Well, I attended Harvard and my niece was the editor - in - chief of the newspaper at U Chicago. She and her brother both attended U Chicago. My niece called me for legal advice because she felt that some of the articles she had and wanted to write were being censored by the administration. So anecdote meets anecdote.
And having been on the Harvard campus for 11+ years, I can say that what you claim is unlikely to the point of being misleading. Yes, if you stand in front of a certain activist group and shout something they would disagree with, yelling might happen. And yelling is not lack of safety.
You really should actually look at the FIRE methodology. Adding your gut feelings and anecdotes to their āsurveyā data of <1% of students with essentially no questions as to the administrations actions is just further unsubstantiating the unsubstantiated.
Thatās for the person being yelled at to decideā¦the difference between yelling and assault is a fine line. I would not say yelling meets the hurdle of civil discourse either, but I donāt think thatās a stated Harvard goal like it is at UChicago, where itās part of the ethos.
Actually, itās not an entirely subjective standard. Unless you want the tyranny of the incredibly thin skinned. Which is convenient for some. āI donāt like what youāre saying, so I feel unsafeā. Thatās exactly the opposite of the Chicago principles of free speech that endorse free speech even though it might be ādisagreeableā, āoffensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.ā
Those same Chicago principles specifically forbid invasions of āsubstantial privacy or confidentiality interestsā. Doxxing anyone?
Reasonable fear isnt defined by the victim, but rather by the Reasonable Man standard. There is a reason few arrests are occuring. Assault isnāt occuring. Those with hurt feelings can walk away. If they canāt walk away, that would be assault.
You probably should google the words āreasonableā standard. or āreasonable personā standard. Since the 1860ās in common law and at all times thereafter, it is defined as an objective standard. Sorry.
I didnāt mean to send this thread on a legal tangent.
Yelling can sometimes result in unsafe situations. Itās not possible to make the claim that someone yelling at another will never result in an unsafe situation.
I agree, even given all the issues that exist with the FIRE rankings.
Nor is it always unsafe and nor is it improper for the objective reasonableness to be adjudged based on context. Yelling is not unsafe. They are two different things. Where yelling changes into violence, something else is happening. Unless your sensitive ears hurt so much from hearing someone elseās ideas that your health is endangered.
Calling yelling unsafe and conflating it with danger is just a way of smearing two separate concepts together to silence others and co-opt the public safety apparatus to accomplish political goals.
No one ever claimed that yelling never is followed by something else including violence. It just isnāt right to stop the yelling. Itās right to stop the violence. And conflating the two sides is just an obvious political play.
Iām really not insisting on any comparison. You have anecdotes. I have my decade of on-site experience as to Harvard.
Why the āpoor behaviorā at Harvard made international news is that people internationally are interested in Harvard, and the power apparatus of theocratic billionaires took sides. I donāt have to guess which is your side.
I did not attend U Chicago, and you did not attend either Harvard nor U Chicago. Using FIRE now as a āuseful baselineā is just further legitimizing a website that is neither data driven nor convincing in any way. Do you think Harvard should have allowed Kyle Kashuv - who called for the genocide of all Jews between bursts of using the N-word to matriculate? FIRE explicitly does. How safe would Jewish students feel with someone around who explicitly called for genocide in writing?
You were the person that introduced FIRE into this thread and called into question its exact methodology. Nobody disagreed with you about that, yet you insist on bringing it up. Why?
However you do seem oblivious to the there are real problems at Harvard that much of the world sees, yet you insist are not there.
There are many incredibly intelligent students, staff, and professors at Harvard. There are also people there who are really disconnected from how the world actually works.
It seems that one side of this discussion / the Ackman side likes to tell everyone āhow the world actually worksā. In some circles that would be considered patronizing.
Iām more familiar with how elite colleges are supposed to select for students with grit. Yes, the ability to face adversity, face opposition and either overcome or treat it proportionately within the scope of accomplishing what needs to get done.
Iāve spoken with many students who spoke of racial and other discrimination in their high schools and communities - often eloquently, often rightfully, and those who made that discrimination a central point in their essay or interview were never admitted. Harvard students are supposed to have academics as their full time job. Not politics. Itās a school.
Somehow now we supposedly have a lot of Harvard students without grit. Everything is scary. Everything makes studying impossible. How did they get admitted?
And some people want to depict Harvard as a bunch of political and religious activists. Itās a disservice to Harvard and its incredibly hard working and diverse faculty to use its international reputation as a megaphone for a few peoplesā foreign policy and political agendas.
Reminder that debate is not permitted outside the political forum. Back and forth between two users needs to be taken to PM. Further posts will be deleted without comment.
Many of the issues at Harvard - plagerism, anti-semitism, DEI hiring practices, etc. - are present at a great many universities in the US. As otherās have noted in the thread, many are quick to single out such a famous and prestigious school, like haters love to hate the Yankees.
That said, there are issues that afflict many institutions of higher learning, most created by the academy. Here are a few:
A coddling of students, where policies like ātrigger warningsā, hotlines to report other students for āhate speechā and other thought crimes, etc. are designed to ensure that fragile minds are never challenged or uncomfortable. Prof. Jon Haidt at NYU has written quite a bit on this issue.
Hiring, promotion and admission policies that favor immutable characteristics over merit and achievement.
An explosion of administrative posts in new bureaucracies that do not contribute to the mission of the universities and are self-perpetuating.
An all out assault on free speech on campus, or at least speech that does not toe the party line. Guest speakers are shouted down or uninvited. Professors are reported by students for stating simple facts, or asking thought provoking questions, that counter the dogma of the day. Schools place ātime and placeā restictions on public speech that are designed to render it all but impossible. Of course, there is a bias where favored speech is welcomed and unfavored speech is opposed at every turn. I invite you to look up school reviews on thefire.org.
School administrations allow students and faculty to engage in disruptive, intimidating, and sometimes illegal, acts of āprotestā (see #4) without consequence. Tactics like using bullhorns to drown out speakers, pulling fire alarms, blocking access to unfavored speeches, chanting threats, and physically restraining other students have become so commonplace that they are the new norm.
A growing acceptance or normalization of anti-semitism on campus.
A decline in academic standards marked by grade inflation, silly classes like āTaylor Swift and Her Worldā (Harvard, Eng Dept), plagiarism or doctoring data by faculty, and an alarming proportion of published studies or experiments that cannot be recreated elsewhere.
An echo chamber where most academics have similar political beliefs and worldview, and those who do not demonstrate that viewpoint are not hired or promoted. This results in viewpoints not being challenged by rational argument and spirited debate.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Of course, many of the issues are interrelated. In short, US universities which were once the envy of the world are killing their brand, and many academics are in such an echo chamber that they do not realize it. There are, however, signs that the marketplace is responding to the decline. In 2022 several judges made public statements that they would no longer hire from Yale law school. In 2010 the WSJ ranked colleges based on surveys from corporate recruiters and several said their companies would not recruit from the Ivies because their grads were not better prepared than flagship land grant schools and they had an unmanageable sense of entitlement. Wealthy donors are cutting schools off. Applications are down for schools whose issues appeared in the press. Some schools that were particularly egregious - think Evergreen State - are on life support.
Couldnāt agree more as to FIRE. Everyone who wants to springboard off their āratingsā should look at their methodology and their survey questions and the rationale for their ranking and ask if anything they say has anything to do with Harvardās administrationās fostering or denying free speech. It doesnāt take a deep dive to figure out what FIRE is all about.