Forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Harvard Faculty 1, Free Speech 0 -- Charlotte Allen. Two concepts of
freedom of speech -- Harvard Law Review
Friday, January 6, 2012
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2012/01/harvard-faculty-1-free-speech-0.html
6.1.12
Harvard Faculty 1, Free Speech 0 - Charlotte Allen
December 10, 2011
Harvard Faculty 1, Free Speech 0
By Charlotte Allen
[image: Subramanian Swamy .jpg]
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has done it again
http://thefire.org/article/13921.html
This is the group that effectively drove former Harvard president
Lawrence Summers out of office over a 2005 remark of his about
possible differences between the sexes that didn't sit well with
hard-line feminists on the Harvard faculty. The FAS voted its "lack
of confidence" in Summers's leadership, and he tendered his
resignation in 2006. Last week the FAS maneuvered another forced
departure on political grounds. It voted toeliminate two Harvard
Summer School courses
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/08/harvard-kills-courses-controversial-summer-school-instructor
taught by Subramanian Swamy, a former economics professor at Harvard
who now lives in India but who has regularly traveled to Cambridge to
teach in the university's summer school.
The reason? An anti-Muslim op-ed article
http://thefire.org/public/pdfs/6e0cda48154d74f6cf97b0f73d058de1.pdf?direct
that Swamy wrote for an Indian newspaper three days after the July 13
bombings by Muslim terrorists that killed at least 21 people in
Mumbai. Harvard has a set of guidelines, adopted by the FAS in 1990
http://thefire.org/spotlight/codes/738.html
, that are supposed to protect the freedom of speech of the
university's students and faculty members. But the FAS decided that
Swamy's op-ed, which included a call to get rid of more than 300
Indian mosques, "crosses the line by demonizing an entire religious
community and calling for violence against their sacred places," in
the words of Harvard Comparative Religion Professor Diana L. Eck, who
proposed the amendment excluding Swamy's courses at the Dec. 6 FAS
meeting.
Under Harvard's governance system a faculty vote
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/7/faculty-final-meeting/
on curriculum offerings is final and does not require the approval of
Harvard's administration. Eck's amendment, carving out an exception
to an otherwise routine approval of the summer school curriculum, and
passed by a reportedly overwhelming faculty vote (FAS meetings are
closed to the public), neatly bypasses Harvard President Drew Gilpin
Faust and other top Harvard officials who have stood by Swamy up
until now. In September a petition spearheaded by Eck and bearing at
least 457 signatures, 68 of them from Harvard undergraduates, called
on Harvard to "repudiate Swamy's remarks and terminate his
association with the University." The university issued a statement
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/39449#CurDomainURL%23/blog.cfm
declaring that it is "central to the mission of a university to
protect free speech, including that of Dr. Swamy and of those who
disagree with him." The statement continued: "We are ultimately
stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most
basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas." Harvard's
economics professors voiced no objection to Swamy's continued
presence on the faculty of the summer school, where the two courses
he was to teach covered elementary economics and the economics of the
Indian subcontinent. No students had complained about political bias
in Swamy's classrooms.
An Op-Ed That Would Not Allow All Hindus to Convert
Nonetheless, even the most committed free-speech advocates would
likely find Swamy's op-ed, published in India's Daily News and
Analysis, disturbing to say the least. It is a call for India to
rename itself "Hindustan." In Swamy's blueprint not only would
hundreds of mosques be closed, but non-Hindus would be stripped of
their voting rights unless they acknowledged "that their ancestors
were Hindus," as Swamy wrote. Those who refused, as well as "those
foreigners who become Indian citizens," could remain in India, but
without the right either to vote or to hold elective office. Swamy's
op-ed also argued that India "[e]nact a national law prohibiting
conversion from Hinduism to any other religion," and that non-Hindus
who "re-convert" to Hinduism be required to belong to a Hindu caste.
Swamy's outrage at Islamic terrorists was understandable. The July 13
bombings had been preceded by another series of Muslim-linked
bombings in Mumbai
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/jul/13/mumbai-blasts
in 2008 that had left 173 people dead. Muslims had conquered and
ruled large sections of India beginning in the twelfth century, and
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the Muslim Mughul empire
covered most of the subcontinent. The 300 mosques that Swamy slated
for destruction in his op-ed were apparently built on the sites of
Hindu temples destroyed by Muslims during their long reign over
India. Although the overwhelming majority of today's Indians practice
Hinduism, Muslims have made significant demographic inroads during
recent decades, at Hinduism's expense. In 1961 about 83 percent of
India's population was Hindu, compared with 80 percent right now.
Islam's share of India's population has grown from 11 percent to more
than 13 percent during the same period, thanks to high birthrates and
illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh. India shares a
border with Pakistan, refuge of the slain Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden. Although technically a U.S. ally, Pakistan is currently in
peace negotiations with the terrorist Taliban. With militancy on the
rise among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, it is not surprising that
India's Hindus fear becoming the targets of escalating violence in
the future. In his op-ed Swami wrote: "Islamic terrorism is India's
number one problem of national security."
Still, the "Hindustan" that Swamy envisioned in his op-ed is
essentially a Hindu mirror image of the Muslim Brotherhood's
blueprint to replace secular-democratic societies in Muslim countries
with an all-Islamic societies to be governed by the Koran and sharia
law. Radical Hindu nationalism is now a major force in Indian
political life. A Hindu-nationalist political party, Bharatiya
Janata, has swiftly grown to become the second-largest in India.
(Swamy is president of a different party, Janata, from which
Bharatiya Janata split off in 1981). Some Indian states already
forbid conversions from Hinduism. Hindu-nationalist mobs have bashed
mosques and killed hundreds of Muslims. They have also targeted
India's 24 million Christians, since Hindu nationalists regard
Christianity as a foreign colonialist import--even though some of
India's Christian communities date back to Christianity's earliest
centuries. There have been murders of Christian missionaries,
burnings of churches and Christian-owned stores, and waves of anti-
Christian violence in 2007 and 2008 that included an attack on Mother
Teresa's religious order, the Missionaries of Charity. India's 17
million Sikhs have also been sporadic targets of Hindu-nationalist
bloodletting.
Despite Swamy's strong support for the Hindu-nationalist agenda, his
July 16 op-ed did not endorse attacks against non-Hindus or their
places of worship, Diana Eck's reference to inciting "violence" at
the Harvard FAS meeting notwithstanding. Nor did Swamy call for
future violence against Muslims by India's Hindus. His op-ed was
instead a call for radical political changes in India to be brought
about by democratic processes, in which mosque removal would be
carried out by the government. Those contemplated political changes
might be controversial (as they were, even in India) and repugnant to
those who believe in religious freedom, but Swamy had as much right
to make them as the communists who have joined forces with the Occupy
movement in America to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.
One might hope that India never turns into "Hindustan," while
refraining from penalizing a Harvard professor for hoping that it
will, in a newspaper opinion piece
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/12/occupy-harvard-subramanian-swamy-
teaching-debated
published thousands of miles away from his Cambridge classroom in the
aftermath of a series of fatal bombings.
No Censorship of Obnoxious Views
It was for this reason that Faust and other top Harvard
administrators apparently supported Swamy's right
http://thefire.org/article/13581.html
to continue teaching at Harvard after the initial effort in July to
have him removed. They might have been spurred to steadfastness by a
July 27 letter to Faust from Adam Kissel, a 1994 Harvard graduate and
vice president of programs at the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education (FIRE). Harvard FAS had written, "We assume that the long-
term benefits to our community will outweigh the short-term
unpleasant effects of sometimes-noxious views. Because we are a
community united by a commitment to rational processes, we do not
permit censorship of noxious views."
But that was the Harvard administration, and Harvard's FAS seems to
have a way, as it did with Lawrence Summers's presidency in 2005, of
having the last word. There was, as might be expected, an element of
selectivity in the FAS's righteous indignation. Diana Eck's remarks
focused entirely on the "demonization" of India's Muslims, while
pointedly ignoring the consequences for India's Christians under
Swamy's blueprint -- even though Swamy's op-ed had included a
disparaging reference to India's Christian president, Sonia Gandhi,
as "semi-literate." Muslims are a fashionable victim group in today's
academia, while Christians are not. Contrast the FAS's harsh
treatment of Swamy to the reluctance of faculty and administrators at
the University of Colorado-Boulder to take any action against former
ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill for blaming the U.S. for the
9/11 Muslim terrorist massacre, and for calling the thousands of 9/11
victims who worked at the World Trade Center towers "little
Eichmanns." Churchill was fired from the university in 2006--but for
scholarly plagiarism (he subsequently sued the university, and his
appeal is pending before the Colorado Supreme Court).
Regarding the Swamy matter, it is tempting to say, "A plague on both
your houses," and focus sympathy on a more appealing victim of an
ideological witch hunt. But one must remember that Swamy was
effectively fired from Harvard because some people didn't like
something he said outside his classroom -- and that ought to chill
the bones of anyone who regards freedom of expression as an important
academic value. *
**One quote of Charlotte Allen's article was misattributed: "Kissel
had written, 'We assume that the long-term benefits to our community
will outweigh the short-term unpleasant effects of sometimes-noxious
views. Because we are a community united by a commitment to rational
processes, we do not permit censorship of noxious views.'" Those were
the words of the Harvard FAS, not Adam Kissel." The mistake has been
corrected. --Ed*
COMMENTS (2)
As I point out in my blog (link below) on this subject, advocates of
censorship generally proclaim their dedication to freedom of speech,
as long as the speech doesn't "go too far." But beyond the usual
problems of academic censorship is the additional question of whether
the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as an institution, should
be taking an official position on what is appropriate or
inappropriate for Indian citizens to write about Indian political and
social issues in a newspaper in India.
http://cantheseboneslive.blogspot.com/
Posted by Carl Bankston
http://cantheseboneslive.blogspot.com/
December 12, 2011 3:44 PM
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/Harvard_Faculty_1_Free_Speech_0.html#comment-766878
This is the same group that drove president Lawrence Summers out of
office.
They are oppressive dictators who do not value freedoms. They try and
implement a world where we can only say what they want to allow us to
say. Luckily the internet at present prevents totalitarian oppression
from such traitors, but it may only be a matter of time before the
internet becomes controlled entirely as they already tried to shut
down websites that reveal unpalatable truths about Islam. I am
worried for our country if good people are being educated by this
liberal university. The sad thing is there are others on this campus
who think like Diana Eck, Bose & Company. That is very scary.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/Harvard_Faculty_1_Free_Speech_0.html
6.1.12
Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech - Harvard Law Review
Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech
COMMENT BY KATHLEEN M. SULLIVAN
By holding that corporations may make independent expenditures from
their general treasuries advocating the election or defeat of
political candidates, Citizens United v. FEC unleashed a torrent of
popular criticism, a pointed attack by the President in the State of
the Union address, a flurry of proposed corrective legislation in
Congress, and various calls to overturn the decision by
constitutional amendment. Political uproar over a 5–4 Supreme Court
decision upholding a controversial free speech right is not new; the
Court's two 5–4 decisions upholding a right to engage in symbolic
flag burning, for example, elicited widespread public condemnation
and efforts in Congress to overturn the Court by statute and by
constitutional amendment. But Citizens United surely marks the first
time a controversial victory for free speech rights emanated from a
majority of Justices conventionally viewed as conservative, over the
dissent of four Justices conventionally viewed as liberal, with
virtually all political criticism arising from the political left.
Does Citizens United mark a reversal in the political valence of free
speech? Have liberals grown weary of First Amendment values they once
celebrated? Have conservatives flip-flopped and now become free
speech devotees? This Comment argues that support for First Amendment
values in fact cuts across conventional political allegiances, and
that both sides in Citizens United are committed to free speech, but
to two very different visions of free speech. Where the two visions
align, lopsided victories for free speech claims are still possible.
For example, last Term in United States v. Stevens, the Court voted
8–1 to invalidate the criminal conviction of a purveyor of dogfight
videos, reasoning that a federal criminal ban on depictions of animal
cruelty was overbroad. But where the two visions diverge, divisions
like that in Citizens United become sharp.
In the first vision, discussed in Part I, free speech rights serve an
overarching interest in political equality. Free speech as equality
embraces first an antidiscrimination principle: in upholding the
speech rights of anarchists, syndicalists, communists, civil rights
marchers, Maoist flag burners, and other marginal, dissident, or
unorthodox speakers, the Court protects members of ideological
minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority's animus
or selective indifference. A vision of free speech as serving an
interest in political equality also endorses a kind of affirmative
action for marginal speech in the form of access to government
subsidies without speech-restrictive strings attached. By
invalidating conditions on speakers' use of public land, facilities,
and funds, a long line of speech cases in the free-speech-as-equality
tradition ensures public subvention of speech expressing "the poorly
financed causes of little people." On the equality-based view of free
speech, it follows that the well-financed causes of big people (or
big corporations) do not merit special judicial protection from
political regulation. And because, in this view, the value of
equality is prior to the value of speech, politically disadvantaged
speech prevails over regulation but regulation promoting political
equality prevails over speech.
The second vision of free speech, by contrast, sees free speech as
serving the interest of political liberty. On this view, discussed in
Part II, the First Amendment is a negative check on government
tyranny, and treats with skepticism all government efforts at speech
suppression that might skew the private ordering of ideas. And on
this view, members of the public are trusted to make their own
individual evaluations of speech, and government is forbidden to
intervene for paternalistic or redistributive reasons.
Government intervention might be warranted to correct certain
allocative inefficiencies in the way that speech transactions take
place, but otherwise, ideas are best left to a freely competitive
ideological market.
The outcome of Citizens United is best explained as representing a
triumph of the libertarian over the egalitarian vision of free
speech. Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court, joined by Chief
Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, articulates a
robust vision of free speech as serving political liberty; the
dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg,
Breyer, and Sotomayor, sets forth in depth the countervailing
egalitarian view. Neither vision, however, entirely eclipses the
other in Citizens United; each of the principal opinions pays lip
service to the other by invoking the other's theory in its own cause.
And, as Part III illustrates, neither side appears to have fully
thought through how its position in Citizens United fits with the
broader views its members have expressed about First Amendment rights
in other contexts, causing seeming inconsistencies with positions
taken in other First Amendment cases last Term. The upshot is that
each vision retains vitality for use in other First Amendment
contexts.
The tension between these two competing visions -- of free speech as
serving equality and of free speech as serving liberty -- is
illuminated by analysis of four possible political reforms that might
be considered in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision:
first, invalidating limits on political contributions directly to
candidates; second, allowing independent electoral expenditures by
nonprofit but not for-profit corporations; third, increasing
disclosure and disclaimer requirements for corporations making
expenditures in connection with political campaigns; and fourth,
conditioning receipt of various government benefits to corporations
on their limiting political campaign expenditures. The first seems
initially attractive to libertarians but not egalitarians; the second
to egalitarians but not libertarians; the third to both libertarians
and egalitarians; and the fourth to libertarians but not
egalitarians. As addressed in Part IV, however, a closer look at each
alternative reveals significant complexities.
The best view of freedom of speech would combine the free-speech-as-
liberty perspective with the egalitarian view's skepticism toward
speech-restrictive conditions on government benefits. Under such a
capacious approach, the first and third reforms are preferable to the
second and fourth, and any new regulation of political money in the
wake of Citizens United should abandon source and amount limits or
increase disclosure requirements, not distinguish among political
speakers or make speech restrictions a price of government largesse.
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/images/hlr_logo.gif
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2012/01/two-concepts-of-freedom-of-speech.html
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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About the terrorist Goon Squad:
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As everyone knows, a goon is a bully or thug who terrorizes or tries
to do away with opposition.
"Myself, Mallu. Yourself?" (V. Bhattathiri) <
KalluM...@gmail.com>
tries his best to be a bully -- telling others what and when to post,
where to post and where not to post, deliberately publishing lies
about others, stalking and abusing them with hate speech -- but fails
miserably. He is really stressed out, and like his lap dog Prem
Thomas (who currently posts as "P. Rajah", and issues *death threats*
to people), is priming himself for conditions such as stroke and
heart disease.
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