Those Who Forget the Past (46 page)

PART NINE

ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

JEFFREY TOOBIN

Speechless: Free Expression and Civility Clash at Harvard

[
This
excerpt represents about half of a longer piece, the second half of
which is devoted chiefly to matters of race at Harvard Law School.
]

AT THE BEGINNING of November, Rita Goldberg was among the members of the Harvard academic community to receive a routine e-mail announcement of a poetry reading —not, at first glance, the sort of thing to reawaken the somewhat musty issue of free speech on campus. The e-mail said merely that Tom Paulin, an Irish poet, would give a poetry reading, known as the Morris Gray Lecture, on November 14.

Goldberg occupies a humble professional niche at the university. She is a non-tenured lecturer in the literature concentration, which itself is a poor cousin to the larger and more powerful Department of English and American Literature and Language, the sponsor of the Paulin lecture. “I had lived in England for many years,” Goldberg told me, “and I knew Paulin's work. He's on television all the time there, and I knew the kind of things he had said about Israel. I put his name in Google, and it didn't take long to see just how bad it was.” Goldberg herself had little clout, but she knew a good deal about how universities worked and possessed some proximity to real power at Harvard. Her husband is Oliver Hart, the chairman of the Economics Department, and, as it happened, he was the host of the department's annual dinner, at the Fogg Art Museum on Thursday, November 7. Among the guests was Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, who had been a member of the Economics Department in the years before he went to Washington, where he ultimately became Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. Goldberg sought out Summers at the dinner and informed him of the invitation to Paulin. “I told him about Paulin's views,” Goldberg recalled, “and he said, ‘That sounds pretty bad,' but then he also said, ‘Be careful. This is a free-speech issue, too.' ”

The following morning, six days before Paulin was to speak, Goldberg sent an e-mail to Lawrence Buell, the chairman of the English Department. “Dear Larry,” she began, “I'm writing in response to your invitation to come hear Tom Paulin on November 14. I assume that the people who selected him for the Morris Gray Lecture know about the reputation he has recently made for himself in the U.K., not only because of his poem ‘Killed in Crossfire,' but also because of statements he has made in the press and on television.” Goldberg quoted an interview that Paulin had given to
Al-Ahram Weekly,
an English-language newspaper in Cairo, in April. “That interview is notorious for several remarks,” Goldberg wrote, “especially the closing one, in which he refers to Jewish settlers on the West Bank: ‘They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.' ” She also included a copy of the poem:

We're fed this inert
this lying phrase
like comfort food
as another little Palestinian boy
in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
is gunned down by the Zionist SS
whose initials we should
—
but
we don't
—
dumb goys
—
clock in that weasel word
crossfire

She noted further, “I'm reluctant to intrude on anyone's right to free speech or free access. But 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 and Goldberg exchanged e-mails over the Veterans Day weekend, and the department chairman said he had known nothing about Paulin's political views. The invitation had been made nearly a year earlier, by a committee of three English professors—Helen Vendler, the chair, and two poetry professors, Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks. (Paulin was invited after the publication of the “Crossfire” poem but before his interview with
Al-Ahram
.) As Goldberg recalled, “I suggested two things to Larry—that they disinvite him or at least that they disclose what he'd said about Israel.” Goldberg sent a version of her e-mail to a friend at Harvard's Hillel, the campus Jewish organization, urging the group to join her protest to the English Department. That e-mail, in turn, was forwarded to friends around and beyond the university.

The reaction to the news about Paulin illustrated, in a small way, a larger truth—that conservatives have become Israel's most passionate supporters in the United States. Denunciations of the invitation to the poet began surfacing among several conservative Internet bloggers—among them Andrew Sullivan and
opinionjournal.com
, the online counterpart to
The Wall
Street Journal
editorial page. As a result, over the long weekend waves of e-mail protests about the poetry reading fell down on members of the English Department. “It spread like wildfire,” Goldberg said.

Struggling in the unfamiliar realm of public controversy, several faculty members in the English Department had the same idea—to talk to their colleague Elisa New. Specifically, they wanted to ask her what Summers thought the department should do about the invitation to Paulin. As most people at Harvard know, New, a forty-four-year-old American-literature scholar, has been dating Summers, who is forty-eight, for more than a year. However, New had the same answer for everyone who asked about the president's views. “If you want to know what Larry Summers thinks, you should ask Larry Summers,” she said. So, on Monday night, Lawrence Buell called Summers to ask him what to do.

The president of Harvard works in an elegant, if snug, suite of offices on the ground floor of Massachusetts Hall, a brick building nestled in the Yard. (The top floors of Mass Hall are a freshman dormitory.) In appearance, Summers has never betrayed his academic roots; his outfit on the morning I met with him included a tweed jacket, an open-necked shirt, and casual pants, all in clashing shades of blue. He propped his feet, which were shod in brown work shoes with thick rubber soles, on a glass coffee table, and talked about academic freedom. A big, shambling man, Summers has a provocative conversational style, which seems to involve disagreeing with every proposition that is put to him. For many at Harvard, that style, like Summers himself, has been unnerving.

Since Summers became Harvard's twenty-seventh president, in 2001, he has rejected the reticent, university-focused manner of his predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, in favor of a broader and more opinionated mode, one notably hostile to campus pieties. Many have welcomed the return of a Harvard president to national debates, but there is little question, too, that Summers has sometimes been ill-served by his own pugnacity. For instance, an early confrontation with the Afro-American Studies scholar Cornel West (the precise nature of which remains in dispute) led to West's decampment, last summer, for Princeton. On most issues, Summers, as an economist, is given to a straightforward weighing of pros and cons, and that includes free speech.

“There is enormously broad latitude for people to be able to invite people who they wish to the Harvard campus, for them to be able to be heard without disruption, and for there not to be censorship,” Summers told me. “That is the premise on which successful research universities operate, and it's basically a policy that works because of the fallibility of human judgment.” Summers went on to say that there are times when it probably would be sensible to censor speech “but no one is smart enough or wise enough to be the censor. Anytime one has an urge to censor something, one needs to think that there are plenty of people who thought advocacy of gay rights was a superb idea for censorship, that criticism of the Vietnam War, or advocacy of Marxist notions, was a superb notion for censorship. It is central to the kind of community we are that censorship not be a part of what the community is.”

In light of these beliefs, one might assume that Summers would have a simple view of the invitation to Paulin: let him speak. But Summers himself has been especially outspoken on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism, so it was not surprising that the chairman of the English Department wanted to take his pulse. In a widely noted speech on September 17, Summers took to the pulpit of Memorial Church, the symbolic center of the university, and said, “I speak with you today not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community about something I never thought I would become seriously worried about—the issue of anti-Semitism.” Harvard's first Jewish president—“identified but hardly devout,” as he described himself—said that anti-Semitism had been remote from his own experience, but “there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally.” Moreover, he continued, “profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” As examples, Summers cited European academics who shun contact with Israeli colleagues, the eviction of Israeli scholars from an international literary journal, and the demands for universities to remove from their investment portfolios companies that do business with Israel. Summers had never heard of Tom Paulin before November, but it appeared that the poet was just the kind of anti-Semite— in effect, if not in intent—that the university president had targeted in his speech.

Buell and Summers spoke on the night of Veterans Day, but there is some dispute about what the Harvard president said. Both Buell and a person familiar with Summers's recollection of the conversation agree that Summers had both an official answer and a personal response to the Paulin invitation. “As president of the university, my judgment is that the English Department should do what it sees fit to do and thinks is best in the situation,” Summers said. But Buell and the Summers camp disagree about what else the president said. Summers, according to the person familiar with his version, thought the idea that no one knew about Paulin's views was preposterous, even if it happened to be true. Second, Summers thought it would look bad to withdraw the invitation. But, third, if the reading did go forward, the department should find a way to dissociate itself from Paulin's views about Israel. Buell took issue with this characterization of Summers's statement but declined to elaborate. Clearly, though, whatever Summers's intent, he succeeded in leaving a mixed message with Buell—one in keeping with the one that the Harvard president left around this time with William C. Kirby, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, that the Paulin matter had kicked up “kind of a shit storm.”

Generations of Harvard freshmen once took their meals at the stolid brick pile known as the Union, but the old McKim, Mead & White structure has recently been renovated into the Barker Center for the Humanities, and on Tuesday morning, November 12, the offices of the English Department there were the center of the shit storm. As Robert Kiely, a longtime faculty member and former chairman of the department, recalled, “Over that long weekend, we got an avalanche of messages and e-mail raising the question as to how could the English Department invite such a person. The quote in the Cairo newspaper—‘They should all be shot'—that was the key statement.”

Before deciding what to do—Paulin was due to arrive in Cambridge the following day and to speak on Thursday—the committee on the Gray Lecture, Vendler, Graham, and Sacks, could at least share some rueful laughter. Faculty members who never came to poetry readings were vowing to shun this one, too. By the standards of Harvard's English Department, the Gray Lecture was a modest honor, which provided the speaker with only travel expenses and a small honorarium. At least, the committee members noted glumly, they were likely to improve on the average of seventy or so people who usually showed up for poetry readings. Mostly, though, the members started answering a question that had suddenly become ubiquitous in Cambridge: Who the hell was Tom Paulin?

Paulin is a fifty-three-year-old Irishman, a professor at Oxford University, who was spending the fall as a visiting professor at Columbia. He is a popular poet in England, where his work is widely praised and frequently anthologized. “Our committee deemed Paulin an important voice in contemporary Anglo-Irish poetry, and one that might be usefully added to the chorus of other voices reading at Harvard this year,” Jorie Graham told me. Paulin has also sought to extend his franchise beyond poetry by becoming a familiar face of the political left outside the academic world, particularly on British television and radio. In his poetry, as well as in his literary criticism, Paulin often writes about politics, especially the Irish struggle against English occupation. Indeed, his views on Israel and Palestine form a kind of proxy for his views on England and Ireland—oppressor and victim, occupier and dispossessed. Though Paulin has over the years spoken out against antiSemitism, notably in an essay about T. S. Eliot, his virulent hostility to Israel, if not his precise language, reflects a common view among many European intellectuals.

But, without a Rita Goldberg stirring up trouble at Columbia, Paulin had enjoyed a quiet, almost protest-free fall teaching a course on Irish literature. “He was a terrific colleague—responsive, engaged, open-minded,” James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, said. “On the last day of class, after the Harvard story broke, a couple of students entered his class and started yelling about Israel. His students whipped out their cell phones and called security and then shoved the protesters out the door. You have to admire a teacher who commands that kind of loyalty.”

Vendler, who had extended the invitation, had failed to reach Paulin over the weekend, so on Tuesday morning she tried him again. Vendler is one of Harvard's few University Professors, an elite within an elite, and an eminent literary critic of the old school, and she was plainly uncomfortable in the political maelstrom. (Declining to discuss the Paulin matter, she left me a message saying, with some disgust, “I write about poetry . . . , I don't write about chain letters.”) As Graham recalled the events of that day, “We thought it would be a good idea to widen the scope of the event to include a question-and-answer session, or some kind of discussion, perhaps involving poetry and politics, or regarding the nature and effects of different kinds of ‘speech.' We decided to ask Paulin—as he had only been invited to read from his work—whether he wished to include such an exchange after his reading.” Vendler finally reached Paulin at Columbia, and after a short discussion they decided he would not speak at all at Harvard on November 14. Graham then called him and expressed her sorrow about the whole situation. “He”—Paulin—“said he was very sorry, but had ‘no stomach for it.' He said he was tired of this whole thing, and that he just wanted some time while at Columbia—where he felt very comfortable—to get some work done,” Graham said.