College Fix

The Fix reports on Harvard’s new anti-bullying and discrimination policy is set to go into effect on September 1, 2023, “setting in motion a personnel expansion and raising free speech concerns.”

Crimson

A refreshing piece by students contrasting the mission of universities—the search for truth via critical thinking—with the level of dogmatism prevalent in the Covid 19 response. NOTE: Harvard still requires original series of Covid vaccine (yet NOT polio vaccine) for incoming students (yet NOT for faculty, staff) despite evidence of heart inflammation risk, non-authorized use of original series, and knowledge that the vaccines do NOT prevent transmission. Among the top US colleges, Harvard is an outlier.

Gazette

University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard addressed ideas around free speech during a March 2023 lecture at Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics.

Crimson

The policy “broadly defines discrimination as ‘adverse treatment of an individual’ based on one or more of a set of defined ‘protected characteristics’” with the option to report on others anonymously.

Harvard Gazette

Interview with Harvard Professor Martin Puchner on the topic of his new book, “Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop.” As he explains in the interview, “In culture there’s always someone who came before you…positions that have to do with cultural appropriation sometimes go off in the wrong direction…[that] can leave everyone impoverished in a certain way.”

Academic Freedom Alliance

Interview with Jeffrey Flier, HMS professor and former dean of HMS, Co-President of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, Founding Member of the AFA, and board member of Heterodox Academy. Among other initiatives, Flier worked with HLS Professor Randall Kennedy to help draft a statement on mandatory diversity statements for the AFA that currently stands as the AFA’s official position.

GSAS

An Interview with William Kirby, PhD ’81, Harvard’s T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, on the ascent of the Chinese university, lamenting the rise in tensions between the U.S. and China, blaming a “self-isolating” U.S. and its xenophobia, noting its “racialist tones,” and fearing for the impact on Harvard, especially a reduction of Chinese students coming to “GSAS in particular because the School is entirely meritocratic.”

Dershow

HLS Professor Emeritus Dershowitz explains who is behind the Stanford protest—the National Lawyers Guild, a group with an HLS chapter. “They are against free speech…against due process… They are not a civil liberties organization, they are not a civil rights organization, they are a Marxist, Leninist organization that sees as its goal the end of imperialism, the end of capitalism…the end of America…and it is what is organizing these protests… These are not sporadic, episodic, spontaneous displays…these are well organized… Stay tuned, it’s coming to a law school near you."

Crimson

Harvard spent “the highest dollar amount of all Ivy League institutions for the sixth time in the past seven years,” reports the Crimson. What was Bacow lobbying for/against? Issues included “the excise tax placed on large university endowments, immigration reform [DACA], federal research investments, and funding for students in [STEM],” plus foreign funding disclosure requirements.

Harvard Law Today

The medium is the message—free your mind from the shackles of cognitive tunneling. Three law school professors discuss times they’ve changed their minds. Why changing one’s mind isn’t something HLS students “typically encounter in the classroom” is perhaps the quiet part said out loud, and the most unsettling.

New Yorker

An excellent, long-form piece by Harvard alum Nathan Heller on the decline in the humanities with a focus on Harvard. The piece has sparked debate in the NYT and online. “What’s going on?…[and] what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before?”

Wall Street Journal

Last month, a Stanford student seen reading Mein Kampf was reported through the school’s ‘Protected Identity Harm’ system. Until the incident, faculty were unaware the system existed, with one stunned professor likening it to McCarthyism. Another said the system “reminded him of the way citizens were encouraged to inform on one another by governments in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China.” Harvard is among schools with an anonymous bias reporting system, and many of these systems are now facing legal challenges.

Boston Herald

Free speech advocate, attorney and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate (HLS ‘67) exposes the reality behind Harvard’s skyrocketing $80,000 tuition—a massive bureaucratic infrastructure. As for new leadership, Silverglate fears that Claudine Gay will only further the shift away from Harvard’s scholarly mission in favor of racial justice initiatives enforced through administrators.

The Crimson

Glavin ’25 calls on Harvard to provide a numerical breakdown of Black identities at Harvard in order to “quantify the disparity and potentially understand the drivers and its connection to the legacy of slavery.” Setting Generational African Americans apart from African immigrants and others unrooted in American slavery, Glavin says, “The Generational African American identity is one that has endured more pain and perseverance than one can imagine — pain and perseverance that has not ceased to penetrate our lives today.”

Harvard Law Bulletin

A profile of Suzanne Nossel ’96, head of PEN America. “The nonprofit’s reach has expanded exponentially over the years, accelerating with particular speed in the decade since Suzanne Nossel ’96 was named CEO in 2013… under Nossel, it’s…a frequent convener and instigator of public discourse, supporting the right to freedom of expression on both sides of the aisle.”

Harvard Law Today

During an event celebrating her new appointment, HLS Professor Daphna Renan argues that “The judiciary should not always have the final word on the Constitution and issues important to Americans… Instead, she said, the U.S. should move toward a more political constitutionalism, which would wrest some of the power from the Supreme Court and share it with democratically elected bodies like Congress.”

Wall Street Journal

The WSJ Editorial Board takes aim at Yale’s non-democratic governance process, and doesn’t let Harvard off the hook for the same offense. “It seems the wealthier American universities get…the less open they are to different voices. At a time when it’s become fashionable to cast any political disagreement as a ‘threat to democracy,’ some of the institutions that trumpet democracy the loudest don’t mind undermining it in their own governance.”

Tablet

Journalist Lee Smith raises the question of whether billionaire Harvard Corporation member David Rubenstein, a top donor to the National Archives, is involved in the classified documents scandal—and if so, why. Smith raises questions around Rubenstein’s influence over historical monuments, recasting American history through an anti-racist ideological lens. Going deeper, Lee reveals Rubenstein’s views on the Chinese Communist Party and his company’s facilitation of Beijing’s quashing of internal human rights protests.

Education Next

Frederick Hess, executive editor of HKS’s Education Next and a faculty associate with Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, weighs in on the College Board’s AP African American studies course. As he explains, “The Florida clash wasn’t really about whether to offer AP African American history but to what degree historical instruction should be explicitly political.”

Crimson

An HMS committee voted to integrate climate change into the school’s curriculum. “The new climate change curriculum will examine the impact of climate change on health and health inequality, applications of these impacts to clinical care, and the role of physicians and health institutions in arriving at climate solutions.”