Archive | Harvard E-Mail Controversy

As I said in my first post on the Harvard e-mail controversy, I believe we should be open to the possibility of genetic racial differences in intelligence, just as we should be open to a wide range of other scientific possibilities. I have not simply been arguing that people should have a First Amendment argument […]

That’s an oversimplification, of course, of the three arguments to which I was responding — with different degrees of disagreement — in my most recent posts (one, two, three) on the Harvard E-Mail Controversy. But is it really that much of an oversimplification? Some people have been a bit puzzled about why I’ve spent so […]

One refrain I saw in some of the comments on the Harvard e-mail matter (and heard in a personal conversation) is that we shouldn’t much worry about the reaction to the e-mail’s author, because she wasn’t really a scientist. If scientists, or others with real scientific knowledge, were deterred from expressing their views, the argument […]

One recurring theme in the comments about the Harvard e-mail controversy is that one needs to be extra cautious about anything one writes in an e-mail. Some of the commenters (and some people I’ve talked to) go further, and suggest that the author of the controversial e-mail should get no sympathy but should instead be […]

I much appreciated Orin’s post about the value of caution, judgment, and tact in dealing with certain questions. These qualities surely are essential in such discussions — not just about race, but also about religion, sex, sexual orientation, and a wide range of other things. And they are of course valuable, though not as necessary, […]

Like Eugene, I received an e-mail recently from a student who will be a 1L at Harvard Law School this fall. Like the student who e-mailed Eugene, this student is somewhat worried about the environment he’ll find when he enrolls. He writes: I’m an incoming student at Harvard Law next year. And even though I’m […]

Here’s a message that I got in response to the earlier posts on the Harvard e-mail controversy. I do not know the author personally, but I thought it was worth passing along; I certainly saw no cues suggesting that it was insincere or otherwise not credible: I wish I were a tenured professor, and was […]

To my mind, the most troubling aspect of the Harvard e-mail controversy is how many people feel comfortable publicly judging someone based on a single forwarded private e-mail. I can see judging a person based on a law review article they wrote, or an op-ed they penned, or public speech they made. All of these […]

I remember very little about my childhood in the Soviet Union; I was only seven when I left. But one memory I have is being on a bus with one of my parents, and asking something about a conversation we had had at home, in which Stalin and possibly Lenin were mentioned as examples of […]

I’ve blogged a good deal so far about why I disapprove of the condemnation of the student who e-mailed a couple of friends saying that she “absolutely do[es] not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.” But let me turn to a more practical problem with […]

I blogged earlier about the Harvard law student’s e-mail — sent to a couple of friends, but later made public by one of the recipients — about being open to the possibility of racial differences in intelligence. Here, let me briefly talk about the response from the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Much has been said in the last two days about a Harvard law student’s e-mail to a couple of other students — an e-mail that was some months later apparently widely forwarded by one of the recipients (without the sender’s permission). The e-mail led to much criticism of the sender, coverage in Above The Law, […]