Harvard Rules (32 page)

The controversy over Paulin's remarks attracted little mention Stateside. Only a handful of American writers noticed it, much less remarked upon it. One of the few who did, Martin Peretz, wrote in the
New Republic
that Paulin was “a lousy but famous poet” who spewed “venom towards Israel.” The first assessment was debatable; the second seemed undeniable.

Soon enough, Tom Paulin's anti-Semitism problem became a problem for Harvard. Sometime between the publication of “Killed in Crossfire” and the
Al-Ahram
interview, the Harvard English department invited Paulin to campus to deliver the Morris Gray Lecture, an annual reading. In November 2002, about seven weeks after Summers' anti-Semitism talk, the fracas over Tom Paulin came to Harvard.

Three professors had chosen Paulin for the honor. One was Helen Vendler, probably the doyenne of American poetry critics and a University Professor, just as Cornel West had been. The other inviters were poets named Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks. Graham and Sacks are partners both in life and in politics; they are one of Harvard's more left-wing couples. But none of the three professors, they would all insist later, had been aware of “Killed in Crossfire” when they invited Paulin to speak, nor had they read or heard about the
Al-Ahram
remarks.

Someone else, however, was aware of Paulin's feelings toward Israel—a Harvard lecturer named Rita Goldberg. When she received an e-mail invitation to the Paulin lecture, Goldberg was shocked that it said nothing of his controversial background. And though Goldberg was not particularly influential on campus—lecturers are non–tenure track teachers hired for three years to fill in curricular gaps—she was married to someone who was: Professor Oliver Hart, then the chairman of the economics department. On Thursday, November 7, just a week before Paulin was scheduled to lecture, Goldberg and Hart attended the annual department dinner. Economics is Harvard's most popular undergraduate concentration, and as a sign of the department's wealth and status, the dinner was held at Harvard's imposing Fogg Art Museum. Larry Summers was on hand, and Goldberg buttonholed the president to tell him about the poet whom the English department had invited to campus. “That sounds pretty bad,” Goldberg recalled Summers saying. She suggested to Summers that the English department either disinvite Paulin or publicize his remarks on Israel. Summers cautioned her that opposition to the event would raise issues of free speech.

The next day Goldberg took a step that would ordinarily have been done
before
protesting to the university president. She e-mailed Lawrence Buell, a scholar of American transcendentalism and the English department chairman, to complain about the Paulin reading. “I assume that the people who selected him…know about the reputation he has recently made for himself,” Goldberg wrote. “In the minds of many thoughtful people both in England and here in the U.S., Paulin's vitriolic attacks have crossed a certain boundary between civilized discourse and something much more sinister. You ought at least to attach a warning label to your announcement of the reading.” Buell, a respected and well-liked figure, responded that he had not known about Paulin's background and would look into the matter.

But things were already progressing beyond Buell's dominion. Goldberg sent a similar e-mail to a contact at Harvard Hillel, who forwarded it to other interested parties. By November 11, on the Internet and over e-mail, the Paulin problem had erupted. Within the English department, there was instant concern about the emerging public controversy—and about Summers' reaction. Tom Paulin was exactly the kind of figure the president had warned them about, apparently the paradigm of the left-wing European intellectual who glibly tosses off anti-Semitic comments at radical chic dinner parties.

Perhaps inevitably, several professors asked Elisa New what her boyfriend thought. New's colleagues had become wary of her presence during their conversations on the Paulin matter, fearing that she would share their comments during pillow talk with Summers. Rather than avoid the subject, they decided simply to ask her directly. Their requests put New, who did not want to serve as a conduit to or from her boyfriend, in an awkward position. She answered, “If you want to know what Larry Summers thinks, you should ask Larry Summers.”

On Monday evening, the eleventh of November, Larry Buell picked up the phone and did just that.

Telephoning the president of Harvard to ask for his feelings about a controversial lecturer was not a normal thing for a department head to do. The university, after all, has hosted plenty of divisive figures, from Robert McNamara in 1966 to Colin Powell in 1993. (The award of an honorary degree to Powell was protested because of his recently announced opposition to allowing gays to serve in the military.) Tom Paulin's lecture was a minor event compared with, say, the November 1997 talk by Chinese president Jiang Zemin. That visit, the most hotly debated in recent years, prompted thousands of demonstrators to rally outside Sanders Theatre in Memorial Hall, just beyond the rear gates of the Yard, where Zemin spoke. To ameliorate the protest and promote a different kind of discussion, the university organized “China Debate Week.” Neil Rudenstine issued a statement articulating why such a visit affirmed “the traditions and purposes” of Harvard. “The invitation does not represent an institutional endorsement of the speaker's particular point of view,” Rudenstine said. “Rather, it reflects a broader belief that we are ultimately stronger—as a university committed to education, reasoned discourse, and mutual understanding—if groups within our community have broad discretion to invite speakers of their own choosing.”

It was one thing to involve the president when the authoritarian head of state of the world's most populous nation was coming to Harvard; but for Larry Buell to contact Summers four days before the arrival on campus of a relatively unknown poet-provocateur—anti-Semite or no—showed just how edgy the campus had become. Rather than risk the president's anger, Buell preferred to ask Summers' opinion, even if it meant sacrificing a part of the faculty's autonomy.

During that phone call, Summers reportedly told Buell that while
he
certainly wouldn't have invited Paulin, he would defer to the English department as to how to handle the visit. Summers apparently believed that withdrawing the invitation would create an appearance problem, and that his Morning Prayers talk would be seen to have discouraged free speech on campus. But he also thought that the Department of English should explicitly disassociate itself from Paulin.

The next morning, Helen Vendler called Paulin, who was teaching at Columbia University while on sabbatical from Oxford. She told him of the situation that had developed and the pressure the department was under. She suggested that perhaps there should be some sort of panel discussion or question-and-answer session in which the charges of anti-Semitism could be discussed. Whether because he found the invitation half-hearted or because he did not want to engage in such a discussion, Paulin declined.

Later that day Larry Buell posted a message on the English department website saying that the Tom Paulin reading “will not take place.” Moreover, he wrote, the department regretted the “widespread consternation that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin's lifetime accomplishment as a poet.”

If Summers had indeed asked for a disavowal, there it was: Harvard's English department wanted nothing to do with Tom Paulin. For his part, the president released a statement saying, “My position was that it was for the department to decide, and I believe the department has come to the appropriate decision.”

Then something unexpected happened. The “appropriate decision” prompted almost as much controversy as did the original invitation. Some suspected that the decision had been made under pressure from Summers—that as soon as the president stated his opinion, he'd given Buell an implicit command. Others thought that the canceled appearance was a lost educational opportunity regarding the exercise of free speech. Law school professor Charles Fried sent the
Crimson
a letter, co-signed by his colleagues Alan Dershowitz and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, lamenting the cancellation. “What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation…” Fried wrote. “Now [Paulin] will be able to lurk smugly in his Oxford lair and sneer at American's vaunted traditions of free speech.”

The law professors were hardly the only ones who thought that the English department had buckled. Many of its own faculty felt that however misguided the original invitation had been, it should have been honored. Professors of literature, they suggested, ought to be especially sensitive to free speech issues, since many of the works they taught had been banned or continued to be the objects of censorship. In Paulin's appearance, the English department had had a chance, however inadvertent, to practice what it preached, and it had instead skulked away from the opportunity.

On Tuesday November 19—a few days after Paulin was to have lectured—the entire department convened to discuss what had happened. Larry Buell conducted the meeting, and Helen Vendler walked the faculty through exactly what had transpired. Peter Sacks, who had been Paulin's strongest advocate, apologized for conducting insufficient due diligence. But the gist of the meeting was what to do about the fact that a department devoted to freedom of expression appeared to have caved in to political pressure. Skip Gates, who also taught in the English department, noted that Harvard had hosted white supremacist David Duke and black nationalist Malcolm X and survived. Why not Paulin?

A vote was taken: though two professors abstained, the rest of the department—including Lisa New—voted to re-invite the poet. Two days after announcing that Tom Paulin would not be coming to Harvard, Larry Buell posted another announcement saying that Paulin was being asked back. But the invitation was less than enthusiastic. “The department in no sense intends to endorse the remarks by Mr. Paulin that have given offence,” Buell wrote. “We are glad that Mr. Paulin has in fact gone on record as regretting those remarks, stressing that they do not represent his real views”—which was not exactly what Paulin had said.

Summers quickly produced a statement of his own. “Invitations to Harvard departments are commonly extended by those departments,” it began. His language was awkward, the tense passive, because the intent of the sentence was to remind the reader that he had nothing to do with inviting Paulin—just as he'd wanted people to know that he'd had nothing to do with Zayed Yasin.

Summers continued, “We are ultimately stronger as a university if we together maintain our robust commitment to free expression, including the freedom of groups on campus to invite speakers with controversial views, sometimes views that many members of our community find abhorrent…

“On another occasion, I have made clear my concerns about speech that may be viewed as lending comfort to anti-Semitism.”

That was a subtle piece of historical revisionism. In his Morning Prayers remarks, Summers had not warned about speech that might be “lending comfort to anti-Semitism”—he had decried speech that he considered anti-Semitic. The new formulation soft-pedaled his original argument.

“I hope,” Summers said, “that people who choose to attend the planned reading will respect the rights of those who wish to hear the speaker. And I hope that people with differing points of view will feel free to air them in responsible ways.”

The differences between Neil Rudenstine's statement regarding Jiang Zemin and Larry Summers' on Tom Paulin were subtle but significant. For Rudenstine, a controversial speaker represented the kind of educational experience that brought people to Harvard in the first place. Summers was more pragmatic. For him, such incidents were something to be tolerated, because universities needed to be tolerant places, but ultimately they were a distraction from the work of the university, rather than
being
an important part of a university education. Readers of Summers' statements would have no difficulty discerning how the president really felt about controversial speakers coming to Harvard.

In the end, Tom Paulin never did come. After finishing his sabbatical at Columbia, he returned to Oxford to write and teach. Declining an interview request, he said, “I wouldn't speak about
Ulysses
now.” But in January 2003, Paulin did publish a poem that appeared to be in response to the Harvard incident. Called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card,” it included the lines:

The episode was an unexpected blessing for Larry Summers. In September he had warned against an anti-Semitism that most people thought did not exist at Harvard—until the English department invited Tom Paulin to speak and made Summers look prophetic. Even better for Summers, Paulin had not actually come to Harvard. Summers got the result that he wanted—the result everyone knew he wanted—without having actually done anything.

Across the campus, however, the perception was that fear of Larry Summers had caused the English department to renege upon and then waffle about an invitation to a controversial speaker. Fear of Summers had become so great that the president had only to suggest his displeasure and professors flinched.

The perception of power is power, and after the Tom Paulin affair, Larry Summers was a more powerful president than he had been before it.

 

His popularity, however, was another matter.

Barely a year and a half into Larry Summers' presidency, there was already hopeful talk among faculty members and administrators that he would not stay long. At least two different groups of faculty members convened explicitly to discuss the question of whether Summers could be ousted. Their discussions went nowhere, as the only people who could fire Summers were the members of the Corporation, and they would never do it—after all, they had chosen him. If anything, Summers' relationship with the Corporation was even stronger now that Bob Rubin had become a fellow.