Freedumb of Speech, revisited

Hear, hear, professor Campos. This concerns, proximally, Harvard's decision not to continue to have a certain law professor serve as "dean" of a residence hall. Harvard happens to use the term "dean" for this position but that is not the usual meaning of the word, which in most cases (including ours) refers to a person who has responsibility for a school or an educational program. This is really what would normally be called a house parent position -- a faculty member or couple who live in the residence hall and look after the quality of residential life. There appear to have been numerous reasons for this decision -- which is not a big deal, they're both still on the faculty with their teaching portfolios intact -- but the one that is publicly known is that the students weren't happy that Professor Sullivan is representing Harvey Weinstein.

Campos rightfully points out that while Weinstein is constitutionally entitled to representation, Sullivan is not constitutionally required to be the person who provides it. Someone who has a regular law practice and who has the time to take on a case that is within his or her ordinary scope of practice and legal competency might feel an ethical obligation to serve an obnoxious client, but Sullivan does not regularly practice law but is evidently highly excited by Weinstein's money. The student's might find his choice unnerving.

So much for that, but in the essay Campos critiques Laura Bazelon goes on to say that this is also a First Amendment issue, since this decision violates Sullivan's right of "free association." Give me a break.

There seems to be a plague lately of people who do not understand the First Amendment. The Amendment is extremely important and I'm all for it, but if it worked the way some people want it to work, it wouldn't work at all. It originally constrained Congress. By virtue of later judicial interpretation and the 14th Amendment, it now constrains government at all levels. However, it does not apply to any non-governmental entity, including Harvard University. The situation with public institutions of higher education is maybe a little more complicated but not very much so.

We hear constant complaints from the right that universities have a liberal bias; that we are intolerant of conservative viewpoints, that we indoctrinate our students with left-wing ideology, and that the faculty is dominated by liberals, or leftists, or socialists, or communists. So here's the True Facts.

At Harvard, and here, we do have a very deeply rooted community culture that supports and celebrates the free exchange of ideas, encourages disagreement and dispute, and requires respect for diversity of culture, beliefs, and values. Yes, it is true. But freedom is complicated. Freedoms collide. Encouraging disagreement and dispute requires forbidding threats, bullying, and fallacious argument including ad hominem attacks. If we're going to be disagreeing with each other all the time we have to do it in a way that is respectful and people don't take it personally. We have to make sure that the dispute remains about the conclusion or the idea, not the value or competence of the people who hold it. And if we're going to have a culture respects diversity then speech that does not respect diversity has to be discouraged. You can't have it both ways. Ergo: racism, discrimination and derogatory speech based on gender or sexuality or other personal characteristics unrelated to the quality of one's arguments and ideas, denigrating people's personal worth because of their culture or appearance or background, all that sort of thing, is not allowed. The town of Skokie, Illinois, has to let the Nazis march, but Brown University does not. And we don't have to let Milos Yiannapoulos speak here either.

But wait, there's more! We are also committed to pursuit of the truth. (It's even Harvard's motto.) Therefore, we do not allow biology professors to teach creationism, or any kind of scientist to teach that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to undermine our economy, or a historian to teach that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Just for instance. And that's the problem some people have. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. And the First Amendment doesn't say otherwise.