Harvey Silverglate disapproves of the Obama campaign's reaction to the satirical New Yorker cover depicting Obama and his wife, Michelle. A campaign spokesman called the cartoon "tasteless and offensive"; Silverglate, LL.B. ’67, attributes that reaction to an overblown political correctness that he traces to Obama's time at Harvard Law School (HLS).
Writing in last week's Boston Phoenix, Silverglate deems the cartoon "brilliant." For Obama not to agree with that assessment, he writes, reflects the prevailing attitude at HLS during the time Obama attended (he earned a J.D. degree in 1991):
By that time, the strictures of political correctness had seeped into all levels of American higher education and had utterly destroyed the sense of humor of so many college and university students. At the very least, this atmosphere stifled them from admitting (to anyone but their friends) that they even got a joke involving matters of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any other hot-button issue...
Silverglate, who has taught at Harvard Law School, recounts incidents, at Harvard and elsewhere, in which administrators acted to stifle student-produced parodies that some found offensive (and in some cases punished the parodies' creators). And he quotes some colorful case law: the decision that protects parodies, he writes, came from Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1988. The court exonerated Hustler magazine in a suit brought by the Reverend Jerry Falwell over the magazine's publication of a fake liquor ad that suggested Falwell had lost his virginity to his own mother.
"Racist and sexist language—so-called hate speech—may not be pleasant, but it is nonetheless legally protected in public places governed by the Bill of Rights," Silverglate writes.
Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, Ph.D. ’69, offered a more general treatment of the subject of free speech on university campuses in their book The Shadow University; Harvard Magazine published an excerpt in the November-December 1998 issue.
