I understand that many of these initiatives will appear controversial. This is more a reflection of the sorry state of our campuses today than it is of the radical nature of my proposals. If the faculty wants to fight me, they will have to do so openly and on the merits. Since I’ve been given the awesome responsibility of leading one of the nation’s premier educational institutions, I plan to do so with a transparent agenda where I will either be supported or defeated on the merits. This is a national, not a local, battle. My tenure and success as this university’s president should not turn on whether my expressing a challenging point of view causes a tenured scientist to call for her smelling salts — which went out of fashion with the arrival of Darwin.
Harvey Silverglate, a frequent contributor to "Freedom Watch", is co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses and co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
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On the Web:
Harvard University: http://www.harvard.edu/
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE): http://www.thefire.org/
E-mail the author:
Harvey Silverglate: has@harveysilverglate.com
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