Edelman v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

Benjamin Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School, sued Harvard University in 2023 after the university denied him tenure. Edelman alleged that Harvard breached its contractual obligations by failing to follow its written tenure procedures and by considering his activities and expression outside the university — including a public dispute with a restaurant and his work in an airline class-action lawsuit — when evaluating his tenure application. On March 18, 2024, the Massachusetts Superior Court allowed his case to proceed, holding that there was enough evidence to support Edelman’s claims that Harvard violated its binding faculty policies. The Massachusetts Appeals Court reversed on February 17, 2026, determining that Harvard was not bound by these policies. Edelman then applied for direct appellate review by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

On August 10, 2026, FIRE filed an amicus brief with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court supporting Edelman’s application for direct appellate review. Although private universities like Harvard are not bound by the First Amendment, they routinely make commitments protecting faculty expression and academic freedom — commitments professors reasonably rely on when deciding where to work, what scholarship to pursue, whether to speak publicly within their expertise, and whether to participate candidly in academic governance. FIRE explained that courts must hold private colleges and universities to their express commitments to academic freedom.

FIRE warned that allowing Harvard to evade its written commitments would encourage private universities to tout robust protections for academic freedom while treating those same protections as unenforceable when faculty seek to vindicate them in court. We urged the court to make clear that colleges cannot reap the benefits of promising faculty expressive freedom and tenure protections while refusing to honor those promises when controversy arises.