What can faculty say publicly about their own universities?

Lawrence D Bobo, Dean of social science At Harvard has rightly drawn criticism after an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson entitled ‘Faculty Speech Must Have Limits’. The title is uncontroversial: anyone’s freedom of speech is limited by laws on defamation, obscenity or public order. But Bobo had other constraints in mind:

Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

He went on to argue that this particularly applied to staff with a public profile:

Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker.

Bobo proceeded to make the standard of intellectual rigour of his thinking clear by claiming that this argument was ‘why you can’t escape sanction for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre’, referring to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famous analogy. As Pinker and others pointed out in a rejoinder:

The analogy is inapplicable for many reasons. Holmes alluded to falsely crying “fire,” whereas the speech that Dean Bobo would sanction is reasoned opinion, not known falsehood. The analogy pertains to a reflexive and predictable mob reaction; faculty opinions may be evaluated and deliberated over time. And the actual legal decision Holmes justified, which convicted people who criticized the draft during World War I, was later effectively overturned in a judgment that limited suppression of speech to incitement of “imminent lawless action.”

What I found both alarming and depressing, apart from Bobo’s ignorance of liberal principles of free speech and its special importance for universities, was that Bobo’s focus was on ‘external intervention’. He appeared to be arguing that universities ought to be their own best judge and jury, and left himself open to the charge that, in practice, he’s arguing Harvard should be above the law, and that stifling free speech or whistleblowing, is fine if it upholds Harvard’s reputation.

What is worse is that Bobo is the W E B Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and previously chaired the Department of African and African American Studies. In his role as a sociologist he presumably endorsed people calling for ‘outside intervention’ to challenge discrimination and racism in organisations, whatever it might do for their reputations.

Worse still, maybe there is no contradiction. A good deal of lazy social science has become accustomed to arguing that discourse is power, and that what matters is less the freedom to say things, (especially if it is argued that such freedom is illusory) than the power relations within which things are said. Thus, most depressing of all, is the prospect that Dean Bobo was being perfectly consistent with his sociological self: your right to say anything depends upon the effect it has. Renown for Harvard, good; criticism of Harvard’s enemies, double-plus-good; anything else can go in the memory hole. This is the ideology of the bureaucrat unchained. Unfortunately, contemporary universities seem to offer them a congenial environment.

John MacInnes

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh

Bobo’s original piece is at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/6/15/bobo-faculty-speech-limits/

The rejoinder by Jeffrey S. Flier, Eric S. Maskin, and Steven A. Pinker is at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/6/19/CAFH-punish-faculty-speech/