist and political commentator, has brought to my attention a fine study done by the Washington Monthly, showing that virulent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests have occurred disproportionately at elite colleges where most students come from relatively rich families. You heard a lot about pro-Palestinian demonstrations, building occupation, and tent […]

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Can Harvard Win Back America’s Respect?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on June 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Harvard has had a very bad year. It began last summer with the Supreme Court’s verdict in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which declared that the university’s admissions policies were unconstitutionally discriminatory—or in plain terms, […]

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Trump, Harvard, and Godfather Politics

As Lawrence E. Harrison shows, a nation is a state of mind, which means my parents had a transnational marriage. Mom and Dad were both children of Sicilian immigrants, but my dad was American while my mom was Sicilian. Sicilians distrust authorities. From Trump voters to Harvard leaders, my fellow Americans are becoming as Sicilian […]

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Intellectual Treason at Harvard, Penn, and MIT

The antidote to bad ideas is good ideas, I’ve often said and sometimes written. I’ve railed against censorship and “cancellation” and defended very free, very unfettered speech. Even odious speech, detestably bad ideas spoken aloud. It’s good that it all be spoken aloud, where its moral bankruptcy is obvious in the marketplace of ideas—when rebutted […]

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Hope for Harvard?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on March 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. Tacitus at the beginning of his Annals, after brilliantly summarizing all of Roman history in the space of a few paragraphs, ends by providing an answer to a question that must have arisen in the minds of […]

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The Babylon Bee Comes to Harvard

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Harvard Salient on February 29, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. CEO Seth Dillon gave an address titled “Humor in American Politics.” On February 27th, the Harvard Republican Club hosted Seth Dillon, the CEO of satirical news outlet The Babylon Bee, for a speech titled “Humor in American Politics,” which aimed […]

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Let’s Help Harvard Faculty Share in Its Governance

I wrote an article for Minding the Campus a while back titled “Harvard’s Plagiarism Review Process is a Joke.” The article mentioned, in passing, that Harvard doesn’t have a faculty senate and doesn’t have a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Without a senate, the faculty have no formal representation to approve […]

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Carole Hooven: Why I Left Harvard

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Free Press on January 16, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. After I stated banal facts about human biology, I found myself caught in a DEI web, without the support to do the job I loved. The only way out was to leave… Since early December, the […]

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Harvard’s Plagiarism Review Process is a Joke

Harvard recently submitted an obfuscated and unsigned summary of its plagiarism “review process” to Representative Virginia Foxx’s congressional committee, Committee for Education and the Workforce. The document is a mishmash of the terms: “investigation,” “inquiry,” and “assessment.” Harvard had previously circulated a draft of an interim policy on research misconduct. There is no indication of […]

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The Future of Twitter: Institutional Capture and Conservative Creativity

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on April 29, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. The modern conservative has lost control of most of the major institutions of American life. It was therefore no surprise that most were glad when Elon Musk purchased Twitter; it seemed like a step toward a recovery […]

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Harvard Shouldn’t Just Blame Students for Free Speech Woes

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Salient on January 19, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. About a week ago, Harvard announced its “Intellectual Vitality and Free Expression Student Summit,” which was co-hosted by PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to free expression. “Our hope is that through participating in this event,” the […]

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After Claudine: How to Repair American Higher Education

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by National Association of Scholars on January 24, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the aftermath of Claudine Gay’s defenestration as president of Harvard, many conservatives, libertarians, and un-woke liberals see an opportunity to rally public support for an operation to rescue higher education. The idea has caught […]

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Claudine Gay Was the Embodiment of Woke Academia

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Conservative on January 14, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. One might think the world had tilted an additional 40 degrees on its axis on January 2. Judging from news accounts, the northern hemisphere was plunged into darkness, and an even more bone-chilling cold than […]

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The Sobering Lesson of the Claudine Gay Ouster

Much ink and many gigabytes have been spilled on the topic of Claudine Gay’s defenestration from the presidency of Harvard University. The commentary ranges from the tedious and predictable gnashing of liberal teeth that racism and sexism somehow were the cause, orchestrated—naturally—by Republicans, who have made plagiarism a “weapon” in their “war on education.” More […]

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Harvard will reap the damage caused by Claudine Gay

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on January 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the end Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the DEI movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as […]

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Copy That, Claudine: She is flagrantly guilty of plagiarism.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Spectator on December 14, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Academic dishonesty strikes many people as boring. After all, it is academic. It is not like Sam Bankman-Fried, the “crypto king,” making $8 billion disappear into thin air. It is not like Florida dentist Charlie Adelson […]

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The Collegiate War on Men

For two centuries after the founding of Harvard College in 1636, there was grotesque gender discrimination in American colleges and universities: there were no female students. Even in 1950, there were far more than two men on American campuses for every woman. But by the late twentieth century female enrollment had surged,  coinciding with the […]

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Virus ‘Stress’ Prompts Students to Demand Easy A’s at Harvard

America’s students will get a lot of pass/fail grades during the coronavirus pandemic. The University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University, and Haverford College have allowed students to choose whether to be graded pass/fail for classes this semester. Duke University announced, “all spring courses at the university will default to a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade scheme.” The Massachusetts Institute […]

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Are Elite Universities Getting Too Chummy With China and Russia?

Two American elite universities, Yale and Harvard, are now in the crosshairs of the Education Department. Why? They accepted money from foreign countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and not reporting the gifts or contracts, which federal investigators estimate to be at least $6.5 billion. The story, which appears in The Wall Street […]

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Why Harvard’s Affirmative Action Victory Should Be Overturned

The recent affirmative action opinion (discussed here) in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University held that Harvard’s discrimination against Asians did not amount to discrimination. Despite the victory of Harvard and the entire higher education hierarchy, committed as it is to using racial preferences to promote “diversity,” there is a reason to believe this […]

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A Confusing Racial Decision for Harvard

Harvard’s decision last month to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because of nasty racial tweets he sent three years ago is a curiously unprincipled action. Kashuv is obviously contrite. He shows all the indications of a reformed sinner eager to undergo Harvard’s diversity training. One would think that an institution so solemnly dedicated to social […]

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Harvard Yields to an Angry Student Protest

The following is an excerpt from an op-ed in The New York Times by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard. I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. […]

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Two Shaky Reasons Why Harvard Could Win Its Racial Bias Suit

The hearing last week in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, presumably the last until the judge offers her opinion, witnessed the unfortunate prominence of both a red herring and a red flag. The Boston Globe captured both the red herring and a red flag in its lede: “US District Judge […]

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Harvard Zealots Abuse Title IX to Nail the Accused

Harvard is perhaps the only institution in the country with multiple sets of Title IX procedures, depending on which branch of the university the student attends. At Harvard Law School, the parties are allowed to have full legal representation, the tribunal is basically independent, and there’s meaningful discovery. Harvard undergraduates, on the other hand, experience […]

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Why Harvard Needs Better Defense Lawyers

By now, it is clear to all observers that the most damaging material that Harvard has been forced to release in the lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions is powerful evidence that Asian applicants, who score higher than applicants from other racial and ethnic groups on grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, are graded […]

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Asian students

Ending Anti-Asian Discrimination at Harvard: Plan B

It is uncertain how the current lawsuit regarding Harvard’s alleged discriminate against Asian applicants will eventually turn out, but the smart money predicts little will change. After all, this is just one of many similar previous lawsuits, and racial preferences survived them all. Nor should we ignore administrative ingenuity in circumventing court orders. At most, […]

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A Medal Not All Are Eligible for

LL Cool J was one of eight winners this year of the Hutchins Center’s W.E.B. Dubois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African America studies. It is awarded to individuals “in recognition of their contribution to African American culture and the life of the mind.” We notice that many expected […]

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