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Harvard Votes No

Last July, UD noted the presence, on Harvard’s summer school faculty, of an economist with scandalously bigoted views. Dangerously bigoted views.

[Subramanian Swamy] received significant criticism for an op-ed he wrote last summer in the Indian newspaper Daily News and Analysis, in which he called for the destruction of mosques, the disenfrachisement of non-Hindus in India who do not acknowledge Hindu ancestry, and a ban on conversion from Hinduism.

Harvard’s faculty has now voted to cancel Swamy’s summer economics courses.

You always want to tread carefully when speech is at issue; and after all these were views irrelevant to Swamy’s teaching. Yet universities need to protect their reputations; they need to watch out for their intellectual integrity. Truly hateful, truly illiberal speech expressed by people who enjoy the prestige and legitimacy of a university affiliation is particularly damaging to universities. Universities are above all places devoted to reasoned discourse; and while we can argue about what ‘reasoned discourse’ might include, it certainly doesn’t include advocating the destruction of mosques.

Margaret Soltan, December 7, 2011 8:03PM
Posted in: professors

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4 Responses to “Harvard Votes No”

  1. Jonathan Freedman Says:

    Sorry, I just don’t agree with this. Remember, Margaret, Arthur Butz–the holocaust denying professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern when we were undergrads there? I fe;t strongly that he should keep his job–as he did–and be subjected to endless, rude, public ridicule–as he was not. Free speech is free speech. The guy is an economist of repellent personal views; he should be confronted directly, in public, with the most robust of possible responses. But he shouldn’t be denied a chance to teach something not germane to his horrific opinions, simply because he’s a genocide-advocating asshole. Like, er, Arthur Butz.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    I thought a lot about Butz when writing the post, Jonathan.

    Butz was tenured. NU had granted him lifetime institutional approval. Swamy is an untenured summer school teacher. Harvard has not vetted him and passed him through to permanent employment, and is under no obligation to continue him on some untenured permanent basis.

    More than this: Just as no university is obligated to sponsor a speaker who calls for the killing of all homosexuals (it’s his free speech!), so no university is obligated to hire and rehire a person who calls for vicious policies against Muslims.

    “I was persuaded … that the views expressed in Dr. Swamy’s op-ed piece amounted to incitement of violence instead of protected political speech,” [the chair of Harvard philosophy] wrote in an email to The Crimson.

  3. Mike S. Says:

    Evidently Harvard is engaging in some embellishment (sensationalization) as to what Swamy actually wrote.
    This whole “incitement to violence” bit doesn’t meet the legal standard.

    http://thefire.org/article/13921.html
    Equally indefensible is the contention that Swamy’s article was an incitement to violence. Yet, this is exactly what the chair of the Philosophy Department, Sean D. Kelly, said, according to the Crimson:
    “I was persuaded … that the views expressed in Dr. Swamy’s op-ed piece amounted to incitement of violence instead of protected political speech,” he wrote in an email to The Crimson.
    Yet the op-ed comes nowhere near the careful definition of unprotected “incitement” announced by the Supreme Court in 1969. According to the Supreme Court, for speech to be considered “incitement,” it must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [be] likely to incite or produce such action.” Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). See also Hess v. Indiana, 414 U.S. 105 (1973) (holding that a protestor who shouted, “We’ll take the fucking street later” was not guilty of incitement because his “threat” “amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time.”).

    In the linked article you will also find several other arguments against Harvard’s latest move in this case.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Thank you for those links, etc., Mike S. I realize this is a controversial move, and that the original article is subject to interpretation.

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