Harvey Silverglate

We do.

And nobody can force us to sit in a room and listen to a radio program that we don't want to listen to.

Nobody can force us to read a book that we don't want to read.

The whole notion of freedom of speech means that people have autonomy on their choices.

Well, that is the theory.

Academic freedom is supposed to be the highest degree of free speech.

Yeah.

You should be able to entertain all kinds of hateful, threatening ideas.

And the way I put it is there's something wrong when you can say something with complete abandon without any fear in Harvard Square.

Whereas on the other side of the fence, you can't say it in Harvard Yard.

It should be the opposite.

And what happens is universities, from the best to the worst, from the most famous to the least well-known, have been taken over by administrators.

Administrators do not really subsume academic values.

They know nothing about the Constitution.

They know nothing about free speech.

They know nothing about academic freedom.

they feel that their job is to keep order.

And so they develop speech codes, kangaroo courts to enforce the speech codes.

And these are very dire developments.

I wrote about them in the shadow university in 98, um, and try to deal with them in 1999 when I started fire, code started fire.