Indian Economist Subramanian Swany

With thanks to Judy B. 

I received  from a friend in Connecticut  an article that appeared in today’s edition of Inside Higher Education i. It confirmed that some of the faculty and students at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts are self-appointed monitors supporting the OIC agenda of punishing blasphemy.  That translates to this policy: any criticism of Islam may be grounds for dismissal.

The Inside High Education article, “Over the Line: Harvard kills courses by controversial summer school instructor” is indicative of how dhimmified the groves of academia at elite American universities can be when the subject of Islam comes up.  In Prof. Subramanian Swamy’s case it is because he has nationalistic views on how to deal with Muslims in his native India.   The Harvard Faculty, while professing support for freedom of speech, doesn’t think it applies in the Swamy case, because he is “destructively” attacking another of India’s great faiths, Islam.  This despite the fact that the Economics faculty at Harvard thought him eminently qualified to teach his courses. It was left to the Harvard faculty Indian religious expert to press for a faculty vote to cancel Swamy’s summer school courses.

Note these aspects of the controversy as reported in the Inside Higher Education article:

In an unusual move, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted this week to eliminate two summer school courses in economics because of anti-Muslim statements the instructor made in an op-ed published in India.

When word about the op-ed spread in July, some Harvard students demanded that Subramanian Swamy be fired. At the time, Harvard pledged to look into the situation, but noted 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." But faculty members this week cited the nature of his statements as justifying the move to kill his courses rather than permit him to return to Cambridge.

The op-ed ran in Daily News & Analysis (and while that newspaper no longer has the piece online, it can be read here). The piece, a response to a bombing by Muslim terrorists in Mumbai, said that India could wipe out terrorism by taking certain steps, such as declaring India a Hindu state where "non-Hindus can vote only if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus," or demolishing mosques, or banning conversion from Hinduism to any other faith. Swamy was once an economics professor at Harvard, but he returned to his home in India, where is an outspoken nationalistic politician. But he has come back to Harvard each year to teach in the summer school.

        [. . .]

An account of the meeting in Harvard Magazine said that the economics department chair, John Y. Campbell, told the faculty that his economics colleagues considered Swamy to be "competent" to teach the courses, and that none of the students who took his courses last summer had complained about him. The only student who mentioned the op-ed in a class evaluation rated the course favorably. The department had "expressed its view that it would not take a collective position on academic freedom or on matters of speech, hate speech, or Harvard’s reputation -- issues on which there were a wide range of views, in this case, within the department," Campbell was quoted as saying.

The proposal that eventually carried -- to decline to authorize Swamy's courses -- was made by Diana L. Eck, a scholar of India's religions. According to the Harvard Magazine account, she stressed that this was much more than an issue of a professor having some controversial views. She called Swamy's views "destructive" and said that his ideas involved limiting the human rights of others and denying freedom of religion. In light of the nature of his comments, she also wondered why his courses hadn't been "quietly dropped," rather than included in the proposed offerings for the coming summer.

She also quoted from a letter she and other Harvard faculty members sent to President Drew Faust last summer. The letter said in part: "Freedom of expression is an essential principle in an academic community, one that we fully support. Notwithstanding our commitment to the robust exchange of ideas, Swamy’s op-ed clearly crosses the line into incitement by demonizing an entire religious community, demanding their disenfranchisement, and calling for violence against their places of worship. Indeed, India’s National Commission for Minorities has filed criminal charges against Swamy, whose incendiary speech carries the threat of communal violence. When Harvard extends appointments to public figures, it behooves us to consider whether the reputation of the university benefits from the association. In this case, Swamy's well-known reputation as an ideologue of the Hindu Right who publicly advocates violence against religious minorities undermines Harvard’s own commitment to pluralism and civic equality."

At least one American group, the Philadelphia-based Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has risen to Prof. Swamy’s defense. 

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has spoken out against Harvard's taking any action against Swamy on the basis of his op-ed. The organization's blog noted that Swamy's op-ed calls for radical social change in India, but FIRE noted that American principles of free expression extend to calls for radical social change. As an example, it cited the legal right for people to call for the United States to become a communist country.

"We tolerate the widest possible range of political, social, cultural, and religious views because, for one thing, we trust in the marketplace of ideas to eventually sort it all out," the blog post said.

Unfortunately at Harvard, that marketplace of ideas has been censored by apologists for Islam, such as the notorious Professor Diane Eck.  . In effect, she and others like her are trespassing traditional faculty department control over curricula and appointment of scholars to teach based on their credentials and evaluations by those in the relevant field. Diana Eck has a long history of making "pluralism" her project, but the possibilty that some in that pluralist stew might have some direct experience of Islam, or come from lands where Islam did great damage (as in india, if one accepts Naipaul's interpretation of India as a "wounded civilization"), and should be allowed to express those views, apparently escape her. Freedom of speech and of thought -- unless that thought, and that speech, agree with what Diana Eck deems appropriate, is not part of her pantheon of values.