Opinions? We don’t need no stinkin’ opinions!

Harvard announced that it will henceforth avoid issuing statements about matters that don’t directly affect the core academic mission of the university. That core mission, surprisingly enough, is education, not politics, not social justice, not sucking up to student activists and not virtue-signaling to progressives. “There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given issue is or is not directly related to the core function of the university,” the announcement stated. “The university’s policy in those situations should be to err on the side of avoiding official statements.”

The policy will apply to all University administrators and governing board members, as well as deans, department chairs, and faculty councils.

“Individuals within the university, exercising their academic freedom, sometimes make statements that occasion strong disagreement,” the report stated. “When this happens, the university should clarify that they do not speak for the university and that no one is authorized to speak on behalf of the university except the university’s leadership….Because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” the statement says.

The special working group whose report was embraced by Harvard interim President Alan Garber’s announcement still have off some weaselly vibes. “Our report argues that the University is fundamentally committed to a non-neutral set of values specifically, getting to the truth by experiment, open inquiry, and debate,” Noah R. Feldman, the Harvard Law School professor who chaired the working group said. “The University is regularly under attack today, as truth itself is under attack,” Feldman added. “This report says the University should not be neutral in that important matter of the future of universities.”

Whatever that’s supposed to mean. Any theories? It sounds lot like wiggle room to me. The “under attack” theme has been flourishing in Harvard’s alumni magazine since Claudine Gay’s expulsion for being a DEI fraud, with Harvard referring to the crisis entirely of its own making (over at least a a decade of kow-towing to Woke World) as something that, you know, just happened to the school because everybody hates Harvard, or everyone is jealous, or something. If Harvard is going to insist that it is still the arbiter of truth, this announcement is more a demonstration of cowardice and prudence rather than principle.

Also worth noting is that this is reunion weekend for Harvard, and it is justifiably terrified of having the big alumni party disrupted by Hamas supporters that the college itself nurtured in its metaphorical Petri dish.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, however, was unrestrained in its praise. In a fundraising email it sent out today, the​ organization wrote of the announcement,

…This matters because a college should host critics — not become the critic itself.  When colleges take official positions on social and political issues, they put their thumb on the scale in debates that are better left to faculty and students. And by choosing the “correct” side of a debate, they chill the expression of students and faculty who disagree. For better or worse, where Harvard goes, others follow. Harvard adopted principles of institutional neutrality similar to those described in the University of Chicago’s “Kalven Report,” which FIRE endorses. That’s why we’re tracking colleges that adopt these important principles. And why we’re working hard to add even more colleges to this list. (In fact, as we were about to send this email, Syracuse announced a plan to ditch institutional statements too!)​​​​​ Harvard has had trouble with free speech for many years. It scored dead last in FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, regularly appears on our annual “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech” list, and often hears from us about how it can change course to promote the principles of free expression.  But this is a great step forward. FIRE will keep a hopeful eye on Harvard and other universities as our mission to protect and promote free speech continues.

Well, FIRE deserves a victory lap, I suppose. That 2024 College Free Speech ranking listing Harvard dead last really stung, though university spokespersons an faculty mocked it. Harvard is not used to ranking last in anything. The effect on Harvard’s morale and self image was like the effect Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” pronouncement, much ridiculed by liberal media, at the time, had on the Soviet Union. When Grace I I were in Moscow after the USSR’s collapse, one of our hosts said that the effect of that verdict on the Russian public was immediate and powerful. “We never thought of our country as evil. It opened our eyes.)

We shall see if Harvard’s change of course in genuine, or just PR posturing.