Free Speech on Campus

Professor Lee Epstein and Chancellor Andrew D. Martin

Political Science 334

Spring 2022


BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU POST (March 9)

Case Study

Harvard invites admitted undergraduates to join an official Facebook group, which is moderated. The site warns students that "Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.''

From the site, students can form their own chat groups. According to Harvard's newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, members of one group sent each other:

memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children... Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child "piñata time.''

Sometime in mid-April members of the group received an email from the Admissions Office:

The Admissions Committee was disappointed to learn that several students in a private group chat for the Class of 2021 were sending messages that contained offensive messages and graphics. As we understand you were among the members contributing such material to this chat, we are asking that you submit a statement by tomorrow at noon to explain your contributions and actions for discussion with the Admissions Committee.

Soon thereafter, Harvard College revoked admissions offers to at least ten members of the group.

Some members of the community supported the university's decision. "I do not know how those offensive images could be defended," one student said. But some professors condemned it. Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, expressed the view that "Harvard is intruding too deeply into the private lives of students.''

Harvard declined to respond to various inquiries writing that "We do not comment publicly on the admissions status of individual applicants.''

Readings

  1. Please read the material linked in the case study, as well as the material linked below under Section/Class Activities

  2. Erwin Chemerinsky, "Punishing Speech is Wrong," Daily News, June 21, 2017

  3. Josh Moody, "Why Colleges Look at Students' Social Media," U.S. News, August 22, 2019.

  4. Optional: Listen to (or read) this NPR podcast about the personal consequences of the Harvard meme scandal for one student from Pennsylvania.

Section/Class Activities

  1. Ronné P. Turner, Vice Provost of Admissions and Financial Aid at WashU, will join the class to talk about admission practices here and the role, if any, of social media presence/postings in admissions decisions. Sections should devise questions to ask Vice Provost Turner.

  2. Are messages sent in a private chat group "speech" deserving of First Amendment protection? Relatedly, Harvard is a private school but what if it were a public school? Would rescinding an admissions offer based on "behavior that brings into question [the student's] honesty, maturity, or moral character'' violate the First Amendment?

  3. According to the editorial board at the Washington Post:

    It would be a mistake... to conflate the recent events at Harvard with any kind of attack on free speech. What happened at Harvard is simply this: Misguided young people with an outsize sense of entitlement have been required to suffer the consequences—about which they had received sufficient warning—for ugly and inappropriate behavior. Harvard was right to insist that those who are granted the privilege of attending the private institution adhere to its standards.

    Defend the Washington Post's position.

  4. Will Creeley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a free-speech advocacy group, claimed that the revocations were in tension with a speech delivered by Harvard's president defending the importance of free speech. The president said:

    We must remember that limiting some speech opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own. If some words are to be treated as equivalent to physical violence and silenced or even prosecuted, who is to decide which words?

    We need to hear those hateful ideas so our society is fully equipped to oppose and defeat them.

According to Creely:

Our sense is that, had the students [whose offers had been rescinded] been enrolled at Harvard, they would be entitled to the freedom of expression that Harvard promises its students.

If the students had made a deposit or begun payment for tuition, effectively entering into a contract with Harvard, they should be afforded the same expressive rights as all students.

Defend Creeley's position.