Elizabeth Warren has been taking quite a bit of flak for recent revelations that she allowed Harvard to claim her as a “minority hire” during her time at Harvard Law School . The claim struck many as dishonest: Warren appears to be Caucasian, and not a Cherokee Indian, and one would expect that she experienced very little racial discrimination as a child growing up.

But while Warren has been suffering from political jibes, most commentators have not reflected their ire at Harvard University , the institution which had initially made the dubious claim that Warren did not rebut. On MindingTheCampus.com, I argue that the absurd, indeed trivial, claim about Warren ’s ancestry makes perfect sense when one considers the nature of Harvard University today: a highly corporatized PR machine, focused more on burnishing its brand and its image as a “diverse” and “multicultural” institution, rather than on disseminating truth. The university’s role in creating the “diversity” myth surely adds a layer of irony to Harvard’s institutional – indeed, corporate – motto: VERITAS.

You can find the piece by clicking here:

On July 16^th of last year, Subramanian Swamy, a longtime summer session professor of Economics at Harvard University, wrote a scathing op-ed in an Indian newspaper advocating radical political changes in response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks three days previous. While many members of the Harvard community were upset by Swamy’s suggestions—which included the replacing of Muslim holy sites with Hindu ones, and the denial of voting rights to those who do not concede India’s Hindu heritage—Harvard’s administration at first stood by their economics professor in the name of academic freedom. But the faculty found another way to get rid of ideas they deemed unacceptable; in an unprecedented maneuver, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences re-labeled Swamy’s speech “incitement” and voted last month to strip his course from the Summer School catalogue, a de-facto firing. The maneuver – to de-list a course from the catalogue as a way of effectively firing (without formally firing – a power that the faculty does not possess) a politically incorrect faculty member – is worthy of Machiavelli, but unworthy of a liberal arts institution of higher learning.

As a graduate of Harvard Law School and as someone who taught a course there in the mid-1980s just before the current censorial atmosphere took root, I wrote this piece with considerable sadness. On Forbes.com, I argue that the Harvard faculty’s move should come as no surprise, but rather fits into a decades-long and unfortunate pattern of censorship at the university. 

In my piece on Mindingthecampus.com, I compliment a recent Harvard Crimson editorial that stands up to administrators and faculty all too eager to proclaim Harvard’s solidarity with a political movement. The Crimson staff was able to see the slippery slope inherent in a university’s proposed institutional support for a political cause; the students had a clarity of vision their elders, including their teachers, so often lack. But in the piece I also describe ways in which the Crimson editorial board has been far from perfect in its recent defense of free speech. Harvard’s constant assault on student freedom of speech and conscience—please see my research assistant Daniel Schwartz’s latest article here, published by FIRE in their academic journal “The Lantern,” for a longer explication—has taken a toll. Even the Crimson, a formerly uniformly reliable bulwark against administrative overreach, has during recent times acquiesced to the politically correct pressures exerted by faculty and administration. One hopes that freedom of speech and thought can be restored to our campuses before administrators and professors complete the task of brainwashing their young charges.