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. 

Two "pledging" controversies have come to the fore in the Boston area in the past couple of weeks. A Brookline group, led by my longtime friend Marty Rosenthal, has sought to move the Pledge of Allegiance out of the public school classroom. Across the river, the Harvard Freshman Dean asked incoming first year students to sign onto a pledge proclaiming such values as civility, kindness, and inclusiveness, to be on a par with academic achievement.