Featured News
Top picks by topic.
Newsletter: Join FAIR HA+ to receive newsletters + access to meetups, events, etc; Non-members, subscribe.
Twitter Feed: @fair_harvdalums
A discussion with Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harry Litman and Sarah Isgur on the end of affirmative action and more. In the discussion, HLS professor Jeannie Suk Gerson points out how Roberts’ opinion uses the same rationale as affirmative action supporters. Roberts’ opinion, the “escape value,” says you can “take into account the perspective that someone brings in terms of how race affected their lives and shaped their views or shaped their future... I think that that is the way that often defenders of affirmative action explain why diversity is important.”
Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer calls on elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale to put their money where their mouths are with affirmative action and create real, systemic change— “Instead of making the admissions process shallow, elite colleges should deepen the applicant pool. The simplest, most direct way to do that is for these schools to found and fund schools that educate disadvantaged students.”
Harvard professor Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard co-president, identifies a diversity challenge: “How to provide a quality education [at Harvard] to students whose preparations differ greatly in quality…That is where the real work needs to be done.” FAIR Advisors Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury (AM 82) and Ian Rowe (MBA 93) identify this same issue, however Lewis looks to Harvard for the “real work” instead of what happens before college. Perhaps his most salient point - one that directly impacts free speech, viewpoint diversity, and intellectual curiosity—is about racial stereotyping.
HLS Professor Randall Kennedy argues that “by requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.”
On On March 21st, Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics hosted a panel discussion on the impact of DEI on higher ed. The event, sponsored by the FAS Civil Discourse Initiative, was part of the Civil Disagreements series and Harvard College’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative. Panelists included: Jeannie Suk Gersen, Stacy Hawkins, Amna Khalid, and Ilya Shapiro.
Harvard Professor and Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard member Tyler J. VanderWeele outlines the issue of viewpoint diversity as it relates to the search for truth.
An important piece by an anesthesiologist on California’s mandated implicit biased training in continuing medical education. “The malignant false assumption that Black people are inherently inferior intellectually has been traded in for the malignant false assumption that White people are inherently racist…That is the basic message conveyed by implicit bias training… [and] is harmful both to physicians and patients.”
An anthropology professor pens a letter in the Macalester College newspaper after an Iranian artist’s exhibit is “paused” by the university due to claimed harm. “When people at Macalester are offended by a graphite drawing that depicts a partially nude woman in a niqāb, what is being caused is not pain, but offense. In a free country, no one has the right to be exempt from being offended. Giving offense is a necessary byproduct of the freedom of speech and foundational to the existence of a free society…”
“A fascinating conversation about the disconnect between what people in upper middle class America believe and reality, the power of victimization, and racial dynamics in the US.”
An important piece by Matt Taibbi on free speech, “a horror story that concerns people from all countries.” Taibbi goes beyond typical discussions of censorship to the causes and agents behind our Orwellian times. It is ”the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons… This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis.”
by FAIR Advisor Monica Harris (HLS 91)
Published in late 2022, this important book by HLS alum and FAIR Advisor Monica Harris asks whether America is really as divided as it seems, or whether or our collective reality has been distorted— What if we’re not as different as we think? What if what we’re seeing is just the illusion of division? Harris asks us to “unplug” from the narratives and find the courage to see through the illusion of division. Only then will we solve the most pressing problems we share and create the country we deserve.
“When Race Trumps Merit provides an alternative explanation for…racial disparities…[and] breaks powerful taboos… As long as alleged racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial differences, we will continue tearing down excellence and putting lives, as well as civilizational achievement, at risk.”
Book by Harvard alum Winkfield Twyman, Jr. (JD 86) and Jennifer Richmond; Foreward by FAIR Advisor Erec Smith.. “Two Americans—Winkfield Twyman, Jr. and Jennifer Richmond, a black man and a white woman—rediscovered the art of letter writing and maintained a years-long correspondence about race in the United States…[here] they share…their exchange in full, charting their journey from wary strangers to trusted confidants…Ultimately, they offer an inspirational message of hope and optimism for all—one that does not allow the past to define our present or predetermine our future.”