Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy said in a Thursday debate about free speech that disinviting a speaker is a form of free “expression.”
In the debate titled “Does Harvard Support Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity?,” Kennedy defended the university’s free speech record against George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Harvard received an “abysmal” ranking by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in September, and was ranked the lowest out of 251 schools for free speech.
“A disinvitation is, itself, a form of expression,” Kennedy said. “Just suppose the people doing the inviting have operated in a corrupt way, or in a way that you think is appalling.”
“The higher-ups here make an invitation to someone and I say ‘well, I’m a member of this community, I don’t like that. I want you to disinvite this person,’” Kennedy continued. “Maybe I win, maybe I lose but as a matter of principle, I don’t see why it is that the mere making of an invitation should stop discussion.”
Kennedy later clarified that while he did not approve of shouting down speakers, he did find it acceptable to rally the community to urge the organizer of a speaking event to revoke an invitation.
“My point was that there is nothing wrong in principle with a member of a university community asking authorities who have issued an invitation to a speaker to reconsider and rescind the invitation,” Kennedy told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There is nothing in principle that makes the issuing of an invitation to speak a decision beyond reconsideration.”
FIRE’s report cited four successful attempts to deplatform speakers and four attempted disruptions of speaking events since 2020.
“Calling a cancel campaign ‘free speech’ does not alter its fundamentally anti-free speech purpose,” Turley told the DCNF. “Technically, it is a form of speech but it is inimical to the very essence of free speech values in higher education. You are seeking to prevent opposing views from being heard on campus.”
Kennedy, during the debate, also defended former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s comments made at a congressional hearing on antisemitism in December 2023, during which she refused to state whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated university policy. He asserted that Gay’s response was “the correct one.”
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened up an inMSNBC_vestigation in December into antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. Committee Chair Virginia Foxx released a report on the investigation in September, stating “these administrators failed their Jewish students and faculty, they failed to make it clear that antisemitism will not be tolerated, and in this case, Harvard may have failed to fulfill its legal responsibilities to protect students from a hostile environment.”
“Harvard has been the target of a very powerful, a very well organized campaign of vilification” Kennedy said. “The most striking manifestation of it is with this committee headed by congresswoman Virginia Foxx that is attempting to intimidate and harass this university and others. It poses a danger to higher education.”
Harvard did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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