Harvard Pretends To Support Free Speech

No matter what you think of Harvard University, one thing you can’t dispute is how important the institution used to be, in previous generations. It was a Harvard faculty member who first popularized the smallpox vaccine in the United States. Harvard researchers developed some of the world’s first computers. A Harvard scientist named James Watson famously modeled the DNA double helix. Harvard was an institution that made real-world discoveries that changed the lives of millions of people. When you heard from Harvard professors and administrators, you took them seriously. They weren’t cynical political actors. They were competent and serious. That was the whole point of Harvard.

With that history in mind, it was both depressing and surreal to watch this recent video message from Harvard’s new president, a political scientist named Claudine Gay. In case you missed it, Gay took over as Harvard’s president this year, to much fanfare, for the simple reason that she is now the first black president of the university. Her skin color and gender were her primary qualifications. No one denies this; it’s how Harvard admits students these days, and it’s how Harvard selects faculty members and administrators.

In the video, Claudine Gay responds to nationwide outrage that many Harvard students have just decided to publicly support Hamas in the wake of its terrorist attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,000 people. In the aftermath of that attack, nearly three dozen student groups at Harvard signed onto a statement saying that Israel was quote “fully responsible” for the massacre. This was a big problem for Harvard, as you might imagine, because it’s completely and utterly psychopathic. And naturally, a lot of people were calling for Harvard to take action in response to what these students were saying.

So here’s how Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard, responded:

This is hardly the worst thing about this statement, but I can't get over the fact that the president of Harvard sounds like a 6th grade teacher. To give a sense of the decline, here is a speech from a Harvard president in 1961 saying roughly the same thing about free speech: https://t.co/X3lPvhiJMH

— Helen Andrews (@herandrews) October 13, 2023

First of all, — and this needs to be said — Claudine Gay sounds indistinguishable from a random fourth-grade teacher in that clip. If you watched that footage without any context, you have to ask yourself: could you tell that was the president of Harvard? I mean, if you still thought that Harvard was a place for smart people, would you be able to tell that was the president? Probably not.

To prove that point, Helen Andrews at the American Conservative went back and looked at speeches from the president of Harvard from fifty years ago. Andrews found that Harvard presidents used to sound a lot different from Claudine Gay. You could tell they were the president of the leading university in this country, just by listening to them. Now, you’d have no idea. Claudine Gay sounds like a random middle manager, or substitute teacher at some middle school somewhere. She sounds like she should be running the HR department at some moderately sized company. There’s nothing special about what she’s saying. It’s not intelligent or insightful in any way. It’s not especially eloquent or wise.

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Insofar as Claudine Gay said anything at all, here’s the crux of it: “Our university embraces a commission to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

Now, if you take that at face value, it’s a reasonable sentiment. Speech on college campuses shouldn’t be suppressed or punished, even if it’s gratuitously wrong. That’s understandable enough. I mostly agree with it. It’s why we have universities, allegedly. The free exchange of ideas is supposed to be a big part of the program. As long as you’re not threatening anyone with imminent violence, then you should be allowed to say what you think. Universities, in this ideal world, would be places where young people can experiment with ideas. Where they can adopt positions that are perhaps radical, and then try to defend those positions intellectually in open debate. That’s how universities should work. Maybe it’s how they once did work. It would be nice if they still worked that way. But they don’t anymore, and that’s the point.

The problem, though — and it’s a very big problem — is that Claudine Gay clearly doesn’t agree with her own statement. Like so many leftists, she’s pretending to embrace some kind of universal principle of open expression, even though she’s more than willing to renege on this principle when it’s convenient for her to do so. She embraces free expression if the expression excuses terrorism. But she certainly does not embrace speech that contradicts her preferred narratives about, say, gender ideology or BLM.

We don’t have to guess about this, by the way. Consider that it was just a year ago that Harvard told students that if they “misgender” a fellow student — meaning, if they use the appropriate pronouns to describe a student’s gender — then they’re potentially guilty of “abuse.” Every undergraduate at Harvard was told that if they use the “wrong” pronouns for a fellow student, or do anything to “lower a person’s self-worth,” then they’re subject to disciplinary proceedings. This is all according to reporting from the Washington Free Beacon. But Claudine Gay never issued any impassioned video message in defense of Harvard students’ right to refer to one another by their actual gender. She never affirmed the right of Harvard students to express their belief in things like reality and biology. Instead, she sat idly by, as students were told that they’ll suffer severe consequences, unless they affirm the delusions of their mentally ill classmates.

There are many other examples of Claudine Gay’s apparent lack of commitment to freedom of speech. To give just one more example, it was just a few years ago that Claudine Gay oversaw the destruction of a black Harvard professor named Roland Fryer. Fryer ruffled a lot of feathers at Harvard because of his heterodox findings on race and policing. Specifically, Fryer found that there’s no statistical evidence that police use disproportionate lethal force against black suspects. Fryer also found that black students who perform well in school are often shunned by their black peers, for being “too white.”

How did Claudine Gay respond to this? Well she tried to burn the heretic, of course. Here’s the backstory. Fryer fired a staff assistant, who then accused him of sexual misconduct. Harvard’s own investigators found that the staff assistant’s claims were mostly bogus, and recommended that Fryer receive some training from H.R., and that’s it. But Claudine Gay — who saw Fryer as an existential threat — decided to overrule that recommendation from Harvard’s investigation. She wanted Fryer fired. There’s a short documentary on YouTube about this case. Here’s a piece of it:

Claudine Gay (and one of her colleagues) correctly identified Fryer’s research as completely contradictory to their own research. Fryer was saying that the police aren’t racist, and Claudine Gay was saying that we live in a white supremacist terror state. And, lo and behold, Gay has a chance to adjudicate a complaint against Fryer. So she decides to throw the book at him. In fact, she petitions Harvard’s president to revoke Fryer’s tenure so he’d never be allowed to step foot on Harvard’s campus again.

This kind of retaliation — this hostility towards disfavored speech — is the norm at Harvard. It has been the norm for a very long time. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or F.I.R.E., Harvard has a, “dismal record of responding to deplatforming attempts — attempts to sanction students, student groups, scholars, and speakers for speech protected under First Amendment standards. Of nine attempts in total over the past five years, seven resulted in sanction.”

F.I.R.E. also declared that Harvard had received its, “worst score ever in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings.” F.I.R.E. specifically notes that, “From 2019 to this year, Harvard sanctioned four scholars, three of whom it terminated. In 2020, Harvard revoked conservative student activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance over comments he made on social media as a 16-year-old, for which he had since apologized. In 2022, Harvard disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from an English department colloquium on campus over her views on gender and trans issues.”

F.I.R.E.’s report goes on to explain that, according to survey results, many Harvard students self-censor their political views. They’re also subjected to hostility if they espouse pro-life views on campus. It’s everything you’d expect. At Harvard, you’re allowed to say that men can instantly transform into women. But don’t you dare suggest that the police aren’t hunting down black men in cold blood. That crosses a line. That’s because at Harvard, and many other so-called “elite” universities, the only sort of speech they have a problem with is true speech.

The war on free speech on campus is a war on truth. Harvard, and Claudine Gay, simply cannot tolerate the truth. Which is much worse than simply not tolerating opposing ideas. What makes the situation on American campuses so dire is not just that speech is suppressed, but it is the type of speech they suppress. Specifically, true speech. If you’re going to suppress any speech — and I’m not saying you should — but if you do, it should be false speech, untrue speech, delusional and crazy and morally deranged speech. But Harvard, along with many other college campuses, goes the other way. Untrue speech is welcomed. True speech is not.

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To be clear, I’m happy to be wrong about all of this. I’d love nothing more than to be proven incorrect on his point, as it pertains to Harvard. I’ve already announced that I’d love to come to Harvard and give a talk, so that Harvard can really have a chance to prove its free speech bona fides. This is the generous offer I made on Twitter the other day, and I mean it. What better way for Claudine Gay and Harvard leadership to demonstrate their support for diverse viewpoints than to host me on their campus? I’d be happy to show up. I’m sure many of my colleagues would as well. Would Ben Shapiro be welcomed at Harvard right now to give the alternative viewpoint to those pro-Hamas student groups? Maybe we could do a whole Daily Wire symposium right on campus. Just a suggestion.

If Harvard and Claudine Gay are serious about their commitment to freedom of speech — no matter how odious they think that speech may be — then this should be a no-brainer. I haven’t heard back from Harvard since my tweet a few days ago, announcing my interest in speaking on campus, so right now I’ll ask student groups directly: If you’d like to host me on campus, just say so. I’m ready and willing to show up. And unlike Claudine Gay, my commitment to free speech and debate isn’t conditional or opportunistic. You invite me, and I’ll show up. It’s that simple. And if Harvard students and faculty can defeat me in open debate, I’ll have no problem with that.

I’m happy with the whole world seeing whatever transpires. I didn’t graduate from Harvard, or any college like it, or any college at all, and yet despite all of that, I will show up. I am nothing more than a high school graduate who is willing to openly debate ivy league students and faculty, live on camera. How could they do anything but jump at this opportunity? I’m not afraid. So I have this simple question for Claudine Gay, and all the administrators and student leaders at Harvard: What, exactly, are you afraid of?