Don’t Sanction Professors For Speaking Out
Why a Harvard Dean was wrong to urge censoring faculty who criticize their universities.
“College administrator tries to silence faculty critics” is hardly a new scenario. But the censors usually aren’t quite so upfront about it.
Enter Lawrence Bobo, a professor and Dean of Social Science at Harvard, who penned an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson last weekend arguing that faculty should be sanctioned when they criticize the university or prompt “external actors” like alumni or the media to do so.
“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs,” Bobo writes.
Apparently, it’s unprofessional to criticize the university so badly that others suggest reforms—even if those criticisms are valid. This is particularly so for Harvard’s more famous faculty, with “well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy” which “opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy.” Bobo names economist Raj Chetty, historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jill Lepore, and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.
He writes:
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?
Yes it is and yes it does.
There are many reasons why sanctioning faculty who speak out against the university is dangerous. Most obviously, it would gut their expressive rights to publicly criticize Harvard’s shortcomings or abuses, amounting to the kind of “professionalism” policy colleges routinely abuse to punish all manner of controversial student and faculty speech. An administrator need only deem speech unprofessional, and they’ve found a convenient loophole around their academic freedom and free speech policies.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which defines professional values for faculty, would say that Bobo’s got it backwards. “Professors have a particular obligation to promote conditions of free inquiry and to further public understanding of academic freedom,” they write. In other words, not only should they not be silenced when freedom of inquiry is at stake—they have a special moral obligation to speak out.
What’s more, a gag order at one of the world’s most elite universities would have an outsized effect because, of course, Harvard has a disproportionate effect on our society. Recent Pew data shows that dozens of House members (9%) have at least one Harvard degree, while Harvard grads make up 13% of U.S. senators. Likewise, half of this century’s Supreme Court appointees have Harvard Law degrees; Harvard grads make up a disproportionate chunk of New York Times reporters; and the nation’s biggest corporate powerhouses—like Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and McDonald’s—all put Harvard grads at the helm.
Bobo’s op-ed has given pundits a fresh opportunity to rehash the school’s recent “abysmal” free speech and academic freedom practices. This includes last fall’s disastrously hypocritical congressional testimony by then-President Claudine Gay, which set off a chain of events that would see her embroiled in a plagiarism scandal and ultimately resign.
Particularly vexing to free speech advocates is that a clear map to a better place is right there in Harvard’s policies. The university has had robust protections for free speech and academic freedom in place for decades, including the right of faculty to teach, research, and publicly discuss divisive topics. Harvard’s policies in this regard are gold-standard, even if administrators have struggled mightily in recent years to put them into practice. Efforts undergirded by the good folks at the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard—including the adoption of institutional neutrality, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences abandoning DEI-related political litmus tests in hiring—have ignited fresh hope that Harvard can re-commit to fulfilling the promise of its excellent policies.
It’s vital that Harvard builds on this progress. If the university wants to stop adding to its controversy list, it should welcome faculty criticisms. After all, they’re the people with perhaps the most incentive to see the institution succeed and are the best-positioned to know its shortcomings.
Consider those faculty Bobo’s op-ed names. What exactly did they say that would so “invite external interference” and “seriously harm the University and its independence?” Steven Pinker wrote a “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” in The Boston Globe last December, urging the university to simply follow its own policies on free speech, viewpoint diversity, and nonviolence. He also pushed for the adoption of institutional neutrality and doing away with DEI-related bureaucracies that have become synonymous with campus orthodoxies around issues of race and gender.
Folks like Pinker, if heeded, could save Bobo from himself. As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed, his proposal might come back to haunt him rather quickly: “Bobo’s op-ed has incited me, an external actor, to publicly lament the subset of Harvard leaders who neither understand nor support free speech,” Friedersdorf wrote on X. “By his logic, I guess he needs to be sanctioned.”
Point succinctly made.
But the icing on the multi-layered irony cake has to be Bobo’s response to The Crimson on Tuesday, in which he attempted to distance “the views in his op-ed from his official role” as a dean with disciplinary authority. Instead, he invoked his expressive right to share his views “as a member of the faculty.”
Quite right. There’s another name for that: Academic freedom.
Alex Morey is a First Amendment attorney and journalist. She leads the Campus Rights Advocacy team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
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Bobo got a fair amount of negative reaction to his proposal, I think this idea will die on the vine fairly quickly. Not a coincidence that it came from a social sciences dean - that's no shade on the social sciences, but rather on the academic culture specific to social sciences. I think he embarrassed himself.
Anyone whose name is Bobo would do well to take special care before publishing anything stupid.