At Harvard Republican Club Event, Steven Crowder Criticizes Danielle Allen for Pulling Out of Debate

University Professor Danielle S. Allen was slated to debate conservative commentator Steven Crowder at a Harvard Republican Club event this spring, but pulled out in early March over disagreements about how the debate would be filmed and distributed.

At a club event at the Boch Center Shubert Theatre in Boston on Monday, where Crowder debated Harvard Law School Professor Randall L. Kennedy, Crowder claimed Allen “cost us a lot of money” when she backed out.

“Hopefully this has been respectful and reasonable enough that you would consider it worthwhile having these conversations,” he said to Kennedy. “Because Danielle Allen didn’t.”

“They’ll expend our resources, agree to it, and then change the terms,” he added. “She demanded the right to retroactively remove consent and have it removed from our channel afterward, along with three days to clear what was meant to be a live stream.”

In a Wednesday interview with The Crimson, Crowder said that Allen had not cost the group money through a financial agreement, but that her withdrawal had wasted “a lot of sunken resources,” including personnel checking the venue and security setup.

In a statement, Allen wrote that the club’s students had asked her to debate Crowder and that she agreed. But as the two sides discussed terms, “it became clear that what was proposed was not a debate with conventional debate structure, but simply my being a guest on Crowder’s show.”

“What they were organizing wasn’t the format I had agreed to, so I pulled out,” she wrote.

Crowder’s executive producer wrote that Allen had been asked to debate in the same format as Kennedy.

Allen wrote that “the filming is a problem” in a February email to Eli R. Solomon ’28, the Harvard Republican Club’s director of speakers, who moderated Monday’s debate.

“I’m up for an intellectual debate in an academic setting,” she wrote. “If Crowder’s team is filming, then they are here for content creation, not intellectual engagement.”

Allen wrote that she could agree to a Harvard film crew recording the event, with footage “both parties would then have access to.” She also noted that filming at Harvard requires permission from the University’s Public Affairs Office.

“In general, I don’t think any of us in the Harvard community should get into the business of supporting people in using Harvard as a stage set for content creation,” she wrote.

In a later email, Allen asked that Crowder’s team send her a media release and a “non-monetization contract” to review, adding that she would likely bring her own videographer.

Under her proposed terms, the full debate would be posted on YouTube within two weeks, and Crowder’s team could not post or distribute the recording without her written approval. She would have five business days to review it, extendable to 15. Even after approving, Allen could object to the footage, and Crowder’s team would have to remove it from its platforms within two business days. Crowder’s team would also be barred from editing her remarks in a way that “materially misrepresents their meaning or context.”

Crowder called the terms Allen’s terms “nowhere within the bounds of reason for a live streamed debate” and said the two sides “had an agreement” before she sent them.

Crowder said his team had tried for years to set up a debate like the one with Kennedy, reaching out to departments and to Harvard directly.

“This is not our first go on this merry-go-round,” he said.

He added that his team reached out broadly to professors in general humanities fields at “somewhere between 10 and 15 schools,” offering a $10,000 donation to a department of the professor’s choosing. Kennedy said his $10,000 donation went to Princeton University, his undergraduate alma mater.

“It was pretty, pretty broad reaching,” he said. “It wasn’t just ‘Hey, one professor.’ We didn’t handpick. We said anyone willing to do it.”

He said the team heard “pretty much no across the board,” except for a “couple who accepted, and then dropped out.”

In April, an event where Crowder was slated to debate history of education professor Jonathan Zimmerman on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus was canceled after producers of Crowder’s show “Louder with Crowder” backed out of a contract. They cited “disagreements with standard university policies,” including livestreaming policies, and “security protocols.”

In a later video, Crowder claimed that Penn was restricting him from livestreaming the event and “demanding” that his team use official security.

Penn’s “open expression” guidelines state that livestreaming an event is not permitted except in limited circumstances where reaching a wide audience is appropriate and approved by University officials.

Harvard holds similar guidelines, though not as stringent, that require any individual who films on Harvard’s campus to receive advance permission, which Allen cited in a preliminary email to a Harvard Republican Club student in February.

On Monday, Crowder tied the Penn cancellation to his dealings with Allen, saying that after those talks his team went to Penn and was told it could not live stream the event.

“I have no idea what they are talking about re Penn,” Allen wrote in a statement.

A spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment.

Crowder visited Boston as part of his “Change My Mind” tour, in which he typically sits at a table on college campuses and invites students to debate him. He promoted Monday’s event on social media as the first time a professor has been featured in the segment.

During the debate, Crowder criticized Harvard’s speech culture, affirmative action, its federal funding, and its past requirement of diversity statements. Kennedy defended the University’s stance against the Trump administration and its use of affirmative action.

Crowder argued that Harvard faculty were an “ideological monolith” and was one of the “worst offenders by all metrics available” of suppressing conservative free speech.

“Have you looked around at the student body at Harvard and academia?” Crowder said. “Have you seen the protests and the screeching and the vandalism and the acts of violence and then look at the polls as it relates to suppression of free speech?”

He also claimed affirmative action practices at the school had harmed the school’s rigor.

“It’s why you have people coming into Harvard without basic arithmetic who can’t do long division,” he said. “All in the name of equity.”

A College spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Crowder’s remarks.

He also said his team had to overcome blockades like filing for individual permits on campus and “work with private groups on campus.” A College spokesperson wrote in a statement that the Harvard Republicans Club “did not attempt” to book an event space on campus through the Dean of Students Office.

The event nearly sold out, according to Crowder’s social media posts, with more than 100 participants from across Harvard and surrounding Boston universities.

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.