Harvard is the Cosmos
By 
The Times has now done five stories about the surpassingly trivial question of who will be the RA of Winthrop House:
This is the fifth NYT piece (3 opinion, 2 news) about who runs a Harvard dorm. Plus three NYT news stories so far on the Oberlin bakery.— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 29, 2019
For context, recall that the same paper thought that the President of the United States being credibly accused with corroboration of sexual assault by a prominent journalist was a minor book publishing story, and a major party candidate reiterating his belief that five innocent African-American men should be executed was not news at all.
We’ve been through this, but it is also worth emphasizing that there is no material issue of academic freedom here — while maintaining one of the most prestigious and well-compensated tenured academic positions in the world Sullivan remains free to act as paid counsel for anyone he wants, including wealthy serial sexual abusers with a history of paying people to harass and intimidate victims. Sullivan losing his dorm master side gig will not affect the ability of anyone to get legal counsel at all; rich people will always have plenty of lawyers to choose from and Sullivan being allowed to remain an RA would not get a single poor person better legal representation.
But, of course, this isn’t about the right to counsel at all:
It would be interesting to count the number of op-eds dedicated to this controversy versus the number of op-eds dedicated to systematic underfunding of public defender operations. https://t.co/ZTfxpzpuCJ— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 25, 2019
What this is really about is that 1)institutions in which Ivy Leaguers are overrepresented massively overestimate the broader importance of what happens at Ivy League universities, and 2)elite journalists are particularly prone to embrace the skewed “free speech” proprieties of the Campus PC panic, which in practice are that relatively powerful people should be able to say anything they want with no consequences or pushback and relatively less powerful people should shut up.
And, of course, the worst part is that all these stories are taking oxygen away from one of the few stories that’s more important, the status of Alan Dershowitz’s dinner party invitations.
…more about this imminently but here’s an example of a genuine, grave threat to academic freedom that is getting a fraction of the attention:
The near-silence thus far from academic Twitter is baffling. The U of Alaska is on the verge of declaring financial exigency and cutting 1300 faculty and staff positions within weeks. An exigency event of this scale would be unprecedented for a state university system. https://t.co/1ab3B69m5Q— David Noon (@davenoon1970) June 30, 2019