We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck…
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Wait!
Alex Bronzini-Vender says he is writing about what is wrong with Harvard.
And yet his two concrete examples are from Northwestern and Texas A&M?
The most concrete thing he says about Harvard as an institution is that Harvard does bad by (a) pointing to IHRA and (b) saying that the university “considers the examples that accompany the IHRA definition [of anti-semitism] to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent”?
You see the problem here?: NU. TA&M. might. If all ya got is that Harvard said something you object to “might” be useful, something from TA&M, and something from NU, then ya got nuthin:
Alex Bronzini-Vender: At Harvard and Elsewhere, the New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/harvards-campus-speech-trump.html>: ‘That’s not how it’s playing out. Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness. The goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, across an ever-expanding matrix of identities and standpoints. Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last…
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Now I would be eager to hear from Ryan Enos and from Steve Levitsky—who are quoted in seeing significant problems with Harvard’s current institutional position. But I want to hear from them in full context. Not what we have here.
And so, once again, I find myself in the same position I find myself with respect to, say, The Free Press. I very hard to see the New York Times editors as working in good faith here.
(Alex himself is, of course, young and a student—and so the appropriate attitude to take to him is to urge him to sharpen and stress-test his arguments.)
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OK. What, then, you ask, should we in universities be doing?
We should be doing our jobs. We should not be entering into any transactional “compacts”, but simply do our jobs. And we are deserving of support to the extent that we do our jobs well.
As my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, still Interim President of the University of Virginia for one more day, wrote in the letter that—in my reading, which could be wrong—made the MAGA Regents of UVA bounce him out of the job tomorrow:
October 17, 2025
The United States Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202
Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley,
Thank you for your letter inviting comment on the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We wholeheartedly agree that “American higher education is the envy of the world.” We also agree with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations. Indeed, the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them.
We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.
Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals. We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation. We look forward to working together to develop alternative, lasting approaches to improving higher education.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Mahoney
Interim President
University of Virginia <https://news.virginia.edu/content/community-message-interim-president-paul-mahoney>
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“Academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship”, and so any “contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education”.
But what is our job? It is complicated. A university is different from the public square. A university is a place in which its members have duties:
to speak,
to listen,
to think,
to learn,
to support one another in those first four duties.
That means that members of a university have academic freedom, not public-square 1st-Amendment free-speech freedom. The idea is to generate, improve, and evaluate ideas; and then to disseminate those ideas; and to create and maintain a community that those who want to take on those duties find a safe, welcoming, and supporting place to do so.
How to arrange an institution and a community that does that best is, as I said, complicated.
The key dilemma is how to support those who are here to listen and to learn, and to weed out those who are not here to listen and to learn (and to encourage them to their proper place(s) go) without discouraging the speaking and the thinking. And here my go-to guru is the most learned Jacob Levy:
Jacob Levy (2016): Safe spaces, academic freedom, and the university as a complex association <https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/03/safe-spaces-academic-freedom-and-the-university-as-a-complex-association/>: ‘“Academic freedom”… is not… freedom of speech… not the freedom to lie, to commit research fraud, to submit plagiarized work…. It’s not the freedom of a professor to stand in front of a class and say “have you heard the word of God as I best understand it? Let me preach to you for an hour”. Or “you all really need to vote for Bernie Sanders, his is the one true way for politics.”…
The scope that a professor has… [is] constrained by the subject matter of the… class… the… institution… [and the] identity… [of the] discipline…. [It] is the freedom of both professors and students (researchers and those pursing knowledge), to be judged only according to what they do in the classroom or as researchers and only according to the standards of the discipline…. [That] excludes… evaluat[ing] students, or for the university to evaluate us at all for our political or religious opinions expressed off campus…
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And:
Jacob Levy (2024): Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-campus-culture-wars-are-a-teachable-moment-in-how-freedom-of-speech/>: ‘Academic freedom… [is] the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods… the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class… and, finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds….
The university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking…. Escalation, overreach and the chilling of legitimate protest are all constant dangers…. Police helicopters and billy clubs on campus are always a sign of failure…. These are genuine problems… but many universities have probably erred too far in the direction of the shrug, letting the belief grow that classes may be disrupted or speakers blockaded without consequence….
In the autumn of 2023… members of university… conspicuously did not all sympathize with the same cause…. [So] universities often fell back on… institutional neutrality. But critics… said the institution had shown that it didn’t take it seriously either…. [Plus] the rule that the university shouldn’t take any interest in the rhetoric that’s used in a protest or on social media was harder to take seriously in an era of hate-speech rules, restrictions on exclusionary speech, and a discourse around “safety” that treated hostile language as violence….
The best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today…. Recommit to academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality, starting now…. A firm defence of the right of pro-Palestinian students to protest non-disruptively; a clear stand against professors using their classrooms as political platforms; a refusal to adjudicate and police the meaning and intent of extramural political slogans or social-media posts; and the discipline to avoid adopting institutional political platforms on foreign, political or social policy. With those rules in place, they can provide the site and space for students and faculty alike to study, explore, discuss and debate, to celebrate, mourn and protest, even the most divisive questions in political life…
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Plus MOAR, for example: <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789633866542-003/html> ; and <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-academic-freedom-and-institutional>.
As I put it in the past:
Brad DeLong (2017): “Any Community... Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome & Safe...” <https://web.archive.org/web/20170926230940/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe.html>: ‘A university has three goals: 1. A university is a safe space where ideas can be set forth and developed. 2. A university is a safe space where ideas can be evaluated and assessed. 3. A university is a safe space where scholars can develop, and gain intelligence and confidence. Speech whose primary goal is to undermine and defeat one or more of those three goals does not belong on a university campus. If you come to Berkeley, and if your speech is primarily intended to—or even, through your failure to think through what you are doing, has the primary effect of (1) keeping us from developing ideas that may be great ones, (2) keeping us from properly evaluating and assessing ideas, or (3) driving members of the university away, your speech does not belong here. There are lots of people who want to take advantage of free speech week to neither: 1. develop ideas that may be great ones, 2. thoughtfully and rationally evaluate and assess ideas, nor 3/ make the university a welcoming place for young scholars. Some will want blood in the streets. Some will hope to take advantage of blood in the streets. Somebody may wind up dead, or maimed, as part of a game of political-cultural dingbat kabuki largely orthogonal to the three proper missions of the university. It is a serious concern.
This is still, today, a hill I will defend—but I will listen to reasoned arguments against it, and try to think and learn. For others disagree. Noah Smith for example:
Noah Smith (2017): Speech on Campus: A reply to Brad DeLong <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/speech-on-campus-reply-to-brad-delong.html>: ‘On Twitter, I wrote that I disagreed with Brad’s ideas about speech on college campuses. Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go…. The alt-right has been trying to provoke conflict at Berkeley, seeing an opportunity to gain nationwide sympathy… [by] get[ting] people so worried about left-wing street violence that they equivocate between left and right. To this end, they are trying to stir up the most obvious source of potential leftist street violence: Berkeley.…
Brad… seems to be starting with… alt-right “free speech” trolling, and generalizing from there. But generalizing from concrete examples can be dangerous, since the set of available examples is quite diverse. There is simply much more going on on college campuses in this country than the antics of the alt-right provocateurs at Berkeley…. At first glance, [Brad] seems reasonable. We all know that some people use speech as a weapon to shut down discussion or to hurt people—the aforementioned alt-right provocateurs are the paradigmatic example of this…. There are very good reasons not to let a tiny group of bad people piss in the pool of free speech. But the danger is that safeguards put in place to exclude this small minority of pool-pissers will wind up—to extend the metaphor—over-chlorinating the pool….
[Brad’s] criteria are impossible to implement effectively without the personal judgment of a small and relatively self-consistent group of judges…. But at the university level, the judges can be literally anyone on campus… Thus the standards Brad sets out are, in terms of actual content regarding the speech that is to be prohibited, effectively vacuous. But… they connote a general endorsement of tighter speech restrictions… amount[ing] to a directive to America’s (or Berkeley’s) entire vast, uncoordinated, untrained patchwork of campus stakeholders to go out and make a greater attempt to limit speech that they think is counterproductive…
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As I read the Noah of nearly a decade ago—and I believe Noah today thinks the same—his main point is that there is no broad agreement within any university on the norm that a university is a place to think of and throw out ideas, to listen to what other people have to say about them, to then think and weigh the ideas to try to assess their value, and so to learn, while supporting all the other members of the university in this common task. And since there isn’t, Noah’s assessment a near-decade ago was:
The effect of [Brad’s] advice, I predict, if widely heeded, will mainly be chaos…. some situations, pro-Palestinian speech might be grounds for firing; in others, pro-Israel speech. At some universities we will see queer, mixed-race leftist professors berated to tears for wearing T-shirts saying “Poetry is lit”. At other universities we will see faculty instructed not to ask students where they are from….
In some cases, professors and/or students are fired or disciplined by administrators. In other cases, faculty discipline students who say inappropriate things in class. In yet other cases, student protesters act as ad hoc militias, sometimes with the blessing of administrators and/or faculty, to enforce speech norms against professors. It’s a jungle out there already. And calling for more speech restriction will only… mak[e]… the jungle yet more chaotic…. Broadcasting the idea that there is lots of problematic speech on campuses that needs to be forcibly expunged, but offering neither a useful criterion for identifying such speech nor a useful method of punishing it, is a recipe for silliness, wasted effort, and general stress…
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Therefore, Noah concludes:
I believe that the proper approach to campus speech is a relatively hands-off one—to treat on-campus speech approximately like we treat off-campus speech. There will be some differences, of course—college kids live on campus, so there will need to be stronger protections against physical intimidation and threat. But in general, I believe that there should be no substantial increase in limitations of speech on American campuses…
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At the time I strongly resisted Noah’s argument, seeing it as resting very heavily on what a distinction between “academic freedom” and “freedom of speech” would be taken to connote—not denote—in the minds of bad-actor s***posters, and worse. And I thought that he was wrong: that we could get rough consensus and running code in the form of social norms in terms of protest-speech taking the form of witnessing, signs, outside-the-event chants, even passive resistance in the form of lying down in front of the door and then lying limp as the campus police in twos lift you up and carry you off.
I still think so. But I acknowledge that it is a closer question than I thought it was a near-decade ago.
There is one other contribution to this that I regard as valuable. Last September 11th, I gave a guest lecture in Robert Lawrence and Larry Summers’s class on globalization. My guest lecture was the day after the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk. And Larry decided to open the class by giving his thoughts on how he, Robert Lawrence, and the students should rededicate themselves to the principles of public reason and the avoidance of political violence.
I thought Larry spoke very well, and so I scrawled down a few notes. And then I dumped those notes into ChatGPT along with a directory of Larry Summers’ writings and transcripts and asked ChatGPT to expand them. And then I cut down the excessively wordy thing it produced, with the idea of turning it into a Thoukydides-style text—that is, since I cannot “carry [what he said] word for word in… memory… make… [him] say what was in my opinion demanded… by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what [he] really said”.
Call it SubTuringLarrySummers:
SubTuringLarrySummers: ‘I want, before turning to the subject of today’s class, to comment on the murder of Charlie Kirk and its relationship to all of us. It’s a tragedy. It’s almost unbelievable that something like this would happen. And yet there was this. There was, earlier, the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare. There were multiple assassination attempts on our president. Political violence is back to being a thing that happens in with some frequency in the United States.
That must be a great concern for all of us.
I might not have thought that was a point worth making in class. However, there is an organization known as FIRE, which I have been an advisor to for many years, which produced a document yesterday. FIRE stands for: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It stands up for free speech on college campuses. It stands up. For fairness. Legitimacy. Due process in student discipline.
If you think about civil liberties as applied to universities, that is the mission of FIRE.
FIRE does a survey of students on college campuses. The survey response rate was not as high as one would have liked. But here is what the survey found. 58% of Harvard students say that blocking entry to a talk is acceptable. 32% say that using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable. And 79% say that shouting down a speaker is acceptable.
I am prepared to say that if you think any of those things, you are wrong.
Violence is wrong. Shouting down speakers is wrong. Blocking people from speaking is wrong.
If you want to say that some invitation is a grave mistake that reflects poor judgment by the person who made it—more power to you, and you’ve got the free speech right to say it.
If you want to stand outside a classroom and hold a sign saying that the person who’s entering the classroom is immoral and shouldn’t be been invited to the Harvard campus—more power to you.
But shouting down speakers. Determining who should be allowed to be heard using violence.
It is very disturbing to me that those things are as popular with our student body as they are.
It would be very wrong to say that those attitudes are somehow causally related to what happened in Utah. But it would also be wrong to say that they are completely unrelated.
And so I think it’s worth all of us thinking about this.
Now, Robert Lawrence, you and I have taught this class for a dozen years. We discuss controversial topics. We’ve had people speak who other people call “Enemies of the Earth”.
And I am not exactly a person who has gone through life completely without controversy. I was highly outspoken after October 7th.
And yet I think it is fair to say that we have never had anything happen in this class which has even struck me as even being close to the edge of problematic.
There was somebody here who thought my views in the aftermath of October 7th were terrible and deeply offensive. And they asked a question. And at the end of class, I gave an answer for three or four minutes. People absorbed the answer. And some of them probably agreed with him. And some of them probably agreed with me.
And life went on.
That is how it should be.
Violence against people whose speech we don’t like is a very dangerous thing. When it is top-down—Stalin’s Russia—that is terrible. And it is also a terrible thing when it is bottom up—when there is a mob of people who think that something’s unacceptable, and if somebody tries to say
So I hope that all of you in this class, as you go through your days and weeks will say whatever you think on whatever question is up for conversation. And, much more important when you see other people jumping down the throats of people saying what they think, you will stand up for the proposition that there should be dialogue…
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All of you outside: Wish us in universities luck, for we need it.
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