STAFF EDIT: Start defending free speech

Harvard University Business School officials could have responded to a political cartoon in the business school’s student newspaper deriding a career services computer service through the avenues all newspapers open to criticism. Instead, Harvard officials acted for the second time in less than a week to stifle free speech on the campus, a disturbing trend at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

The business school refused to raise issue diplomatically and democratically with a cartoon in the school’s student newspaper, the Harbus, that criticized a computer program run by the school’s career services department. Rather, the school exerted pressure on the newspaper’s editors to remove the cartoon from the newspaper’s website for being ‘disrespectful,’ causing the Harbus Editor Nick Will to resign in protest, according to The Boston Globe. In resigning, the editor cited ‘personal intimidation and threats’ from school administrators, according to The Globe. The cartoon in question featured a computer screen with several critical announcements, including one referring to the program’s creators as ‘incompetent morons.’

Harbus staff are now ‘terrified of the administration,’ according to The Globe, creating an atmosphere which is decidedly not conducive to the free exchange of opinions and ideas that defines many universities. Fear of administrators is neither healthy for the newspaper as an independent reporting outlet or the paper’s editors, who are rightfully interested in their own well-being and their standing with the administration of one of the country’s top business schools. A simple and relatively harmless, though ‘disrespectful’ in some administrators’ views, political cartoon is no reason to make students legitimately fear for their standing at any academic institution.

It is essential that newspaper editors at Harvard and everywhere else be free of fear that university officials will punish them for their critical words. If editors’ free speech is not protected from administrative pressure, they will feel less compelled to play one of the core roles of journalism a watchdog that promotes the truth and enlightens people to a sometimes negative reality. Without that assurance, journalists are reduced to an unacceptable public relations role. Even if the newspaper does receive university support, business school officials must recognize newspapers’ proper roles as independent reporting organizations. Will was perfectly justified in resigning his post as editor once it became evident that he could not fulfill his duties as a journalist because of threats from administrators.

The Harbus incident was not the first incidence of anti-free speech activity at the university. Officials in the school’s English department last week canceled a scheduled public poetry reading by a man whose poetry has included allusions to the Israeli army as a ‘Zionist SS’ and American settlers in the West Bank as ‘racist’ and ‘Nazis.’ For a university with such a renowned reputation throughout the nation and the world for top-notch academics, the trend is disturbing. A free and open exchange of ideas is one of the most important components of successful academic endeavors.

All newspapers dedicate pages specifically to the opinions of their readers. Harvard Business School administrators should have confronted the disrespectful cartoon with criticism on the paper’s opinion pages, rather than with heavy-handed and intimidating threats to the paper’s editors. They should have defended the performance of the career services department instead of working to simply erase criticism of the department.

Students should get active in defense of their free speech rights and defend the open environment they deserve. In just the past year, Harvard students have protested in defense of the university’s underprivileged workers and Boston’s underpaid janitors. Neither of those efforts would have been as effective as they were without the free speech rights many students take for granted. Free speech is a cornerstone right, one which, when restricted, should be most passionately defended by students of all backgrounds who locate themselves everywhere on the political spectrum. As one of the world’s top universities, Harvard sets the bar in many areas of academics. The university’s students must protest English and Business School officials’ moves to quell free speech in the interest of protecting the rights of students everywhere. Without loud protest, administrators, many of whom have defended their actions during the past week, will not respond. Students must make sure administrators know how dearly they cling to free speech.

Harvard administrators must return to the realization that open environments foster rich educational experiences. They must work to arrest a disturbing trend of free speech suppression.