Walkout at Milton Academy
Quillette by HLS Professor Randall Kennedy and Harvard alum Harvey Silverglate (LLB ‘67)
Kennedy and Silverglate team up to write an essay about intolerance at Milton Academy after Silverglate, an invited guest speaker at Milton Academy, articulated the title of Kennedy’s re-issued book, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Harvard Book Store interviewed Kennedy on the book in August 2021). Despite the event being around freedom of expression featuring Silverglate, a known free speech absolutist, and the book’s subject the word itself, offended students walked out of the event, the school’s administration apologized to the entire student body for Silverglate’s “shocking and uncomfortable” infraction, and then refused to share Silverlgate’s response.
Kennedy and Silverglate then came together to write an essay in Quillette about the incident and its implications.
“Though we come from different perspectives, we have collaborated on this essay because of what the walk-out tells us about the dangers that free speech and academic freedom face even in purportedly sophisticated, broad-minded, intellectually adventurous settings… If controversial opinions regarding what words and ideas may be aired are ruled out of place at a free-speech assembly at Milton Academy, we know that we have entered a perilous cultural moment in which debate is overwhelmed by unquestioning persecutions of perceived heresies.”
“…The educational authorities at a storied academic institution are so afraid of offending the sensibilities of censors that they would rather discourteously ignore a guest speaker’s request to respond to a mistaken charge than permit the airing of a full debate. What happened at Milton is hardly an attractive display of diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
Update: Harvey Silverglate is in the process of gathering signatures to be a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers.
