Kalven Report Institutional Neutrality

Jeffrey Flier
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In a recent op-ed in The Harvard Crimson—“Faculty Speech Must Have Limits”—the university’s dean of social science, Lawrence Bobo, made an extraordinary set of claims that seriously threaten academic freedom, including the chilling idea that faculty members who dare to criticize the university should be punished.

Bobo is a senior administrator at Harvard, overseeing centers and departments including history, economics, sociology, and African and African American studies. When he writes about faculty free speech, those within and outside his division listen.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Just when you thought the turmoil at Harvard was over, its briquettes have ignited again, thanks to a big squirt of lighter fluid from Harvard’s Dean of Social Science, Larry Bobo.  Last week, Bobo posted a deeply misguided editorial in the Harvard Crimson, which you can see by clicking the title below. What he calls for is in-house censorship of Harvard faculty, and even sanctions applied to those who nevertheless adhere to First-Amendment-permitted free speech.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Harvard has some slow learners, especially in the dean’s office. Lawrence Bobo, the dean of social science, kicked up a storm this week when he wrote in the Harvard Crimson that faculty members who criticize Harvard or its policies should be subject to university punishment.

FIRE

Excerpt: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow was fired for producing porn off the clock. Tomorrow, UW will go after his tenured position after donors and politicians threatened to pull their support. Firing him would crash into the First Amendment.

Academic freedom generally protects faculty from punishment for what they do or say off the clock. The same law that shields faculty from getting fired or punished for their political opinions or associations also protects their right to create porn.

Samuel J. Abrams & Steven McGuire
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table.

But, despite these small steps, or even because of how small they were, it was reasonable to remain skeptical about whether Harvard had really understood the message. Professor and Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo has made it eminently clear that it did not get through to him.

Jonathan H. Adler
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Professor Lawrence Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, has an article in the Harvard Crimson on the proper limits of faculty speech that has to be read to be believed.