The Right Change on Campus Displays

The FAS got to the right policy by way of the wrong politics.

Last week, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences discreetly reformed its policy interpreting the University’s campus use guidelines. The update now allows Harvard students, faculty, and staff to mount publicly visible signs in private spaces on campus. The amended guidance comes after months of faculty pushback over the FAS insisting that two biology professors take down a Black Lives Matter banner from their windows in the Northwest Science Building last August, citing campus use rules against “self-mounted displays.”

Some 18 faculty members signed on to a memo urging a vote to change the policy. Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra appeared not to want a vote on the issue. Instead, an identical change came in a hushed revision to the FAS campus use guidelines a day after the scheduled faculty meeting.

Opening doors for more free speech makes the campus a stronger intellectual community. Moreover, the FAS’s willingness to walk back its problematic policy sets a good precedent — but in the future, Harvard must learn to act directly on faculty input, instead of initially rejecting their ideas and later doubling back on them.

The policy change itself is good, especially considering Harvard’s suppression of political expression in recent years. In 2024, following the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard, a University working group composed solely of administrators set sweeping rules limiting speech of all kinds, including prohibiting forms of protest as innocuous as chalking.

It may be necessary to mitigate protests when they seriously disrupt campus life, and yet it is equally necessary for Harvard to foster the expression of diverse viewpoints on its campus. The FAS’s change in policy is commendable, as it ostensibly aligns with that mission.

The issue, however, is in process. For whatever diverse perspectives the FAS is now promoting, they’ve yet to hear their own. Faculty have been urging the FAS to change the expression guidelines for months — really, more than a year — so why avoid letting their proposal be heard?

Unfortunately, the FAS’s selective hearing is hardly an isolated incident — two months ago, Professor Jeff W. Lichtman was virtually fired from his role as Dean of Science after holding ground for months over Ph.D. program cuts in the Sciences division. On two occasions last year, Lichtman proposed a cut in next year’s science Ph.D. admissions — first 50 percent, later 70 — that weren’t pursued by Dean Hoekstra. Yet in November she walked back her much higher alternatives, instead opting for Lichtman’s earlier 50 percent proposal, citing faculty responses as having influenced her decision.

These episodes show the value of receiving faculty input on campus issues. In both cases, faculty were shut down before their ideas were implemented. More worrisome is the prospect of all of the faculty ideas that never came to fruition because Harvard hasn’t listened — or because administrators have intimidated them out of sharing their perspective to begin with.

In the future, Harvard can create an environment more conducive to both free speech and institutional efficiency by listening to the input of its educators. After all, the FAS clearly likes what the faculty has to offer.

An empowered faculty senate could help to remedy these inefficiencies by giving Harvard’s instructors a formal space in which to deliberate on campus policy in a streamlined and fair manner.

While the channels of communication used to implement vital campus changes could clearly use some fine-tuning, it is encouraging to see the FAS walk back a harmful policy rather than digging its heels in further. The University’s signage policies hinder free speech on campus — at the very least, the FAS took action, a promising sign for campus discourse.

Looking forward, if Harvard wants to support free speech on campus, it ought to listen to faculty the first time around.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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