Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Friday, November 22, 2002

Washington Post article: "Harvard Mulls Offensive Speech Ban" The Washington Post has an article about a proposed offensive speech code at the law school. Frankly, if you read the article, you'll know as much as I do about this. Apparently part of the offensive speech they're banning is actually telling the students about this. News to me. I can, however, point out an error in the article. It says, "In the meantime, the school is also offering first-year students a new course to help them "manage difficult conversations" and learn how to speak with sensitivity on touchy issues such as race and gender." Well, that's not really true. They experimented by having one or two of the first-year sections (there are seven sections total) go through a two-hour workshop on this. It's not a "course," it wasn't "offered" to anyone, and my section wasn't one of the ones picked, so I have nothing to say about the content. The other thing they left out of the article is that on Monday night there was some sort of task force on diversity open meeting, and a bunch of professors spoke against any kind of speech code (that news courtesy of the Boston Globe -- not like I actually know what's going on here...). Alan Dershowitz apparently said something like "I will not be silenced." Good for you. I don't know what else to say about this. Personally, I haven't heard too much offensive speech here, so I don't know what the big deal is.... You can see this is an issue really close to my heart...