The resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University is one episode in a slew of assaults on academic free speech and intellectual freedom on college and university campuses. To be sure, Gay was forced into resigning, not because of plagiarism or racism, but because of her politics. She would not say the right words, i.e. “yes” or “no”, when Rep. Elise M. Stefanik asked Gay a question designed to entrap her: “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” The tense 90-minute exchange between the two women before the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce was chillingly reminiscent of the McCarthy-era question posed in the same body: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” Days later, Gay resigned.
The Harvard president’s resignation has a context, one which is troubling at best. There have been countless professors in the US and Canada who have been harassed by their own colleges, lost their tenure, threatened with being fired, or actually being fired over their speech or point of view. They challenged predominant, official narratives in settings where challenging predominant, official narratives is the ostensible purpose.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions [FIRE] is a 501c3 corporation that ranks colleges and universities according to their students’ perceptions of free speech climates. Ironically, given Claudine Gay’s resignation, of the 248 colleges ranked in the period January-June, 2023, Harvard ranked dead last in its tolerance for free speech and free inquiry. It received the only “abysmal” rank, the lowest possible rank. Just above it, receiving a “very poor” rank, was the University of Pennsylvania. As did Claudine Gay, U Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned in the wake of her appearance before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce amidst similar charges of anti-Semitism.
In the FIRE ranks, private, Ivy League universities like Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania fared poorly for free speech climates. By contrast, each of the four highest ranked—Michigan Technological University, Auburn [Alabama], the University of New Hampshire, and Oregon State University—are public schools. Right behind them at #5 was Florida State University which received an “above average” rank. It may be worth noting that two of the five highest-ranked were Southern schools.
When you move from student perceptions and FIRE rankings to faculty experiences, you get a better feel for the punishing free speech climate at US colleges and universities. In forthcoming articles, I’ll look at ten cases that stand out to me. These ten cases happened between 2016 and 2023. Here is an overview of them.
Michael Rectenwald, a professor of Global and Liberal Studies at New York University, was coerced into taking a paid leave of absence for creating an alt-right fake Twitter persona in which he criticized campus surveilling of Halloween costumes, “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces” (2016). Peter Boghossian, a professor at Portland State University, resigned in the wake of harassment in the “grievance studies affair,” a hoax about academic silliness in publishing decisions (2017). He and a colleague had gotten published a paper hoaxily titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” Keith Fink, a law lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles, was fired for criticizing UCLA’s treatment of free speech in a class about free speech (2017). Brett Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College, resigned following an incident in which white students were asked to leave the campus for a day (2017). Jodi Shaw, a staffer at Smith College, resigned over strong-arm Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DEI] tactics following an incident between two white janitors and a Black student (2018). Andrew Wenaus, a professor of English at Western University, was fired for using the word “nigger” while trying to explain the culture of the Deep South prior to de-segregation. Greg Patton, a professor at Southern California University, was suspended for using a Chinese word that sounds, roughly, like the so-called “n-word” in a class about understanding filler words when traveling in China (2020). Jordan B. Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, relinquished his tenure and took early retirement because he refused to be coerced into calling students by made-up pronouns (2022). Erika López Prater, an instructor at Hamline University, was fired for showing a painting of the prophet, Mohammad, in her art history class (2023).
I’ll write about each of these individually in forthcoming articles.