New Law Requires Talk on Constitution

Harvard will celebrate Constitution Day this afternoon. It has no choice in the matter.

In what several educators say is an unusual affront to academic freedom, a new law signed by President Bush in December requires all schools that receive federal funding to honor the anniversary of the Constitution’s adoption with a lesson on the nation’s founding document.

The University, which received nearly $500 million from the federal government in the 2004 fiscal year, will mark the holiday with a lecture by the preeminent constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe ’62. Tribe said he plans to speak on “the Constitution’s future” under John G. Roberts Jr. ’76, the pending nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Harvard, whose own charter predates the Constitution by 137 years, is taking the new law sitting down, but several other universities have raised strenuous objections to the requirement.

“I’m surprised that the Congress and the president would choose to honor the Constitution by violating it,” Edward Rubin, dean of Vanderbilt Law School, said in a statement released by the university. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of the Constitution than compelling speech about a particular topic at a particular time.”

To meet the law’s conditions, Rubin is hosting a panel at Vanderbilt this week on the constitutionality of Constitution Day. He has invited Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who inserted the law as an amendment to an unrelated spending bill approved by Congress last year.

Byrd, who carries a copy of the Constitution with him at all times, said in a press release, “Without constant study and renewal of our knowledge of the Constitution and its history we are in peril of allowing our freedoms to erode.”

Byrd’s office did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

The Supreme Court has frequently recognized a qualified right to academic freedom among both public and private institutions. In a 1967 decision written by William J. Brennan, the court determined, “Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

No school has yet challenged the new law in court.

The Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787, but because that day fell on a Saturday this year, the U.S. Department of Education decreed that schools could celebrate this week or last. It was unclear how or whether the department would enforce the law, which applies to all schools—public and private, elementary through graduate—so long as they receive funding from the federal government.

Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David P. Driscoll instructed the state’s schools to obey the provision in a perfunctory notice last month.

Colleges and universities have marked the holiday, officially named “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day,” in a variety of ways.

MIT hosted a presentation by several professors on Saturday highlighting “the roots and future reach” of the Constitution. Yale will hold a discussion and public reading of the document on Tuesday.

Tribe’s lecture will be held at noon today in Lowell Lecture Hall. The University is providing a live simulcast of the event on its website.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.