I at least expected my thoroughly disgrace alma mater to always maintain some vestige of intelligence, as misapplied as it frequently has been lately.

Guess not.

Before student group-sponsored speakers at the college are allowed to begin, the following official statement from the administration must now be read to the audience:

“A quick note before we begin—Harvard University is committed to maintaining a climate in which reason and speech provide the correct response to a disagreeable idea. Speech is privileged in the University community. There are obligations of civility and respect for others that underlie rational discourse. If any disruption occurs that prohibits speech the disrupters will be allowed for up to 10 minutes. A warning will be issued to all disturbers at the 5-minute mark explaining that the protesters are disrupting the event and ask them to stop. Any further disruption that prevents the audience from adequately hearing or seeing the speakers will lead to the removal of the disrupters from the venue.”

Brilliant.

How smart do you have to be to figure out what’s wrong with this? Let’s see:

• It validates preventing a speaker from speaking, which is unethical at a university whether it is for 30 seconds or the whole speech.
• It assumes that the kinds of people who have no respect for open discourse and the opinions of others with respect rules. They won’t, and don’t.
• It falsely treats speech that interferes with speech as speech, when it is conduct.
• Funny, I would also expect the leaders of a university that promotes itself as the most prestigious in the nation to be sufficiently literate to recognize the creepy resemblance between this policy and Big Brother’s “Two Minute Hate” in “1984.” [The graphic above is from the film.] Remember that? Orwell describes a daily period during which members of the Outer and Inner Party of Oceania  watch a film about Emmanuel Goldstein, Big Brother’s sworn foe, and loudly scream their hatred for the enemy and their love for Big Brother. To be fair to Harvard, it is improving on Big Brother’s methodology by making the Hate five times as long.
• What Harvard is allowing is illegal in Massachusetts, because the Bay State has always been a bastion of free speech.
• What prevents tag-team ten minute disruptions, where one group stops after 10 minutes and a new group of protesters arrives and starts for another 10 minutes?
• How many epithets, degrading insults like “Racist!” or “Fascist! or coded bigotry like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”s can be shouted ten minutes?
• The right to protest isn’t the right to disrupt. Once, a Harvard, this was observed and understood: those who protested professors teaching “The Bell Curve” long ago confined themselves to carrying signs and demonstrating outside the venue.
• The policy doesn’t control or mitigate unethical protest methods, it encourages and guarantees them.

Morons.