Law professors Randall Kennedy and Jonathan Turley debate Harvard’s free speech record
Disinviting a speaker from campus is free speech, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy said during a debate Thursday.
The Steamboat Institute hosted the event titled “Does Harvard Support Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity?” Kennedy and George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley discussed Harvard’s “free speech record,” the Daily Caller reported.
“A disinvitation is, itself, a form of expression,” Kennedy said when asked about an op-ed he wrote in The Harvard Crimson titled “It’s Alright to Demand the Disinvitation of Speakers.”
“Just suppose the people doing the inviting have operated in a corrupt way, or in a way that you think is appalling,” he said.
Kennedy (pictured) also said that when university officials invite a speaker he doesn’t like, he asks them to rescind the invitation.
“Maybe I win, maybe I lose, but as a matter of principle, I don’t see why it is that the mere making of an invitation should stop discussion,” he said.
Further, Kennedy does not “approve of shouting down speakers,” but he does support “rally[ing] the community to urge the organizer of a speaking event to revoke an invitation.”
In response, Turley argued that Harvard does not have free speech.
He cited the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s recent study which ranked Harvard last out of 251 schools for free speech.
He also referenced a 2022 survey by The Crimson which found that nearly “every Republican had been eliminated from the faculty at most departments.”
About three-fourths of Harvard faculty identify as liberal or very liberal, while 2.5% identify as conservative and 0.4% identify as very conservative.
“This doesn’t happen randomly,” he said.
“It takes a concerted culture for a faculty to replicate their own views,” the professor said.
He also said that self-censorship has doubled at the school since 2021.
“Calling a cancel campaign ‘free speech’ does not alter its fundamentally anti-free speech purpose,” Turley told the Daily Caller after the debate.
“Technically, it is a form of speech but it is inimical to the very essence of free speech values in higher education. You are seeking to prevent opposing views from being heard on campus,” he said.
Also in an interview after the debate, Kennedy criticized Harvard’s new institutional neutrality policy, according to The Crimson.
“I’m deeply skeptical,” he said. “They want to…depoliticize things. They want to get the University out of politics. But I don’t think that can happen.”
In June, Dean of Social Science Lawrence Bobo said “faculty speech must have limits” when it “incites external actors,” as previously reported by The College Fix.
MORE: Some Harvard scholars demand return to free speech on campus
IMAGE: GBH News/Youtube
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