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 departmen
t 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.
In his conversation with Vendler, Paulin agreed that the English Department would announce that the decision about the lecture had been made “by mutual consent.” But consent to what? Paulin declined to discuss the matter, and he told friends that he had agreed only to a postponement of his appearance, not a cancellation. Vendler and the others on the committee have said that they, too, believed Paulin would ultimately give the reading. On that Tuesday, Buell posted an announcement on the English Department’s Web site saying, “By mutual consent of the poet and the English Department, the Morris Gray poetry reading by Tom Paulin originally scheduled for Thursday November 14 will not take place. The English Department sincerely regret [sic] the widespread consternation that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided on last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin’s lifetime accomplishment as a poet.” There was no suggestion that Paulin’s lecture would ever take place.
That, at least initially, seemed fine with just about everyone at Harvard. Summers praised the English Department’s decision. “My position was that it was for the department to decide,” he said in a statement, “and I believe the department has come to the appropriate decision.” Rita Goldberg, the unlikely initiator of the controversy, was astonished and delighted by the success of her electronic “chain letter.” She said, “This was an honor for Paulin. Do you want to give this man this honor, when he has this history? This was an actual call to murder people. It’s not a joke in wartime. Someone might take him up on it. It’s incitement.” As for Paulin himself, he had disavowed his call for the murder of the settlers months earlier, in a letter to the Telegraph of London. Since returning to Oxford in December, he has limited his public comments to a self-pitying poem, “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card,” published in January in the London Review of Books, which referred to “the ones who play the a-s card - /of death threats hate mail talking tough/the usual cynical Goebbels stuff . . .”
Controversial speakers have been coming to Harvard for decades, and over the years there have been occasional unpleasant incidents, most memorably in 1966, when Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, was noisily confronted during the Vietnam War. But Yasir Arafat, Malcolm X, the Shah of Iran, and scores of others have all spoken without incident. As Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, observed, “We’ve had Fidel Castro here, we’ve had Al Sharpton, we’ve had monsters, charlatans, and scoundrels.” So why not Tom Paulin?
Fried had served as Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration and as a Republican appointee to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and the Paulin matter roused his libertarian instincts. “I heard they were withdrawing the invitation because it caused ‘consternation,’ ” Fried told me. “The reason that was given is they were disinviting him because people didn’t like what he’d said. There’s a difference between what you decide to listen to and what you silence. This is silencing.”
Fried wrote a letter to the editor of the Crimson, the campus newspaper, and he recruited two law-school colleagues from a different end of the political spectrum, Alan M. Dershowitz and Laurence H. Tribe, to sign it with him. “By all accounts this Paulin fellow the English Department invited to lecture here is a despicable example of the anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel posturing unfortunately quite widespread among European intellectuals,” Fried wrote. “What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation b
ecause a speaker would cause, in the words of English department chair Lawrence Buell, ‘consternation and divisiveness.’ . . . If Paulin had spoken, we are sure we would have found ways to tell him and each other what we think of him. Now he will be able to lurk smugly in his Oxford lair and sneer at America’s vaunted traditions of free speech. There are some mistakes which are only made worse by trying to undo them.”
The law professors’ letter—along with the controversy— prompted the English Department to call a meeting for the following Tuesday, to discuss the Paulin invitation. “The department, rightly, felt it has been misrepresented by the notion —untrue—that Paulin, because of statements and views attributed to him on the Internet, and then somehow distributed to selected media over the weekend, had been ‘disinvited’ by us,” Jorie Graham said. At the meeting, on November 19, the thirty to forty senior and junior faculty members voted to reaffirm their own prerogatives. As Robert Kiely, the former department chair, recalled, “There was a unanimous reassertion that departments should be autonomous, free to invite whom they wish. And, after a long discussion, despite the unpleasantness of his views it was unanimous with two abstentions that the department should reinstate its invitation.” So far, Paulin hasn’t said whether he will come to Harvard after all.
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