Harvard is a private institution, and does not have to abide by federal guidelines on free speech. In fact, since April 14, 1970, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted its own Resolution of Rights and Responsibilities, an approximately one-page statement which gives the University special autonomy to ensure dissent plays a vital role in its existence. It states that “freedom of speech and academic freedom” are personal rights upon which the community is based.
Since 1970, this issue has only gotten more complex. Two decades later, the university published seven more pages of free speech guidelines to supplement the resolution; these guidelines are linked to the current faculty webpage and “apply to all gatherings under the auspices of the FAS,” though they do not have formal jurisdiction over classroom procedures because “the teacher should be the one who determines the agenda of discourse in the classroom.” The guidelines state that there are “obligations of respect for others that underlie rational discourse.” As with Harvard’s racial harassment and Title IX policies, this document forbids “racial, sexual, and intense personal harassment … prevent rational discourse. Behavior evidently intended to dishonor … race, gender, ethnic group, religious belief or sexual orientation is contrary to the pursuit of inquiry and education.” This kind of disrespect can be “punished.”
Earlier this semester, students argued that the white supremacist ideologies in Government 50 preceptor David Kane’s alleged posts on a private blog merited his firing. Notably, this situation underscored that there are no pre-established procedures for a professor’s right to free speech off campus or before their term as Harvard faculty. In these instances of ambiguity, how should policy be actionalized?
Freedom of speech in theory does not mean that words have no consequences, especially in relation to how students perceive relationships with faculty. In order to better understand how students felt about their professor’s political views, the HPR gathered opinions from 150 Harvard students through an anonymous survey. This sample is not large or representative enough to draw conclusions about the Harvard population, but interesting trends in this limited sample size — as well as anonymous replies to an optional prompt to share any feelings at the end of the survey — raise important questions about the student body: How relevant are professors’ political opinions for students? Do students engage with professors with differing political views? How do students navigate long standing traditions and classroom dynamics that give professors power over them? Such questions may be helpful to inform improved university policy following this semester’s events.
Relevance of Professors’ Political Views
Given that university policy focuses exclusively on faculty’s right to free speech when they are affiliated with the university, can an individual separate their political opinions outside of Harvard or views in the past from their current actions and speech within campus and class?
Considering the widespread outrage following the allegations of Kane’s racist blog posts, it appears students might not believe so. Teaching fellows who worked closely with Kane to create and structure course content wrote they were in “shock, disbelief, and disgust” and condemned the materials posted on Kane’s blog site. Over 500 students and 20 student organizations signed a petition expressing that they were “appalled at the permittance of racist, sexist, and damaging ideologies associated with and potentially authored by Preceptor David Kane.” Following this, the government department changed concentration requirements to allow Gov 51 in place of Gov 50, extended the drop deadline without a fee and hosted an open town hall to listen to student concerns. Imai Kosuke was appointed the new course head of Gov 50 and nearly all students now choose to attend TF-led lectures.
This outrage initially seems to contradict survey results: When students were asked how relevant their professors’ political views were on a one to five scale, there was an even distribution of rankings from one to five across all concentrators. Two-thirds of students reported they were indifferent and did not feel disadvantaged when a professor did not share their political beliefs. Exceptions were largely based on classes’ grading structure: Humanities courses are known for more subjective grading and concentrations dealing with political science (government, social studies) at Harvard tend to consistently lean left, explaining why concentrators in these subjects considered their professor’s politics more important. Students might be interested in social science sub-specialities like immigrants’ or trans rights or advocating for sex workers, topics that cannot be taught by conventionally conservative professors given that their ideology often delegitimizes these topics from being fields of genuine academic inquiry.
The fallacy is that STEM or otherwise skills-based courses like Kane’s data science class are politics-free. But even these professors need to be cognizant of politics, for it can explicitly connect to course content or their applications: How can eugenics be complicit in evolutionary biology research and vice versa? How can computer algorithms be subtly racist? If a professor teaching a pre-medical subject does not believe in trans rights, how can they help aspiring physicians understand the necessity of sex reassignment surgeries?
Students may be indifferent to political views because they do not realize how their education is being subtly politicized and how personal politics affects teaching in ways we underestimate all the time. Beyond explicit racism, far-left students noted the problem that neoliberal professors in humanities or general education courses still do not give considerable weight to anti-colonial, intersectional, non-White thought. These students add that disagreements can tangibly cost you, given the teacher-student power dynamic allows teachers to dictate your grades, recommendations, and well-being in a classroom. Diversity in thought is rendered useless if this power dynamic means students only transiently mold their beliefs to match their professors for grades or validation, as opposed to genuinely engaging with a view different than their own.
In the Kane controversy, this is complicated because white supremacy may not be viewed as a “political” question at all, but rather one of basic human dignity. As such, student outrage may indeed not contradict with a climate of students’ otherwise self-reported indifference to political views.
How Vocal Are Professors?
Given that teaching is necessarily politicized, what politics should a teacher reveal and how? In the survey, students generally emphasized that diversity in thought was important, and that it is difficult to make arguments against diversity in thought in principle. However, when it comes to actually interacting with professors with different political views, the same percent of students reported comfort or indifference as the percent who reported discomfort.
Survey respondents overwhelmingly responded that professors currently most often speak about politics as it relates to course content, and that they also preferred that professors only discuss politics as it relates to course content — although the level of outspokenness was difficult to decipher based on qualitative measures in the survey like being “very” vocal versus “moderately” vocal. This politicization of class discussion might explain unusually high stress during election week, according to the Undergraduate Council’s recent survey, when an unavoidable political event unrelated to (most) courses’ content shaped student experiences.
During such discussions, particular political issues may be raised. An anonymous reply distinguished between two examples: that someone thinking low taxes and high military spending are good is unconventional for the Harvard population, but still does not interfere with their teaching ability, while a view that women are responsible for sexual assault is explicitly sexist and will translate to treating some students worse than others. Another response noted that we can debate if the Affordable Care Act is the most effective model for healthcare or how highly the 1% should be taxed, but we cannot debate about which race is the most intelligent, or if the wage gap exists, or if victims of sexual violence invite it. The latter infringes on the lived experiences of students, denies facts and creates a hostile environment for learning and teaching.
Ideologies that are explicitly racist or sexist and result in unfair treatment of particular groups of students are easy to argue, but the less “-ist” or “-phobic” views that are nevertheless controversial must be rational and still grounded within the realms of academic uncertainty. After all, academia currently has a rigorous process to ensure work is scientifically sound, ranging from peer review or replication studies. Some questions reach a broad consensus, others remain open to debate between two or more likely answers, and still others are simply deemed unanswerable.
As an anonymous respondent put it, “If a professor claims that wealth taxes have not been historically enforceable because tax evasion is difficult to trace across international banks, the academic research is not clear here. If the disagreement is unfounded and involves dangerous pseudoscientists who believe in eugenics, this is much less permissible.”
The challenging conundrum occurs when views that are not any obvious form of “-ist” or “-phobic” are both within the realms of academic uncertainty and can still be construed as harmful: For example, does a belief in high military spending inherently also mean a professor upholds settler-colonialist views that are violent toward students from marginalized communities who are victim to America’s military conquests? Even if they hold this view, does their treatment of an individual differ, including how they answer questions in class or offer them advice in office hours? Does a professor saying that a student would be murdered in rural China given her gender identity as a trans woman abuse teacher-student power dynamics even if the statement is factually correct?
Racism, Sexism and White Supremacy
Returning to the realm of less ambiguous personal politics, professors who have historically held allegedly racist, sexist or white supremacist views have been criticized but not necessarily fired at institutions like Harvard.
Harvard psychology professor and Democrat Steven Pinker has been accused of racial insensitivity for tweeting “Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings,” with a link to an article about the frequency of police interaction with different racial groups. He has also publicly written about and participates in discussions of innate differences between sexes and racial/ethnic groups, claiming the political left’s insistence that certain subjects are off-limits has not been productive and underscoring the importance of free speech. His data-driven work has been severely criticized, similar to how Murray and Kane’s work was criticized.
Conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield prides himself on not using trigger warnings in his classroom and holds several controversial views about affirmative action and rape culture. In an interview with the Boston Magazine, he stated: “I think—and this is something I get attacked for—the coming of Black students in great numbers was a factor in the arrival of grade inflation,” as well as that “it seems in women’s sexuality that they find it much more difficult to walk away from an encounter than a man does without being upset.”
What do the Pinkers, Mansfields, and Kanes of higher learning mean for students? Just because people with potentially racist or sexist views exist in the world, should students be taught by them? I would respond to criticism that Harvard is a far-left bubble or that university education is dominated by Democrat professors by questioning: Is a potentially insular education more detrimental than exposure to potentially bigoted views? Though education should involve discomfort, that discomfort should not euphemize views that disregard the lived reality of BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, fat people and other marginalized groups.
Defining racism was surprisingly diverse among survey respondents: Some said that if “racist” means someone is legitimately a white supremacist, then they would not approve of that professor. But if “racist” means they support President Donald Trump, it is not a problem. Others directly contradicted that by stating any support for Trump is racism. Such distinctions reflect common debates about what constitutes racist remarks and whether it is possible to say something racist without being “racist.” Ultimately, however, when presented with the theoretical question, “Should Harvard hire known racist professors?” shouldn’t there really be one answer that unequivocally condemns racism?
In the survey, this was not the case. Sixteen percent of students replied that Harvard should be able to hire known racist or white supremacist teachers, often citing that cancel culture overuses and misuses these labels. Ten percent of survey respondents replied that they would take a class with a known racist or white supremacist teacher provided they had expertise on the subject they were teaching.
Harvard platforming racist, sexist, or white supremacists professors goes beyond how vocal or biased the individual professor is in practice: It means the institution is actively legitimizing anti-intellectual and hateful views that threaten student safety, or else affirm tolerance of white supremacy among students. The Resolution of Rights and Responsibilities underscores that the administration must give full and fair hearing to expressions of grievances and respond in good faith to widely-expressed needs for change. This semester is one instance when this path of action was failed. If Harvard is serious about their racial and sexual harassment policies, hiring and firing practices must be reexamined. Systems of oppression should not be reproduced by instructors, but if they are, students should be listened to when they demand change.
Image by Philippe Bout is licensed under the Unsplash License.
