Often the most precipitous modes of inquiry are the most vital. Certainly, that was how Anthony McIntyre and Ed Maloney felt when they founded the Belfast Project, a Boston College-based oral history project that would solicit candid narratives of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The wound in Ireland is still raw, and it is therefore unsurprising that Belfast Project interviewees were promised that their stories would be kept secret until their deaths.

But last month, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered Boston College to turn over many of the transcripts in order to aid with the police investigation into a forty year old unsolved murder in Ireland. In our piece this week on Forbes.com, Daniel Schwartz and I discuss the judge’s decision and argue that, while it pays lip service to the importance of academic freedom, it does not go nearly far enough to protect society’s interests and could end up setting a very unfortunate precedent for scholars engaged in sensitive research. 

Take a look at an excerpt of our piece after the jump, or read it in its entirety 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. 

I started the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education because of a trend I began to detect in the 1980’s; initially often well-meaning attempts to make campuses more welcoming were leading to a watering-down of free speech and academic freedom at our universities. “Political correctness”—the convention that makes equivocation and dishonesty de rigeur for a “polite” and “comfortable” environment—became the norm.