At midnight last night, FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) put up its list of the “10 Worst Censors of 2024”.
Part of the intro:
Each year, FIRE names and shames the worst-of-the-worst silencers, bowdlerizers, and steamrollers of free speech.
This year, we’ve included five free speech villains whose chilling misdeeds happened off of college campuses. Thelist belowincludes people guilty of many forms of censorship including raiding a small-town newspaper, punishing a middle schooler for wearing eye black at a football game, canceling students and professors for their views on the Israel-Hamas war, and retroactively censoring famous authors without their consent. The 13th annual Lifetime Censorship Award went to Harvard University, a university as censorial as it is famous.
Previous lists were limited to campuses, but no longer: off-campus censors were also in the running. The list below is in no particular order, and there’s a longer explanation of each ranking at the website given at the top.
I was particularly interested in the Razzies given to the California Community Colleges (for requiring faculty to pledge allegiance to DEI) and Texas A&M (a state school) for its pattern of firing, deplatforming, and censorship.
- Muirlands Middle School disciplined a student for wearing eye black to a school football game, calling it “blackface”. The student is now suing.
- The Marion County Police Dept. raided a small town newspaper because the paper had dirt on a political ally, and the paper’s owner died the next day.
- Mayo Clinic College of Medical Science punished Prof. Michael Joyner for speaking to the press on COVID-19 and sports performance.
- Book censors & bowlderizers: Legislators across the country drafted a number of vague, overbroad policies to remove or limit access to books they believe are inappropriate. Book publishers edited out so-called “problematic content” from the works of authors like Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine in new editions through “sensitivity reading.”
- San Francisco State University students accosted former Olympic swimmer Riley Gaines after a speech about female sports and an admin disciplined a professor for showing a depiction of Muhammed in a class about the history of the Islamic world.
- Hypocritical college admins enjoyed a censorship frenzy after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. USC admins banned Prof. Strauss from the classroom for his anti-Hamas views, while Brandeis admins “unrecognized” a student group due to pro-Hamas comments made by the national org. This turmoil was exacerbated by the hypocritical testimony of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth — presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT, respectively — at the “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism” hearing by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
- FIRE sued California Community Colleges and other admins after CCC imposed draconian regulations forcing more-than-54,000 professors to teach and promote politicized conceptions of DEI.
- The Texas A&M University system landed in hot water due to censorship controversies involving the hiring of former New York Times editor Kathleen McElroy and Prof. Joy Alonzo’s criticism of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler also earned a lawsuit from FIRE and several students when he banned an on-campus charity drag show.
- FIRE sued NY state officials over a law urging online platforms to “stop the spread of hateful content” related to the Israel-Hamas war. After FIRE won an injunction against the law, New York ignored the court’s order, sending investigation letters to FIRE’s client Rumble and other social media networks demanding that they disclose their policies for removing speech related to the conflict. Also in 2023, FIRE weighed in on New York’s censorial crusade against the National Rifle Association.
- Florida state officials derecognized Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, expanded the Stop WOKE Act, and banned drag.
Last but not least, Harvard University will receive FIRE’s sixth Lifetime Censorship Award, reserved for those colleges that deserve special recognition for their commitment to censorship. The school earned the award for landing at the bottom of FIRE’s annual free speech rankings, threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, driving out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real, and rescinding a fellowship for form
I wanted to show you why Harvard got the lowest ranking; and the ranking was assigned well before Claudine Gay and the Presidents of MIT and Penn were excoriated for their testimony before a House committee:
Harvard University came in dead last on this year’s College Free Speech Rankings — achieving a worst-ever score. When asked about Harvard’s abysmal ranking during her congressional testimony in December, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said she didn’t think the ranking was “an accurate representation” of Harvard’s respect for free speech. But all one needs to do to understand Harvard’s disrespect for free speech is look at its record of censorship.
Only a few weeks before Gay’s testimony, Harvard hired self-advertised “media assassins” to threaten the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit and “immense” damages if the paper published a story alleging Gay plagiarized some of her scholarship. So much for placing “a high priority on freedom of speech” — or freedom of the press for that matter. Gay resigned on Jan. 2, after more than 40 allegations of plagiarism came to light.
Long before Harvard threatened news outlets with litigation for their reporting, it punished faculty and students for their speech. School administrators drove out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real. It rescinded a fellowship for former Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth over his purported “anti-Israel bias.” It effectively fired an economics professor for an op-ed he published in India. It canceled a professor’s course on policing following student uproar. It fired professor Ronald Sullivan from his deanship after students protested his role on Harvey Weinstein’s criminal defense team. It bizarrely demanded students take down a Nicki Minaj flag because the community could find it “offensive.” And the list goes on.
Even outside speakers invited to campus aren’t safe from Harvard’s censorial glare. In 2022, feminist philosopher Devin Buckley was disinvited from an English department colloquium because of her views on sex and gender. Her talk was supposed to be on the separate topic of British romanticism.
Harvard students clearly feel the chill. Students report low administrative support for free speech and low comfort expressing ideas, placing the school near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings in both individual categories. Unfortunately, Harvard students themselves may also contribute to the problem. If the efforts to oust Sullivan and cancel the policing class aren’t evidence enough, an alarming 30% of Harvard students think using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in at least some circumstances.
For its long track record of censorship, Harvard is receiving FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award. It joins Georgetown University, Yale University, Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and DePaul University in receiving this “honor.” It’s past time Harvard truly commits to its ostensible truth-seeking mission and the principles of free speech and academic freedom that make it possible. But that may be wishful thinking, the triumph of hope over experience.
The new President of Harvard hasn’t yet been chosen, but I suspect it will have to be another black woman lest Harvard be criticized for, well, Sarah Haider talks about this in her nice new analysis of DEI, including a tweet:
This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.
The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.
— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) January 2, 2024
Hill is a professor of CUNY and a “television personality”.
Banned drag
OK, but I have to note, for the record:
The Curriculum Inquiry “drag pedagogy” paper by Harper Keenan and “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess” (440-461, v50, n5, 2021) tells the world precisely what drag queens – i.e. a generative theme in Freire’s critical pedagogy – need access to children – children – as young as five for :
“It may be that Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.”
“We’re dressing up, we’re shaking our hips, and we’re finding our light – even in the fluorescents [sic]. We’re reading books while we read each other’s looks, and we’re leaving a trail of glitter that won’t ever come out of the carpet.”
… what could “alternate modes of kinship” mean? Or a “family” of “queers”, i.e. “The Queer Family”? What could it mean that a trail of “glitter” won’t ever come out of the carpet? Why do drag queens need access to children, in schools and libraries, but not really adults, or in any other setting of note – like fire stations, hospitals, gardening clubs, or local park trash cleanup days?
Hmmm… what is that called…
Worrying?
Why don’t they invite the scholar that Gray allegedly plagiarized to be the new President? She’s a black woman. Of course, she isn’t woke.
Craziness. And calling Harvard out for special mention is entirely appropriate.
FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award to Harvard might be misinterpreted in the lower reaches of the academic food chain, where 4th tier institutions try to follow what they suppose are leading edge fashion trends. For example, one Texas campus enjoys a program called “Critical Studies in Music and Society”, which includes courses in “Music and Race Formation” and “Decolonial Listening”. It is only a matter of time before Critical Food Studies and Critical Astronomy Studies show up. Such campuses will do their best to mimic their conception of Harvard in all respects.
I wonder how this affects the typical Harvard student. In other words, the student that is there to get a Harvard degree on their CV so that they’ll have a great career in law, medicine, banking, etc. I’m guessing they pay lip service to any political issues and spend 99.9% of their time on academics and socializing with their friends.
I may be biased, as I saw college (at a large US state school) as a ticket to a decent career. In between academics and internships, I squeezed in some social activities. I never got involved in any demonstrations or political issues whatsoever, and neither did anyone I knew, as we would have seen them as a waste of time. A very small minority of the school always seemed to be protesting this or that, but they were generally viewed as oddballs.
My point is, I think that whether Harvard gets an A or an F on free speech matters little to the typical student there, because the point of these schools is to prepare students for elite professional careers. Everything else is just window dressing. Whoever the next president is, whether its a black woman, an indigenous trans-man, or a potted plant, just needs to make sure that Harvard continues to crank out graduates for the elite professions.
They left out that public library in California that claimed it was a violation of state law to refer to trans-identifying males as “males,” and shut down an event in its public space because the speakers would not comply. Shameful.