The Snare of Speech

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has always been notoriously hushed about what goes on behind closed doors at their monthly sessions in University Hall. After last Tuesday’s debacle of a meeting, we’re starting to understand why.

The Faculty chose to spend two hours engaged in a meaningless debate over parliamentary minutiae and the free speech resolution of anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory ’82, leaving no time to act on any of the several measures pertaining to the actual governance of the College. In light of important and time-sensitive proposals like a graduate program in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) and reforms to the Q guide on the table, the Faculty’s dithering becomes all the more irresponsible. We encourage the Faculty to stop wasting the time of both its own members and of the students it governs, and to move forward on projects that actually matter.

The debate over Professor Matory’s free speech motion is by its very nature suffused with bad feelings and suspicion of ulterior motives on both sides, and has brought out the worst in both its supporters and detractors. It is likely a good thing that most of the country has not found out that the Faculty spent two hours bickering over whether Harvard ought to explicitly support free speech or not. If the entire charade seems silly enough to those who are familiar with the motion’s political implications, it seems downright ludicrous for those looking in from the outside.

Complicating the matter further was a convoluted knot of parliamentary procedure that left professors at the meeting unsure of what motions they were voting for in the first place. The end result, a pointless miasma of motions and amendments, served nothing except the vanity of those thinking they were arguing over something meaningful. The situation eventually vaporized, as most issues at Harvard tend to, by University President Draw G. Faust agreeing to set up a committee exploring the issue.

If the Faculty enjoys this sort of thing, it might be well-advised to set up a debate club for such exercises in hollow bombast. That way, Faculty meetings could be reserved for the accomplishment of actual business. The proposed graduate program in VES, a critical step in remedying Harvard’s flagging involvement in academic visual studies, will now have to wait until the next meeting to move forward. And with the semester winding down and course evaluation period beginning, the Faculty has also missed the boat on making a strong commitment to undergraduate education by making course evaluations mandatory. These are the sort of real proposals with real impacts on Harvard life that the Faculty should be privileging over petty pseudo-academic word-brawls.

Henry A. Kissinger ’50 once remarked that “academic fights are more brutal than…fights in the real world because the stakes are so low.” The professoriate’s behavior this month has borne his conclusion out in spades. We suggest that the Faculty’s skills might be better employed in actually making material differences in Harvard’s academic life.