Table of Contents
FIRE Speaker in Philadelphia Thursday
Tomorrow, January 19, FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel will lead a dinner discussion hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Club of Philadelphia. Adam, a Harvard alumnus, will discuss "Harvard's Tradition of Oppressing Controversial Speech," including several recent cases:
- In 2011, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to fire a professor of economics after he published a controversial op-ed in India.
- Last fall, the dean of Harvard College instituted a Freshman Pledge stating that "kindness" was "on a par with intellectual attainment" at Harvard, and pressured students to publicly pledge to such official Harvard College values.
- In 2010, the dean of the law school asserted that as a "social justice" law school, HLS ruled certain ideas automatically out of bounds.
The dinner will begin at 6:45 pm at Aqua, a Malaysian-Thai restaurant located at 705 Chestnut Street. Tickets are $35 for members and $40 for non-members, and can be purchased here.
To request a FIRE speaker to visit your campus, check out our Speakers Bureau page or email me at jaclyn@thefire.org.
Recent Articles
Get the latest free speech news and analysis from FIRE.
German chancellor echoes the frequent — and illiberal — call to end online anonymity
Online anonymity is vital to free speech in Germany. And the United States.
Ruling on Palestine Action ban casts even more doubt on UK’s troubling mass arrests of peaceful protesters
A UK court says banning the group Palestine Action was unlawful — after more than 2,700 arrests — but the ban remains pending appeal. So for now, supporting the group is essentially Schrödinger’s speech crime.
He refused to censor his syllabus — so Texas Tech cancelled his class
In another blow to academic freedom in the Lone Star state, Texas Tech canceled a psychology class after the professor refused to scrub race and gender from his syllabus.
Fandom’s lighthouse in a sea of censorship
In the storm of internet censorship and cancel crusades, the fanfic database Archive Of Our Own (AO3) has become a lighthouse of artistic expression.