In a puritan streak, Harvard University has forced several student groups who were planning on hosting a "Barely Legal" party to change the name -- or they otherwise couldn't hold the party, according to the Harvard Crimson and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). (Disclosure: Free For All writer Harvey Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors of FIRE.

In a puritan streak, Harvard University has forced several student groups who were planning on hosting a "Barely Legal" party to change the name -- or they otherwise couldn't hold the party, according to the Harvard Crimson and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). (Disclosure: Free For All writer Harvey Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors of FIRE.

By Harvey Silverglate

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

By Harvey Silverglate

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

Every few weeks a story pops up about how someone – often a college student or an employee who has been fed propaganda to the effect that he or she is entitled to live an offense-free life – was “harassed” because someone else left nasty comments on their door dry-erase board, or some such thing. The most recent example comes from the University of North Dakota, where one student was just charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct for smearing ice cream on the wall of the dorm elevator to write the words “Scott is a Jew.

Last month, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclosure: for which TheFreeForAll blogger Harvey Silverglate serves as Chairman of the Board) noted that Colorado College had punished several students who published a parody of a campus feminist publication. FIRE is now reporting that the College has denied the students' appeal.

A popular viral video making the rounds on the internet shows New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman getting hit with a pie as he begins a speech at Brown University. The Brown Daily Herald reported yesterday that one of the students was taken into custody (but then released) by Brown police, while the second, who calls himself “Captain Custard” and may not have been a Brown student, remains unidentified.

The Waltham-based university named after the late and great Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, champion of free speech and free thought, has just achieved the dubious distinction of winning one of the “muzzle awards” given out annually by the highly respected Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Just when you think you’ve heard the last politically correct, holier-than-thou pronouncement coming out of our university campuses for a while, you open the morning’s newspaper and find more inanities. This morning’s two-minutes-outrage is a rant from campus professors, researchers and administrators criticizing Big Tobacco for giving – and universities for accepting – no-strings-attached grants for health-related research at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and the University of Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe reported this morning that although Attorney General Michael Mukasey will still speak at this year's Boston College Law School commencement, the school has decided that it would nonetheless "deny Mukasey the Founder's Medal," which celebrates "traditions of professionalism, scholarship, and service which the Law School seeks to instill in its students."

On the front page of today’s Boston Globe, higher-education beat writer Peter Schworm reports on the emerging power struggle between, on the one hand, universities that boast increasingly large endowments, and on the other, members of Congress. Several politicians have proposed using the tax code to pressure those institutions to use more of their endowment money for decreasing the sky-high costs of private college educations, making such educations more affordable to working class and poor families.

By Jan Wolfe

University Presidents have developed a strange knack for lauding the First Amendment even as they dispense with it. That’s why it’s so encouraging to see Gene Nichol, President of The College of William & Mary, match his anti-censorship rhetoric with action.

According to The Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, Nichol has permitted students to bring to campus the Sex Workers' Art Show, a sort-of X-rated Vagina Monologues in which strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars apparently rave about how much they love their jobs (much to the dismay of campus feminists of the anti-pornography school, I’m sure).

By Jan Wolfe

University Presidents have developed a strange knack for lauding the First Amendment even as they dispense with it. That’s why it’s so encouraging to see Gene Nichol, President of The College of William & Mary, match his anti-censorship rhetoric with action.

According to The Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, Nichol has permitted students to bring to campus the Sex Workers' Art Show, a sort-of X-rated Vagina Monologues in which strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars apparently rave about how much they love their jobs (much to the dismay of campus feminists of the anti-pornography school, I’m sure).

As my colleague Wendy Kaminer wrote in this space on Wednesday, the school opened an investigation into Professor Donald Hindley, a 40-year veteran of the Politics Department, last October after two students complained about comments he made in class.