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Harvard just can’t stay out of the spotlight.

This time, Dunster House resident dean Gregory K. Davis recently came under fire after the right-wing website Yardreport published screenshots of years-old inflammatory social media posts and called for his removal.

Davis has since expressed regret for any harm his comments may have caused — but, in any case, participation in past political discourse should not disqualify him from continuing to hold his position.

Free speech is a delicate issue — particularly when the individual in question serves in a student support role. In this vein, it is important to have a standard that can be applied to political comments of any stripe. Davis’ posts were extremely left-wing, but a number of them were part of the broader political conversation of the time, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. If a right-leaning dean had criticized BLM on their social media accounts, we wouldn’t immediately call for their resignation without more facts. In neither case should the University employee be fired merely for weighing in on a controversial issue.

That said, a student-facing role becomes much harder to fulfill well if you alienate students. Everyone has a worldview, and while we should be able to shoulder discomfort, students deserve to be able to trust that a Harvard employee will conduct themselves in a neutral manner, regardless of their politics. If University officials have made inflammatory comments in the past they would be prudent to remove them from public pages.

That doesn’t mean that political bias from student support staff is always acceptable just because it is redacted. If there are credible complaints showing how an employee’s conduct has negatively impacted their interactions with students with whom they disagree, they can evidently no longer properly execute their responsibilities. But that isn’t the case here — it would be foolhardy to fire an employee on account of now-harmless past comments dug up by a politically prejudiced website.

Still, this idiosyncratic episode offers broader lessons for Harvard. Institutional neutrality is important. Harvard — and those who claim to speak for it — should not take stances on political issues that do not affect the functioning of the University. But it’s also unreasonable to apply this same standard to all employees: Should we stop professors from making political statements or engaging in public policy debates?

For the sake of Harvard’s intellectual community, University employees should be able to articulate their personal beliefs without fear of retribution.

Free expression is the lifeblood of a university — it would be strange if our commitment to that principle stopped with our deans.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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