Massachusetts voters face a question of profound importance on the ballot this November. That is, whether to approve the Death with Dignity Act, which would permit physicians to prescribe life-ending medication to patients with incurable disease and less than six months to live. In a recent column for the Boston Herald, co-authored with my research assistant Juliana DeVries, we argue that personal liberty should govern this most personal area of life: one’s own death. If terminally-ill adults want to end their lives and their suffering, the government should allow them the merciful option of doing so. 

The column after the jump...

Many of you have heard of the ongoing cheating scandal at Harvard, in which 125 students in a class called “Introduction to Congress” were accused of cheating on a take-home final exam.  Harvard’s administrators have initiated a vast inquiry into the allegations, pledging to adjudicate each student’s case separately before the notorious Administrative Board. However, doubts have been expressed here and there over whether Harvard’s cheating rules, and the professor’s and teaching assistants’ instructions to the students, were sufficiently clear to function as a fair basis for these allegations in all cases.

In our recent piece for Minding the Campus, my research assistant Zachary Bloom and I offer the case of John McCoy, a former Harvard Extension School student falsely accused of cheating on an exam, as an object lesson in why one should be skeptical of these kinds of charges emanating from Harvard, and of the reliability of the Administrative Board to actually come to a fair and rational decision on allegations of cheating. McCoy’s battles with implacable administrators show that Harvard’s disciplinary system is a far cry from the truth-finding apparatus that it claims to be.

John Silber, the former Boston University president who passed away last Thursday, September 27^th, was known for many things. I tussled with him here and there, such as when he tried to fire some leftist members of the faculty whose academic freedom, I thought, protected them from such action. However, I also witnessed his principled attempt to fight back against the idiocy of the university thought police that remains a plague in American higher education.

In my most recent piece for ThePhoenix.com, however, I tell a less well-known Silber story that illustrates his courage and integrity. In 1986, federal prosecutors tried to get Silber to finger then Boston Mayor Kevin White in a corruption investigation of City Hall. They subpoenaed Silber to testify before a secret anti-corruption grand jury. Instead of invoking the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, Silber took the witness stand and told it like it is. The feds proved not up to the task of getting Silber (in Alan Dershowitz’ immortal phrase) not only to sing, but also to compose.

The column after the jump...

Last year, Harvard’s Freshman Dean Thomas Dingman drew the wrath of former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, as well as the mockery of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for pressuring incoming students to sign a pledge that "the exercise of kindness holds a place on par with intellectual attainment." This year, Dean Dingman abandoned the criticized pledge tactic (in what turns out to be nothing more than a tactical retreat) but not his overriding commitment to imposing on students’ freedom of conscience. Without any public pre-announcement (which doomed last year's thought-reform efforts), Dean Dingman managed to slip a stealth re-education program into Harvard's freshman orientation week. As part of this “sensitivity training” students were made to perform skits where they acted out civility, as the Harvard administration defined it. In my most recent column for Minding the Campus, co-authored with my research assistant Juliana DeVries, I explain how this turn of events fits the Harvard administration into a long history of authoritarian intrusions into freedom of thought, yet nary a word of protest has been heard from Harvard students, alumni, faculty, and governing boards.

The column after the jump...