Read the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine, featuring a variety of insightful articles including “Academic Freedom and Free Speech.”…
Harvard Magazine: September-October 2024
The Missing Middle
How overheated political attention warps campus life This academic year, Harvard’s campus has been a political powder keg. Many commentators are rightly concerned about free speech at this University and others, but the current national discussion has overlooked the harmful effects of its own presence. A disproportionate focus on our campus can exacerbate the effects of…
Is Harvard Campus Conversation Constrained?
At Harvard, there are research areas that can’t be investigated, subjects that can’t be broached in public, and ideas that can’t be discussed in a classroom. So say a group of Harvard professors, now more than 120 strong, who have formed a Council on Academic Freedom to respond to perceived assaults on free inquiry and…
Defending Civil Discourse on Campus
On Thursday evening, the nonprofit held its “Free Expression Student Summit” at Harvard. Nearly 100 students participated in the two-day event, which began with a Thursday evening keynote panel titled “Combatting Censorship, Disinformation, and Hate” and continued into Friday, with workshops on cancel culture, protest rights, and academic freedom. The summit was the first public…
Free Speech on Campus
On Tuesday evening, one week after the Congressional hearing that prompted demands for President Claudine Gay’s dismissal and less than 12 hours after Harvard Corporation members released a statement confirming their support for her continued leadership, a group of scholars gathered at the Radcliffe Institute for a long-planned discussion of campus speech that had suddenly…
Campus Conversations on Speech
On campuses nationwide, free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse have led to numerous incidents in which professors have been “mobbed, cursed, heckled into silence, and sometimes assaulted,” they continued (these events are allegedly mirrored by a less publicly visible silencing of students, who, fearing reprisal, are unwilling to discuss certain topics in class). Read…