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.

The Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, G. P. “Bud” Peterson, has proposed a new endowed chair in “Conservative Thought and Policy” that would (not necessarily, but most likely) be held by a politically conservative professor. The announcement comes as Peterson is seeking to raise the funds necessary to create the professorship. Peterson is a rare Republican at the helm of an American public university – especially one of national prominence like Colorado’s. Indeed, the picture is the same at most private universities, though less so at private religious institutions and the service academies. With this kind of background, it’s understandable that he would notice the grip that the academic left has on higher education.

It’s important to note that the academic left is not coterminous with traditional liberalism. Quite the opposite is true. I’m referring to the whackjob sociological, political, literary and other such theories and authoritarian tendencies of critical theorists and others in dubious academic disciplines. Alan Charles Kors and I dealt with this phenomenon – I hope – in our 1998 book, The Shadow University.

Despite Peterson’s political leanings – and his presumptively good-faith desire to develop more ideological diversity in higher education – if the problem is higher education’s intolerance for views outside the left’s agenda du jour, the solution of hiring a token conservative professor would exacerbate rather than cure the problem.

For one thing, the problem on campuses isn’t a perceived schism between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The idea that campuses are “liberal” is a myth. As I said earlier, the academic left differs markedly from those who fit the mold of traditional liberalism, with its focus on, for example, free speech. Though the litany of censorship cases on American campuses is legion, it’s not that “liberals” and “conservatives” are suppressing student and faculty speech. Instead, that’s the job of campus totalitarians on the far right and the far left alike. (That today there are far more totalitarians of the far left than of the far right on college campuses is not a comment on the relative merits of one over the other. It is just that the crazy left happens to have the upper hand right now in academia.)

For another, the notion that only a conservative is qualified to hold a chair in “Conservative Thought and Policy” is a parody on affirmative action. Should universities require that endowed chairs in Judaic Studies, for example, be held by a Jew? (So far it’s not clear that Peterson’s proposal would limit the position to conservatives, but the implication is that the school would be looking for a scholar/true-believer to fill the spot.) Is it the academic discipline – the study of conservative thought – that Chancellor Peterson wishes to bring to Colorado, or just a conservative? It doesn’t seem like a well-thought-out plan. (And besides, what does it say for the general conservative distaste for affirmative action programs when they drop their presumptively principled opposition when the policy instead benefits a group they do happen to like – namely, themselves?)

The fundamental problem with the proposal is that it does not deal with the underlying outrage that besets higher education today: the fact that our university campuses are among the least free institutions in our society. Ideally, campuses should be among the most free since academic freedom is, at least in theory, central to the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of higher education. Until we solve this central problem, one has to give conservative polemicist George Will some credit for his response to the Wall Street Journal's query: “Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious.” By the way, Will’s name has been bandied around as a possible candidate to fill the new chair, but it looks like they’ll have to find another specimen – perhaps one less sensitive about being treated like the subject of an anthropological study.

    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.

    Twelve “winners” were picked this year, and Brandeis was chosen for its utterly incomprehensible efforts to punish a tenured faculty member, long-time Professor Donald Hindley, for his having used the word “wetback” in what turns out to be a perfectly appropriate and relevant manner during a lecture on Mexican politics and culture. It’s an offensive word, Brandeis’ Provost concluded, notwithstanding the available evidence that Professor Hindley was actually criticizing the racist use of the term. (Of course, even if Hindley approved of such use of the term, it would be his right. But the irony of punishing an anti-racist classroom lecture, on grounds of racial or ethnic intolerance or harassment, is just too much.)

    The battle against the Brandeis censors in the Hindley case as well as other recent attempts at suppression of speech has been taken up by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , of which I am co-founder and currently serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors. It is nice to see that the First Amendment Center agrees that battling censorship at Brandeis is a worthy goal. Maybe Brandeis President Yehuda Reinharz will begin to get the hint and undertake a conversion of Brandeis’ culture into something that Justice Brandeis would recognize and of which he would approve.

                                        Harvey Silverglate

By James F. Tierney

In a story we missed when it first broke a month ago, a federal appellate court upheld a Texas school's decision to suspend the high school sophomore for writing a violent fictional short story that school administrators interpreted to be a "terroristic threat." According to the Student Press Law Center, the Fifth Circuit decision "relied heavily on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's opinion" in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case that came down this summer -- Morse v. Frederick. Alito's decision in that case had limited the scope of legitimate school censorship to "'speech that a reasonable person would interpret as advocating illegal drug use' and did not extend to any political or social commentary." [emphasis added] By contrast, in Ponce v. Socorro the Fifth Circuit divined a much broader rule that it determined was implicit in Morse, holding that "speech advocating a harm that is demonstrably grave and that derives that gravity from the 'specific danger' to the physical safety of students arising from the school environment is unprotected." [emphasis added] It looks like the family of the student is considering whether to ask the full membership of the Fifth Circuit to rehear the case; even if they do, it's by no means certain that the whole court will agree to do so. We'll follow the story and post if more details come in.

By Harvey Silverglate

For quite some time, I’ve been griping about what I call “the corporatization of the American university” – the trend in which our colleges and universities have prioritized their role as businesses over their role as educational institutions. This transition has led to all manner and kind of mischief, including an administrative culture that is willing to sacrifice such basic values as academic freedom and rational processes in order that there be “no trouble on the watch” of the current president, whoever he or she might be. (I discuss this at length in my 1998 book The Shadow University.) Because promotional messages must be tightly controlled – as they are for major corporations -- the public face of most universities today is that of the “vice-president for community relations and public relations,” rather than the president or other academic leader.

It often seems that Harvard University is the punching bag for my doleful thesis about the degradation of the academy. And so it goes: In its December 13 edition, The Cambridge Chronicle, the weekly newspaper of what we Cantabridgians fondly refer to as The People’s Republik of Cambridge, reports that “The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University plans to rebrand itself the ‘Harvard Kennedy School.’” And why, after all these years, make such a move? Well, according to the Chronicle, to “better leverage the Harvard name.”

The spokesperson who explained the change, and the reasons for it, to the Chronicle was – of course – Melodie Jackson, the associate dean for communications and public affairs for the Kennedy School. David Ellwood, the Kennedy School dean, broke the news in an email to alumni, explaining: “It’s really an effort to be more effective in our communications to our audiences and to our various stakeholders,” he wrote. Stakeholders? Hmm. The decision was made, naturally, in conjunction with market research and focus group work. It turns out that there’s some kind of advantage, for branding purposes, in having the Kennedy School equate to Harvard’s other premier graduate professional schools, namely Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School. But this raises a logical question: if the HLS teaches law, and the HMS teaches medicine, what does the Harvard Kennedy School teach? At least the old John F. Kennedy School of Government said something honest about the curriculum.

My advice to stakeholders: stay turned for future good news from the associate dean for communications and public affairs.

By James F. Tierney

Two weeks ago, Harvey Silverglate blogged about a federal Magistrate Judge, Wayne Brazil, who overturned a “civility code” at San Francisco State University on the grounds that it targeted speech and expression that falls under the protection of the First Amendment. (The case was brought by the officers of SFSU's College Republicans, who were investigated under the civility code when students complained they had insulted Muslims by stepping on the Hamas and Hezbollah flags -- which contain the word “Allah” in Arabic script -- during an anti-terrorism rally.) The opinion is available here.

By Harvey Silverglate

            H. L. Mencken, late in life, allowed himself to be interviewed by a young reporter from his hometown newspaper. The interviewer asked the grand old curmudgeon, "why, if you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, do you continue to live here?" Mencken answered the query with another question: “Why do people visit zoos?” Well, living right smack in the middle of the zoo that Harvard has become in its dotage, I now understand Mencken’s reasoning perfectly.

            The latest head-shaking Harvard story is that anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory introduced a one-sentence resolution at a faculty meeting stating that “this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.” Professor Matory, according to the Harvard Crimson, “has claimed that critics of Israel, like himself, ‘tremble in fear’ of repercussions for their views.”

            As a pretty close student of the goings-on at Harvard (I’m a graduate of the Law School, a long-time affiliate at one of the Harvard undergraduate houses, and I lecture at least a couple of times each semester at one or another Harvard Law School class), I have to say that the only faculty member I know who actually did suffer for his views on Israel was Lawrence Summers, who happened to be the university president at the time he gave a speech positing a possible link between animosity toward Israel and anti-Semitism or the appearance of anti-Semitism. That speech, plus another unpopular speech supporting the ROTC program, which Harvard's faculty stripped of university funding in 1995, capped off by Summers’ infamous musing on women’s suitability for careers in science made Summers sufficiently vulnerable so that a no-confidence resolution introduced by none other than Professor Matory caused Harvard’s governing body to vote “no confidence” in Summers, resulting in his resignation in February 2006. And so it was a bit ironic to have Matory, a leader of the faculty rebellion that forced Summers out for his unpopular and politically incorrect views on hot-button topics, claim that he felt “unsafe” for espousing his views on the campus. Presumably, had Harvard truly dedicated itself to a culture that fostered “civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas,” Summers would still be Harvard’s president.

            But I suppose that my disgust over the Harvard faculty’s intolerance for views with which it disagrees -- and Matory surely is not in the camp that has to worry about being “unsafe” – is matched by my amusement over the notion that tenured faculty members, especially those adhering to the politically correct fashions of the day, are somehow “unsafe.” That faculty, as Summers learned the hard way, is perhaps the most pampered tenured faculty in the nation. Harvard has become infamous, for example, for the paucity of full professors who actually teach undergraduates. They are so pampered, in fact, that it is notoriously difficult to get them even to attend faculty meetings, unless, of course, they are about to vote no-confidence in a president who expresses his views too bluntly. Indeed, the reason the Matory resolution was not brought to a vote was that it takes one-sixth of the faculty present to conduct an official vote, and attendance at the meeting fell just short of that very modest quorum.

            One of the craftiest semantic tricks adopted by campus censors since the mid-1980s used to suppress unpopular viewpoints and supposedly offensive speech on campus has been the “civility code,” a close relative of the “harassment code.” The latter has received more attention by commentators as well as courts. But free speech advocates have been slow to recognize the dangers posed by codes that insist that students be civil to one another – or else. It is the “or else” that makes these codes mandatory, and hence a form of censorship.

            On November 7^th, U.S. Magistrate-Judge Wayne Brazil, sitting in federal court in San Francisco, made one of the clearest statements I’ve yet seen as to why forced civility, innocuous as the term may sound, can all too easily be turned into a speech code and lead to unconstitutional censorship. Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian public interest organization, and supported by the non-partisan and wholly-secular Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclosure: I co-founded FIRE and currently serve as Board of Directors chairman), Brazil issued a preliminary injunction against San Francisco State University’s so-called civility code. The jurist said that the school could enforce the portion of the code that prohibited true intimidation and harassment but it could not conflate those concepts with the act of merely telling someone something he or she did not want to hear. This ruling sends the clear message that before a public college or university – which, being a governmental institution, is bound by the constitution’s free speech provision – may shut a student up, it must actually show that the speech or conduct can reasonably be seen “to threaten or endanger the health or safety of any other person,” not just make him or her uncomfortable.

            Of course, there’s nothing wrong with civility, but, like much that is virtuous, it must be the product of voluntary self-restraint, not orders barked by an intrusive (and unconstitutional) campus feel-good bureaucracy. Magistrate-Judge Brazil said he would issue a written opinion, which we’ll be looking for. Meanwhile, let us each do a good deed and find someone today to whom to be voluntarily civil.

By Harvey Silverglate

The act of censorship is usually seen as a direct affront to the First Amendment, buts it’s not always that clear and simple. The reason, of course, is that the amendment has several clauses, and at times some of them are in tension with one another, if not in seeming conflict.

Consider today’s curious report in The Boston Globe that the pastor of St. Joseph’s School in Wakefield, Rev. Ron Barker, ordered the removal of the Harry Potter series of books from the school library’s shelves. At first, it seems to be a slam-dunk case of unconstitutional censorship. Once a book is selected by the relevant school authorities for placement in a school library, the Supreme Court has ruled, there has to be a pretty good reason for administrators to remove it. The First Amendment, after all, protects the freedom of speech and press.

However, the First Amendment also protects the “free exercise” of religion, and if an administrator at private parochial school decides, as Rev. Barker reportedly has, that the witchcraft and sorcery themes of J. K. Rowling’s now-classic series are inimical to Catholic religious teachings, and that, as one parent reported, “he said it’s his job to protect the weak and the strong” from undue literary influences, then the First Amendment actually protects that act of censorship. Besides, the First Amendment arguments are moot in this case anyway, because the constitution protects only against censorship by public officials, and that doesn’t cover any private school, whether religious or not.

And so, in this instance, the First Amendment, if it were even applicable, actually protects the power of Rev. Barker to keep the students from reading the Potter books in school. Of course, having the power to censor does not mean that it is wise, or even effective, to do so. Indeed, Rev. Barker could have saved himself the trouble, since it’s obvious that the students will read the books elsewhere if that’s what they want to do. There’s one surefire way to deal with official censorship – by unofficial reading outside of school.

            Predictably, the massacre at Virginia Tech has unleashed an enormous volume of pseudo-psychiatric babble about developing pre-emptive steps to avoid such tragedies in the future.  The harsh truth is that the science of the human mind – to the extent it can be called a science at all – is insufficiently developed to have much predictive value. Moreover, profiling students that fit certain behavior patterns is not only ineffective, but is also an inexcusable encroachment upon their freedoms. It is my view that the supposed benefits gained by restricting the liberty of a seemingly troubled student are outweighed by the adverse civil liberties consequences that over-predicting violent or other anti-social behavior would have on our society. It is one thing to offer help to a troubled student, but quite another to restrict his or her liberty in some significant fashion.

            We have seen this for years in Massachusetts’ system for obtaining judicial declarations that particular inmates, who are near the end of their sentences for sexual assault offenses, remain “sexually dangerous persons” and hence should be civilly committed for an indefinite period (until “cured”), rather than released. Lawyers who handle these cases will tell you that many of the psychiatrists and other mental health “experts” hired by the state to testify that particular inmates would likely re-offend if released, are simply quacks who shill for the government.

            One is reminded of the case of Randall Dale Adams, the subject of documentary film-maker Errol Morris’ masterpiece The Thin Blue Line (1988). Adams had been convicted of the high-profile murder of a state police officer and was on Texas’ death row. State law required that, in order to execute a prisoner, there be sufficient proof not only that the prisoner had committed murder, but that he would likely kill again. Morris when down there to make a movie about the infamous psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson, who was on virtual retainer by Texas prosecutors and who could be relied upon to testify, at the sentencing phase of capital cases, that the defendant was irremediably dangerous and would almost certainly kill again, either in prison or out, and thus should be put to death to assure the public safety. Morris’ movie about Dr. Grigson was going to be entitled “Dr. Death” (Grigson’s nick-name among defense lawyers). Dr. Grigson had testified against Adams, resulting in the predictable death sentence. What Morris learned, instead, was that Adams was entirely innocent of the murder, which he demonstrated in The Thin Blue Line, resulting in an exoneration and the discrediting of Dr. Grigson, who, it was suddenly revealed, had predicted that the defendant, later proven not to have killed at all, would kill again unless executed. So much for the value of the psychiatric “science” of predicting violence.

            The reason the subject comes up now is that there is a well-recognized phenomenon that occurs with alarming frequency after a high-profile massacre such as that in Virginia Tech – other unbalanced individuals sometimes engaged in “copy-cat” shoot-ups elsewhere. Panicked school administrators all over the country look to take pre-emptive steps to prevent repetitions on their campuses. The problem, however, is that the attempted cure is often far worse than the disease, since there is no demonstrated way of either predicting or preventing repetitions, but the logical result of such efforts would entail expelling or even locking up a huge number of students who are seen as being “odd.” In a free society, such pre-emptive action on the basis of expert psychiatric drivel is simply unacceptable.

            The National Research Council (NRC) issued a report in 2003, spurred by the disaster at Columbine High School in Colorado, entitled Dea