Earlier this week, we took a look at Michigan State, which featured a Communist professor during its  Constitution Day celebrations.

According to Danielle Charette, a student at Swarthmore College, denigrating American values on this national day of observance has become a new tradition on campuses across the nation:

Several universities across the nation used recent Constitution Day activities to criticize the founding document, or America in general, despite the fact that the observance calls for civic education and commemoration.

Take for example Harvard Professor Alexander Keyssar’s recent address at Swarthmore College. He used the opportunity to make sweeping criticisms against the United States.

Keyssar’s lecture, named after his book “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” touched only in passing on the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Instead, most of the speech tied today’s voter ID laws, passed largely by Republican legislatures, to the Jim Crow-era.

“The dirty little secret of democracy in America,” Keyssar opined in his speech, “is that not everyone actually believes in it.”

In another example, a recent Drake University event featured Georgetown University law professor Michael Seidman, who stated in his guest lecture at the Iowa campus that “we should give up on the idea that we have an obligation to obey the Constitution of the United States,” according to an article in the Times-Delphic student newspaper.

The article also notes that Seidman referred to the Constitution as “outdated,” said countries such as England and Australia, which don’t have a Constitution, have better civil liberty records than America, and “that the Constitution prevents beneficial discussions from taking place in the United States.”

“We need to be clear about exactly what it means to obey a text. The only circumstance in which obedience takes hold is when, but for the Constitution, we would do something else, and only because of the Constitution we would do something that we would not otherwise do,” Seidman is quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, at Wesleyan University, Judge Stephen Gold delivered a recent Constitution Day talk that appeared to be only tenuously related to the broader mission of Constitution Day. It was called “Imposing Sentence: The Balance Between Affording Discretion and Avoiding Disparity.”

Charette also noted that special Constitution Day lectures at University of California Berkeley and Smith College were geared to critiquing America’s founding document rather than commemorating its creation.