Harvey Silverglate, a Boston criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer, is the co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). He co-authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses.
The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality that has gripped our college campuses, currently basking — or wallowing — in a so-called diversity and inclusion phase, has visited Babson College, where members of the administration and faculty worked themselves into a lather over an incident of racial harassment that, it turns out, the most elementary investigation would have demonstrated […]
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Harvey Silverglate delivered these remarks upon receiving the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton award Monday, May 9th at a dinner in New York City. Silverglate is a Cambridge attorney, a veteran defender of civil rights and civil liberties, and co-founder, along with University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in […]
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Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought an explanation for our being on this planet, and some have looked for an answer in “liberal arts” education. But now – at Harvard at least – this profound search for meaning has apparently been transferred from the liberal arts department, where definitive answers have been rare, […]
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The ills besetting higher education in recent years – ballooning tuitions, kangaroo disciplinary tribunals, speech codes and other violations of academic freedom, expanding bureaucracies, invasions of student and faculty privacy, lowered academic standards, and others – are on virtuallyeveryone’s minds. However, these problems are not mutually exclusiveand severable; rather, theyare manifestations of a larger downward […]
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Question: When is an obnoxious expression of a point-of-view a crime in our supposedly free society? Answer: When college administrators and federal law enforcement officials find it in their career interests to appeal to political correctness and play holier-than-thou, all at the expense of liberty, as the latest controversy at the University of Mississippi demonstrates. On […]
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A speech to the 55th reunion of the Harvard Law School class of 1958, October 26, 2013. I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1967. Very early in my career, I represented many students in Administrative Board cases growing out of their protests against the Vietnam War. I represented (with Alan Dershowitz) one group of students accused […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Zachary Bloom At first blush, the ongoing cheating scandal at Harvard College appears to raise serious questions about academic integrity at that fabled institution. If the allegations that 125 students inappropriately shared notes and answers for a take-home exam in violation of the exam’s rules prove true, the result will be […]
Read MoreHarvard’s Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman has managed to circumvent the brouhaha he created last year with his “kindness pledge.” To recap: In the fall of 2011 Dean Dingman drew the wrath of former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, as well as the mockery and criticism of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE) […]
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The Boston Herald is a scrappy, politically conservative tabloid that normally rants and rails against excessive regulations and good-for-nothing government bureaucrats. Yet in an editorial on the Penn State child molestations, titled “Keeping campuses safe,” the Herald called for a heavily expanded bureaucratic response. It excoriated “the football program staff” of Penn State who, quoting […]
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Seemingly lily-white Elizabeth Warren’s supposed claim of Cherokee heritage may make for good campaign fodder–incumbent Senator Scott Brown has gone so far as to demand that Warren apologize for allowing Harvard to claim her as a minority–but the real lesson in this latest of partisan battles has more to do with university rather than electoral […]
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This is the text of a speech given March 28, 2012 at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in New York City. *** I began representing students in 1969. A group of Harvard students took over University Hall in an anti-Vietnam War protest. There was a lot of violence, President Pusey called in the police, and […]
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According to various reports, UCLA may ask incoming students about their sexual orientation. Such a development would make it the second school in the nation to do so–Elmhurst College in Illinois became the first last fall. The disclosure would be voluntary, and would have no bearing on admissions. As Matt Comer, a spokesperson for the […]
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When I read this article in today’s Harvard Crimson, asking for a shorter school year, I couldn’t figure out if it was a parody. At first I laughed, but then it occurred to me that the Crimson editorialists are likely serious. I would love to see a comparison done of the length of the academic […]
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Although our beleaguered universities continue their seemingly inexorable march from being institutions of higher education to resembling, more and more, political and social re-education camps for the young, every now and then the students demonstrate that they remain well ahead of campus administrations and faculties when it comes to appreciating the true role of our […]
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Harvard College’s Class of 2015 found something unprecedented awaiting their arrival on campus: an ideological pledge. It was framed as a request for allegiance to certain social and political principles. No such request had been made of Harvard students since the college’s founding by Puritans in 1636. First-years are being pressured to sign a “Freshman […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Kyle Smeallie The Department of Education is currently investigating Yale University for allegedly maintaining a sexually hostile environment. No one can deny that the New Haven Ivy is in a difficult position. To wit, Yale enacted changes last month to lower the standard of proof in sexual assault cases, and last week, College Dean Mary Miller announced that a fraternity would be banned for […]
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In Savannah, Georgia, an ambitious experiment in higher education is under way. Ralston College aims to offer a back-to-basics liberal arts experience , stripped of the amenities and assumptions of the modern university. Though just now getting off the ground–it has yet to accept student applications–its stated mission is clear. Students will experience rigorous coursework […]
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The first remarkable aspect of the case intriguingly captioned John Doe, Father of Minor Daughter H.S. v. Silsbee Independent School District, are the facts: Administrators at a public high school in Texas threw a female student off of the cheerleading squad because she refused to cheer for one particular member of the basketball team—a fellow […]
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What does it mean to be safe on campus? The word is so often invoked—creating “safe zones” or maintaining a “safe environment”—that it has arguably become meaningless. Perhaps more accurately, it has taken on a second meaning, specific to the university. Whereas the real-world definition refers essentially to one’s physical well-being, in the campus context […]
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In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal […]
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By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard’s footsteps. What better place, […]
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In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If […]
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By William Creeley & Harvey Silverglate Reaction to Brandeis University’s plan to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its esteemed collection was swift—and scathing. Within the Brandeis community, President Jehuda Reinharz’s proposed fire sale provoked howls of betrayal from students, faculty, alumni, and donors. In the art world and news media, the move was […]
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After years of fat, our colleges and universities are now facing decisions imposed by the coming years of lean. Will the academy pull back from the spending binge of recent decades by cutting away administrative fat, or by chipping away at academic bone? Will it be administrations or faculties that get downsized? The answer will […]
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People ask me when I got my first inkling that something was seriously wrong with the culture of our campuses of higher education. It was in the mid-1980s, and it had nothing to do — yet — with the post-modern corruption of the liberal arts, which was then beyond my professional interests and experiences. It […]
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The punditocracy has offered up a wide range of answers to the question of what should be done about former Department of Justice legal counsel and author of the infamous “torture memos,” John Yoo. Suggestions have included indictment, professional discipline or even disbarment, and termination from his tenured position at the University of California-Berkeley’s Boalt […]
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