Over the years, differences about the implementation of the University's free speech principles have often provoked controversy. And we haven't always gotten it right. As long ago as 1939, an invitation from a student group to the head of the American Communist Party generated protest and the invitation was ultimately canceled by the Corporation. Bertrand Russell's appointment as William James Lecturer just a year later divided the Corporation, but President Conant broke the tie and Russell came. Campus conflicts over invited speakers are hardly new.
Yet the vehemence with which these issues have been debated in recent months, not just on campuses but in the broader public sphere, suggests there is something distinctive about this moment. Certainly, these controversies reflect a highly polarized political and social environment – perhaps the most divisive since the era of the Civil War. And in these already fractious circumstances, free speech debates have provided a fertile substrate into which anger and disagreement could be planted to nourish partisan outrage and generate media clickbait. But that is only a partial explanation.
Universities themselves have changed dramatically in recent years, reaching beyond their traditional, largely homogeneous populations to become more diverse than perhaps any other institution in which Americans find themselves living together. Once overwhelmingly white, male, Protestant, and upper class, Harvard College is now half female, majority minority, religiously pluralistic, with nearly 60 percent of students able to attend because of financial aid. Fifteen percent are the first in their families to go to college. Many of our students struggle to feel full members of this community – a community in which people like them have so recently arrived. They seek evidence and assurance that – to borrow the title of a powerful theatrical piece created by a group of our African-American students – evidence and assurance that they, too, are Harvard.
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