Nick Will, editor of The Harbus, the student newspaper of the Harvard Business School, now resigned after (he claims) University officials threatened to hold him personally responsible for any “questionable” content which appears in the paper.
The kerfuffle has been going on for a few days, well covered by InstaGuy and the Volokh Illuminati. But now it appears to have passed the strong-words stage and entered into a new phase of actual consequences.
It goes without saying that the University’s behavior — assuming the editor’s allegations are accurate — is thuggish in the extreme here. It’s a damned shame Will has chosen to resign rather than stand and fight, although I can’t blame him. I would certainly think that there would be plenty of lawyers willing to aide him in any defense that would be required. (A Reynolds-Volokh Dream Team? )
This particular controversy strikes near and dear to my heart, as in a former life I too was a reporter and erstwhile editor at an Ivy daily. And indeed, we managed to piss off our administration quite a bit once by publishing an extremely controversial political “advertisement”.
Happily, though, they respected the paper’s independence, and confined their criticism to just that — criticism. (Matter of fact, they took out a half-page ad in the paper itself denouncing us. That was a nice touch, I had to admit). But anyway, it was an interesting few weeks — we pissed off more than a few students and alumni as well — I can recall actual protests with people shouting about how evil we were and everything. (I was there, of course, skulking in the crowd of demonstrators — along with basically every other staffer on the paper. You couldn’t throw a rock in the crowd without hitting an editor who couldn’t resist showing up to see themself being shouted about.)
At any rate, I wish Mr. Will good luck, and hope perhaps he’ll reconsider his decision. But for now, especially if you’re a Harvard alum, drop Larry Summers a line and tell him to smack some heads around there and get folks to quit being idiots.
PS – No, I haven’t decided if I’ll tell you what the actual advertisement was, but I will tell you this: my support of our decision to publish it annoyed Meryl quite a bit at the time, and I’ll bet she still disapproves…