Harvard faculty members are finally upset about free speech and viewpoint intolerance. Hundreds of professors signed a letter of outrage over what they called an attack on the "rights of free expression, association, and inquiry” in higher education.
The cause for this outcry is the threat to end the university's tax exempt status, freezing federal grants, and other punitive measures. Some of those measures raise serious concerns over academic freedom and free speech.
The problem is that Harvard faculty members have spent decades denying those rights to teachers and students alike.
There is an almost comical lack of self-awareness among Harvard faculty members who express concern about protecting viewpoint diversity and academic integrity. The letter gives off that same queasy feeling as when CBS morning host Gayle King insisted she is an astronaut, just like Alan Shepard, due to her 10-minute jaunt in space on the Blue Origin. One is just left speechless, looking awkwardly at one's shoes.
Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education. Harvard ranks dead last for free speech, awarded a 0 out of 100 score last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There has been no outcry about this from most of these professors.
There has long been a culture of intolerance at Harvard. Just last month, Harvard Professor Timothy McCarthy called upon the university to fire any any faculty who do not support the use of “gender-affirming care” on children.
Just last year, the president of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics called for the the express abandonment of nonpartisanship as a touchstone of the institute after President Trump's second election.
Dean of Social Science Lawrence Bobo recently rejected the notion of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies is now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
The Trump Administration is right to focus on Harvard as an example of all that is wrong with higher education today. Like most universities, Harvard's faculty runs from the left to the far left. For years, the university has been criticized for extreme ideological bias in hiring and admissions. The faculty merely harrumphed. After all, this is Harvard.
Consider the numbers. In a country with a plurality of conservative voters in the last election, less than 9 percent of the Harvard student body is conservative. Less than 3 percent of the faculty identified as conservative.
That is more than an academic echo chamber. It is an academic sensory deprivation tank.
Harvard faculty have purged conservative faculty for years and created one of the most hostile environments for free speech in all of higher education. Even with the virtual absence of conservative faculty and an overwhelmingly liberal class, only 33 percent of graduating students feel comfortable speaking their minds freely at Harvard.
In a recent debate at Harvard Law School, I debated the respected Professor Randall Kennedy on the lack of ideological diversity at Harvard. I do not consider Kennedy anti-free speech or intolerant. Yet during the debate, I noted the statistics on the vanishing number of conservative students and faculty at Harvard in a country divided quite evenly politically. Kennedy responded that Harvard "is an elite university" and does not have to "look like America."
The problem is that Harvard does not even look like Massachusetts, which is nearly 30 percent Republican. At the law school, only a tiny number of faculty members agree with the views of the majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the federal judiciary.
For the record, I have criticized the threat of removing Harvard's tax-exempt status and other measures that threaten free speech. However, as I discuss in my book "The Indispensable Right," there are ways to force greater diversity without curtailing academic freedom. That includes federal and state governments withholding government funding from these schools until there is greater diversity and tolerance on campuses.
For years, these administrators and professors have shown an abundance of arrogance and a paucity of concern over free speech. They showed little concern for how they were damaging this historic institution. In just one generation, higher education is in a free fall across the country as professors pursued ideological over institutional interests. If universities were conventional corporations, virtually every university president and board in the country would be removed for violation of their fiduciary duties.
But there is no such fiduciary obligation in education. Liberal presidents, boards, and faculty have eliminated most dissenting voices to their agendas. Indeed, many Harvard faculty would sooner bulldoze every building to the ground than restore true ideological diversity to their departments or abandon biased hiring and admissions.
Harvard spent millions fighting to defend their use of race in admissions — including discrimination against Asians in a shockingly demeaning and dehumanizing manner — until it lost before the Supreme Court in 2023. In the meantime, the university has been forced to introduce remedial, high-school-level math courses for its students due to falling scholastic standards.
Of course, none of that history is mentioned in the letter. Instead, one signatory to the Harvard letter, Kennedy School professor Archon Fung, explained that “It is a very predictable pattern that authoritarian governments go after two institutions first, which is the media and universities.” It was a telling argument. Much like academia, journalism schools abandoned objectivity and neutrality in favor of advocacy journalism. As a result, revenue and readers are plunging as citizens turn away from the mainstream echo chamber in favor of new and independent media.
Fung further argued, “We’re one of the two or three pillars that are really, really important for free discussion and inquiry in a democratic society, which is the beating heart of a democracy.”
It is precisely the free discussion and inquiry that Harvard, in maintaining its orthodox culture, has denied to conservatives and libertarians.
When it comes to the unjustifiable cancellation of its tax-exempt status, many of us will continue to argue for moderation in dealing with Harvard. The last thing we need in this debate is the help of the Harvard faculty.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
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