Of course it’s Harvard. My other alma mater, for which I worked as an administrator for several years, Georgetown, was ranked at #240 out of 251 schools. Harvard lapped the field however, with a perfect 0.00 score. Do read the report, rankings and details here, as depressing as they are regarding the ethics rot in higher education generally. At least I wasn’t disappointed or disillusioned about my two universities’ rankings and performance, since Ethics Alarms has covered the deterioration of both, not as extensively as FIRE, but enough to make it obvious to readers here (and me) that Harvard and Georgetown have busted ethics alarms.

Ironically, the report comes out shortly after Harvard’s erudite alumni magazine published a long and purportedly relevant essay about the distinction between freedom of speech and academic freedom, featuring the views of Robert Post, a Harvard PhD and a professor and former dean at Yale Law School. Post is considered the national authority on the topic. It is a provocative and informative essay, with one teeny-tiny problem that renders the piece ridiculous. Although academic Lincoln Caplan’s essay is published by Harvard, it doesn’t mention the Claudine Gay debacle at all, which was begun (well, if you don’t count Harvard appointing an under-qualified, DEI president) when Gay couldn’t articulate the difference between academic freedom and free speech before Congress, repeating the lawyer-dictated rote that whether anti-Semitism was tolerable on campus depended on the “context.” Gay isn’t mentioned once. Jews aren’t mentioned once. Although “Academic Freedom and Free Speech” is supposedly written from a Harvard perspective, it wanders in the wilderness of abstract truth, as if Harvard had no free speech issues at all.

This dishonesty and refusal to engage in self-criticism has characterized the University’s treatment of the Gay disaster from the beginning. She is still a professor, earning a seven figure salary. Harvard’s oft-repeated narrative is that Old Ivy’s first black female President was the innocent victim of a conservative (and racist) hit job. And, of course, Harvard reveres both free speech and academic freedom, while the FIRE ranking is invalid and politically motivated.

That zero score isn’t going to improve any time soon.