Harvard Law to ban “offensive language,” Emmett Hogan surrenders

From the Boston Globe (via alert reader Philip Mone ’02):

A Harvard Law School committee announced plans yesterday to draft a speech code that would ban harassing, offensive language from the classroom, a highly unusual step for a law school and a move that runs counter to a national trend against interfering with campus speech.

…

Harvard’s Black Law Students Association and some faculty have been pressing since last spring for a speech code that would punish offending students and professors. The law school community was ruptured at that time by a series of racial incidents – most notably one student’s use of the word ”nig” in an online course notebook, a professor’s defense of that student, and another professor’s comment that feminism, Marxism, and black studies have ”contributed nothing” to tort law.

Yet while law school officials have taken steps to soothe campus tensions since then, their primary action – forming the Committee on Healthy Diversity, which said it plans to draft the proposed speech code – has created a new wave of concern.

Does anyone else think it’s strange that “Healthy Diversity” apparently doesn’t include ideological diversity?

Bostonian Jay Fitzgerald: “Larry Summers needs to give another of his thunderbolt speeches, this time on free speech.”