When Laurence D. Bobo, Harvard’s dean of social science, took to the campus paper to insist that “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits,” he presumably anticipated a backlash. The ideas he expressed there are so contrary to established doctrines of academic freedom as to be really rather eccentric. “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?” Bobo asked. “And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?”
His answer: “Yes it is and yes it does.”
For almost all academic-freedom experts, the answer is, of course, “No it isn’t and no it does not.” In fact, as Keith E. Whittington explains in our pages, faculty members have worked very hard to establish “that, unlike employees at most organizations, they have the right to publicly criticize their employer and their administration.” This is a key pillar of the modern understanding of academic freedom, established in theory (if not always in practice) by 1915.
Bobo’s essay is notable for how it differs from other recent calls for the partial abrogation of academic freedom. Those calls have taken two tacks. The first seeks to disqualify some speech on grounds that it is motivated by bigotry rather than — and in contradiction of — genuine expertise. That is the argument that Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth made in It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Hopkins, 2022). The second seeks to limit academic freedom when its exercise is thought to interfere with the ability of all students to participate in an educational community. That is the argument made by the Hamline University administrators who punished an adjunct professor of art history for showing a medieval devotional image of Muhammad, an action Hamline’s associate vice president for inclusive excellence called “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.” In theory, the two rationales for limiting academic freedom are entirely distinct; in practice, they are often invoked together.
Bobo’s ideas have nothing to do with these. He has in mind the damage wrought by “the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former university president” — he means Larry Summers — have “publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership.” His motivation is institutionalist; he wants to protect Harvard from negative outside attention. “A faculty member’s right to free speech,” he writes, “does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.”
