“On a panel purporting to explore whether the law school was in fact promoting a singular point of view, five of the six panelists promoted the same view.” Brian Timmons, an Obama classmate who had been the managing editor of the Harvard Journal on Law and Public Policy.
At the height of early-1990s conservative backlash over political correctness and “speech codes” on U.S. college campuses, Barack Obama participated in a panel event geared toward denying that restrictions on free expression were problematic, or happening at all.
The 1991 Harvard Law School yearbook quoted the future President of the United States virtually shrugging his shoulders at the thought that non-liberal white students might take offense at restrictions on speech that minority students found objectionable. “I don’t see a lot of conservatives getting upset if minorities feel silenced,” Obama said, flipping the argument around.
In addition to Obama, who was by then the former Harvard Law Review editor, the panel included several prominent Harvard law professors; the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal director; Justice Stephen Breyer, who then presided over the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; and Brian Timmons, an Obama classmate who had been the managing editor of the Harvard Journal on Law and Public Policy, which describes itself as “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.”
Some on the panel mocked the idea of political correctness stymieing free speech. “More voices are being heard on campuses,” said panelist Benjamin Schatz of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights. “People who don’t like hearing them are complaining about political correctness.”
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