On Tuesday, Harvard officials announced that the university would adopt a formal stance of ideological neutrality on political events and other controversial issues. The decision comes after months of tumultuous campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas.

Earlier this month, a faculty-led working group published a report that strongly recommended adopting a neutral stance on topics that do not directly concern the university itself.

"The university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university's central activities. They must defend the university's autonomy and academic freedom when threatened," the report stated. "The university and its leaders should not, however, issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university's core function."

The report hinted at what is likely the prevailing reason behind Harvard's push toward neutrality—the immense pressure faced by school officials to weigh in on Hamas' October 7 attack against Israel, and the ongoing war in Gaza. The report noted how, if officials make statements about one topic unrelated to the university's core function, the school opens itself up to demands it comment on every other controversy.

"If the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day," said the report. "This is the reality of contemporary public life in an era of social media and political polarization."

Survey results released last week by The Harvard Crimson indicate widespread faculty support for neutrality. The survey found that more than 70 percent of Arts and Sciences faculty supported a shift to formal neutrality and more than half reported feeling "somewhat negatively" or "negatively" about "the current state of academic freedom at Harvard"

The announcement was met with widespread praise from free expression advocates.

"For better or worse, what Harvard does, others follow," Angel Eduardo, senior writer and editor at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote on Tuesday. "The principles outlined in the Institutional Voice Working Group's report don't just bode well for Harvard's future on free speech and academic freedom—they may also signal a significant sea change in colleges across the country."

On Wednesday, Syracuse University also announced that it would adopt the recommendations of a similar working group and take an official neutral stance.

"We embrace the guiding principle that the remedy for speech that some may find hurtful, offensive, or even hateful is not the disruption, obstruction, or suppression of the free speech of others, but rather more speech," a statement from the university reads. "Except under the most extraordinary circumstances and with the sole purpose of protecting its mission of discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge, the University does not make institutional statements or pronouncements on current controversies."

The post Harvard Announces It Will Stop Releasing Political Statements appeared first on Reason.com.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICH

HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.

Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE

ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN

Enjoy today’s videos!

In this video, we present Ringbot, a novel leg-wheel transformer robot incorporating a monocycle mechanism with legs. Ringbot aims to provide versatile mobility by replacing the driver and driving components of a conventional monocycle vehicle with legs mounted on compact driving modules inside the wheel.

[ Paper ] via [ KIMLAB ]

Making money with robots has always been a struggle, but I think ALOHA 2 has figured it out.

Seriously, though, that is some impressive manipulation capability. I don’t know what that freakish panda thing is, but getting a contact lens from the package onto its bizarre eyeball was some wild dexterity.

[ ALOHA 2 ]

Highlights from testing our new arms built by Boardwalk Robotics. Installed in October of 2023, these new arms are not just for boxing and provide much greater speed and power. This matches the mobility and manipulation goals we have for Nadia!

The least dramatic but possibly most important bit of that video is when Nadia uses her arms to help her balance against a wall, which is one of those things that humans do all the time without thinking about it. And we always appreciate being shown things that don’t go perfectly alongside things that do. The bit at the end there was Nadia not quite managing to do lateral arm raises. I can relate; that’s my reaction when I lift weights, too.

[ IHMC ]

Thanks, Robert!

The recent progress in commercial humanoids is just exhausting.

[ Unitree ]

We present an avatar system designed to facilitate the embodiment of humanoid robots by human operators, validated through iCub3, a humanoid developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.

[ Science Robotics ]

Have you ever seen a robot skiing?! Ascento robot enjoying a day in the ski slopes of Davos.

[ Ascento ]

Can’t trip Atlas up! Our humanoid robot gets ready for real work combining strength, perception, and mobility.

Notable that Boston Dynamics is now saying that Atlas “gets ready for real work.” Wonder how much to read into that?

[ Boston Dynamics ]

You deserve to be free from endless chores! YOU! DESERVE! CHORE! FREEDOM!

Pretty sure this is teleoperated, so someone is still doing the chores, sadly.

[ MagicLab ]

Multimodal UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are rarely capable of more than two modalities—that is, flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating envelope. For instance, an aerial robot could fly a long distance, perch in a high place to survey the surroundings, then walk to avoid obstacles that could potentially inhibit flight. Birds are capable of these three tasks, and so offer a practical example of how a robot might be developed to do the same.

[ Paper ] via [ EPFL LIS ]

Nissan announces the concept model of “Iruyo,” a robot that supports babysitting while driving. Ilyo relieves the anxiety of the mother, father, and baby in the driver’s seat. We support safe and secure driving for parents and children. Nissan and Akachan Honpo are working on a project to make life better with cars and babies. Iruyo was born out of the voices of mothers and fathers who said, “I can’t hold my baby while driving alone.”

[ Nissan ]

Building 937 houses the coolest robots at CERN. This is where the action happens to build and program robots that can tackle the unconventional challenges presented by the laboratory’s unique facilities. Recently, a new type of robot called CERNquadbot has entered CERN’s robot pool and successfully completed its first radiation protection test in the North Area.

[ CERN ]

Congrats to Starship, the OG robotic delivery service, on their US $90 million raise.

[ Starship ]

By blending 2D images with foundation models to build 3D feature fields, a new MIT method helps robots understand and manipulate nearby objects with open-ended language prompts.

[ GitHub ] via [ MIT ]

This is one of those things that’s far more difficult than it might look.

[ ROAM Lab ]

Our current care system does not scale, and our populations are aging fast. Robodies are multipliers for care staff, allowing them to work together with local helpers to provide protection and assistance around the clock while maintaining personal contact with people in the community.

[ DEVANTHRO ]

It’s the world’s smallest humanoid robot, until someone comes out with slightly smaller servos!

[ Guinness ]

Deep Robotics wishes you a happy year of the dragon!

[ Deep Robotics ]

SEAS researchers are helping develop resilient and autonomous deep-space and extraterrestrial habitations by developing technologies to let autonomous robots repair or replace damaged components in a habitat. The research is part of the Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats institute (RETHi), led by Purdue University in partnership with SEAS, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Its goal is to “design and operate resilient deep-space habitats that can adapt, absorb, and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions.”

[ Harvard ]

Find out how a bold vision became a success story! The DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics has been researching robotic arms since the 1990s, originally for use in space. It was a long and ambitious journey before these lightweight robotic arms could be used on Earth and finally in operating theaters, a journey that required concentrated robotics expertise, interdisciplinary cooperation, and ultimately a successful technology transfer.

[ DLR MIRO ]

Robotics is changing the world, driven by focused teams of diverse experts. Willow Garage operated with the mantra “Impact first, return on capital second” and through ROS and the PR2 had enormous impact. Autonomous mobile robots are finally being accepted in the service industry, and Savioke (now Relay Robotics) was created to drive that impact. This talk will trace the evolution of Relay robots and their deployment in hotels, hospitals, and other service industries, starting with roots at Willow Garage. As robotics technology is poised for the next round of advances, how do we create and maintain the organizations that continue to drive progress?

[ Northwestern ]

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University in January, following numerous allegations that she plagiarized passages in her published works. But in some corners of the media, the fact that she committed plagiarism mattered much less than the fact that it was conservative writers who caught her.

Aaron Sibarium, a reporter at the right-leaning news website The Washington Free Beacon, performed the lion's share of the digging. Christopher Brunet, a conservative writer; Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist; and Phillip Magness, a libertarian economic historian, also made important contributions. Their allegations were very serious, and what they found led many commentators—including Harvard students—to conclude that she should be held accountable. Even The Harvard Crimson's editorial board, writing in support of Gay, nevertheless acknowledged that she had committed plagiarism and that the university's investigation had been inadequate.

Gay's defenders said the charges against her lacked importance and that she was guilty of mere sloppiness—failing to sufficiently paraphrase the passages she had copied. This position became less tenable after subsequent reporting from Sibarium revealed that she had in fact committed traditional plagiarism as well: copying passages from other scholars without citing them.

The next course of action was to shoot the messengers. Since many of the people accusing Gay of committing plagiarism were conservative, their motivations were deemed political and thus dismissible. New York Times columnist Charles Blow described the campaign against Gay as "a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress."

Gay's defenders had a point, at least, in noting that conservatives had first set their sights on the president of Harvard after her disastrous testimony before the House of Representatives concerning antisemitism on campus. When Gay ultimately stepped aside, her resignation letter leaned into this explanation while merely nodding at the plagiarism accusations.

"It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus," she wrote.

Gay is a more sympathetic figure when the hearing is considered in isolation. While her explanations of Harvard's speech policies in the face of relentless grilling by Republican political figures seemed tin-eared, it is in fact true that such policies are context-dependent; calls for political violence are not necessarily violations of Harvard's policies unless they are directed at specific individuals. She should not have lost her job for articulating that.

Yet Gay is no free speech hero. She may have defended provocative political speech at the House hearing, but her brief tenure at Harvard has not been marked by a dramatic return to free speech principles. In 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard dead last on its college free speech list. Indeed, one might conclude that in order to restore free speech at Harvard, different leadership is sorely needed.

In any case, the plagiarism allegations had teeth. Reporters discovered numerous instances of Gay lazily copying other scholars' exact passages without naming them. The political ideology of some of her accusers should make no difference; Gay must be held to the same standards as other professors and students. As one member of Harvard College's Honor Council wrote in an editorial for The Harvard Crimson days before her resignation, "There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University's president."

When Harvard's governing board picks the next president, it should look for someone who both abides by principles of academic integrity and vows to improve the college's free speech standing.

The post Claudine Gay's Defenders Shot the Messenger appeared first on Reason.com.