Word: speech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harvard is mostly a liberal place, and that it provides a home for many leftists and radicals, is not in itself objectionable. What is objectionable is the increasing willingness of the Harvard community to allow and excuse a tyrannical intolerance on the part of some of its members. Free speech or free discussion in the university is in no sense a peripheral or secondary matter. The university is neither a church nor a political party, and those who would turn it into one simply do not belong here. Freedom of speech and discussion is the core of the university...
This is to comment on the report in The Crimson (May 13) about the Ad Board's decision to discipline 14 students for disrupting the speech of a South African diplomat last March. It struck me as unfortunate, though not surprising, that the only criticisms of the Ad Board's decision your reporter was able to find in the Harvard community were from those who thought the punishment of probation too harsh rather than too feeble. The sad fact is that free speech at Harvard has been dying for some time and that this latest Ad Board ruling is further...
...with anything like the degree of severity that it deserves and that would be necessary to deter it. If the penalty were losing one's Harvard degree, one can be sure there would be very few if any martyrs willing to pay such a price, and respect for free speech here would be virtually universal. As it is, violations are commonplace because the penalties imposed are hardly worth mentioning. Time will tell; but does anyone really believe that the punishment just imposed--probation until October 15--will seriously intimidate even the offenders themselves (how much trouble can they get into...
...perhaps inevitable that academic freedom protects even this degree of zaniness, but it would be a tragedy if there came to be a time when only the crazed or fanatical were protected. Yet that is the danger we approach as year after year the violations of free speech accumulate uncorrected, as it becomes ever more clear that unpopular speakers at Harvard can expect to be harassed and intimidated, and that the university will neither seriously discipline the perpetrators nor invite the silenced speakers back. If students on the Right were to take a cue from students on the Left...
...CLUM), the state-wide affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), I find it necessary to make it clear that not only wasn't Prof. Kennedy talking on behalf of CLUM or ACLU, but his reported position is diametrically opposed to our long-held policy on the free speech rights of even the most unpopular speakers...