Doubt began to pervade the campus. Some students and faculty decided that Bob Rubin had simply deceived the Corporation when he assured its members that the rough-and-tumble Larry Summers was a thing of the past. Others who had followed the presidential choice process began to speak wistfully of Lee Bollinger, who had since become the president of Columbia University, and wonder if he would not have been the superior choice. Some students looked enviously at Princeton and Brown, where presidents Shirley Tilghman and Ruth Simmons, the latter the first African American president of an Ivy League school, were leading their campuses with a less combative, more inclusive style.
In the spring of 2002, with the chaos in the Af-Am department ongoing, and a community ill at ease with its new president, Larry Summers’ first year was coming to a rocky end. An oncoming controversy over the limits of speech in the post-September 11 world, set against the magisterial backdrop of Harvard’s commencement, would make the conclusion of the 2001–2002 school year even more turbulent.
Zayed Yasin, class of 2002, was a model of the modern Harvard student: a bright, thoughtful, motivated young man from an international, multicultural background. His mother was an Irish Catholic nurse from southern California. His father was an engineer, a Muslim from Bangladesh who had immigrated to the United States in 1971 and worked as a designer of power plants. Before college, Yasin had lived in Chicago, southern California—his parents met at UCLA—and Indonesia. But he spent most of his youth in the small town of Scituate, a fishing village turned white-collar suburb about twenty miles southeast of Boston. An international student and a local kid at the same time, Yasin would be the first member of his family to attend Harvard.
Dark-haired, clean-cut, and slender, with a manner that was mature yet earnest, Yasin was always interested in public service. As a boy, he became an Eagle scout. While a high school senior, he won a scholarship from the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps that would pay for his Harvard tuition in exchange for military service after college. But he turned down the scholarship because, he said, “I didn’t want to go to MIT all the time” for training, and he was worried about committing himself to the military until he was in his thirties. Yasin intended to make up the financial difference with help from his parents and aid from Harvard, but the lost ROTC scholarship was a big hit. “We’re not poor, but we’re not filthy rich,” Yasin said.
Like most Harvard students, Yasin was active in extracurricular pursuits. He wanted to be a doctor, and as a freshman he worked as an emergency medical technician. For a while he was president of Harvard-Radcliffe Friends of the American Red Cross, a group that taught first aid and helped in disaster relief. Before his senior year, he worked on a public health program to try to eradicate malaria in Zambia.
But perhaps his most challenging work came during his junior year, when he became president of the Harvard Islamic Society. HIS was a small but growing group on campus, in proportion to the small but growing numbers of Muslim students from South Asia and the Near and Middle East. Yasin hadn’t been particularly devout before college, but at Harvard, he started to become more serious about his faith. “The people that I liked the best at Harvard, the people that I respected for the way they lived their lives, were Muslims,” Yasin explained. “I really admired the people who did have that moral and religious compass. And I saw the difference between people who did live that way and people who didn’t.”
The Harvard Islamic Society didn’t have the numbers, the money, the alumni, or the tradition that Harvard Hillel did. For evening prayer, HIS members met in the lounge of a classroom building in the Yard. The Jewish cultural and religious organization, by contrast, was housed in the multimillion-dollar Rosovsky Hall. But Yasin did what he could with the resources he had, and one of his priorities was to build bridges between the different religious organizations on campus. During his year as president, he held several inter-faith meetings with Hillel and initiated a discussion series with Hillel and the Catholic Student Association.
One activity, however, would come back to haunt him: During Yasin’s tenure, HIS threw a fundraiser to benefit the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a U.S.-based Muslim group that raised money for Muslims around the world who needed health care—particularly Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From what Yasin knew, HLF was a legitimate, valuable group. Before his junior year, he had spent a summer working for Balkan Sunflowers, a nongovernmental health organization in Albania, which has a largely Muslim population. “I saw the HLF doing good work there,” he remembered, delivering health care to the stream of refugees flowing back into Kosovo.
But after the fundraiser, there were news reports that HLF was funneling money to Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization. (In December 2001, the Bush administration froze HLF’s assets for just this reason, although the group vigorously denies the accusation.) So, instead, the Harvard Islamic Society gave the money it had raised, about $900, to Red Crescent, an international relief organization affiliated with the Red Cross. “We wanted to avoid any murkiness,” Yasin said.
As president of HIS, Yasin had gotten to know Harry Lewis, the dean of the college, and Rick Hunt, the university marshall who was also head of the faculty committee on religion, a group that set university policy regarding religious issues. Both Lewis and Hunt were impressed with Yasin. They liked his positive attitude and admired how he struggled with the problems of the world at such a young age. And so both administrators encouraged him to try out for one of Harvard’s biggest honors: the position of undergraduate commencement orator.
The Harvard commencement ceremonies, which take place in Tercentenary Theatre, are so filled with history and ritual, they’re like a performance art piece for scholars. Commencement is divided into two parts. On Wednesday’s Class Day, a humorous speaker addresses the undergrads. Recent Class Day speakers have included Conan O’Brien, Al Franken, and actor Will Ferrell. Day two on Thursday sees diplomas conferred upon the cap-and-gowned graduates, not just the college seniors but students from the graduate schools as well. Though it’s ostensibly for the graduates, the afternoon of commencement’s second day is actually called the “Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.” That’s because Harvard hosts its reunions at the same time. The idea is to fill returning alums with school spirit, and then—boom!—hit them up for money. Simultaneously, the new graduates transition instantly from tuition-paying students into the ranks of gift-giving alumni.
The second day of commencement is by far the more formal of the two. Before the degrees are officially awarded, the morning ceremony kicks off with the Harvard band playing; a procession of the president and members of the faculty and governing boards filing onto the stage, and an opening address delivered entirely in Latin.
After the morning ceremony, the undergraduates go to their various houses, and the graduate students to their schools, to receive diplomas. And in the afternoon, everyone is supposed to reconvene in Tercentenary Theatre to hear the university’s commencement speaker. (It was on this occasion in 1947 that George Marshall outlined his plan to aid postwar Europe.) In June of 2002, that speaker was scheduled to be Robert Rubin; Summers had shown his gratitude to his former boss by asking him to speak at Harvard’s commencement. But he had done more than that for Rubin. He had offered Rubin the seat on the Harvard Corporation being vacated by Herbert “Pug” Winokur. (The Enron-affiliated executive had resigned from the Corporation to spare Harvard bad publicity.) With Winokur gone, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin would be a team again.
As part of the Thursday morning rites, every year one undergraduate delivers an address to the assembled crowd. Called the “Senior English Address,” it’s usually about five minutes long. Being chosen to deliver the undergraduate oration is considered a high honor. On the most public, elaborately choreographed occasion of the university year, one undergraduate is entrusted with the opportunity to stand before the university community and speak his mind. It was this responsibility that Harry Lewis
and Rick Hunt wanted Zayed Yasin to compete for. “I had rough ideas,” Yasin said. “I wanted to talk about graduation from Harvard in a post-9/11 world. But I didn’t think I had a shot. I just figured, why not go for it?”
So Yasin wrote a short essay about the tensions between being Muslim and being American, and how in fact they weren’t really tensions at all. How both the Koran and the Constitution promoted peace, justice, and compassion. “As a Muslim, and as an American, I am commanded to stand up for the protection of life and liberty, to serve the poor and the weak, to celebrate the diversity of humankind,” he wrote. “There is no contradiction.”
Yasin focused on “the constant struggle to do what is right.” That, he claimed, was the true meaning of the word jihad—a word that had been “corrupted and misinterpreted” by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In fact, jihad was a universal concept, even an American one. “The American Dream,” Yasin wrote, “is a universal dream, and it is more than a set of materialistic aspirations. It is the power and opportunity to shape one’s own life; to house and feed a family with security and dignity; and to practice your faith in peace. This is our American Jihad.”
The judges were a committee of five: Peter Gomes; Rick Hunt; Nancy Houfek, an acting teacher at Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre, a classics professor named Richard Thomas; and the dean of the extension school, Michael Shinagel. Together they had more than a century of Harvard experience, and they took the university’s traditions seriously. Competing against about twenty other students, Yasin had to submit a draft of the speech in advance and then make it through three rounds of auditions. But in early May, he got the news that he had been chosen to speak at commencement on June 6. There was really only one concern—his speech didn’t have a title. “I was slow on the title bit,” Yasin remembered. So Michael Shinagel suggested one that he thought summed up the speech in a concise way: “My American Jihad.”
About three weeks later, the Crimson ran a short piece on the student commencement speakers. The article listed the title of Yasin’s speech. After that, all hell broke loose.
The protest began with some discussion on the house bulletin boards, websites that each undergraduate house uses to disseminate news and events. Each site has a discussion forum, and in the days after the Crimson story, several students began posting messages to the bulletin boards in which they questioned the appropriateness of a Muslim student giving a commencement speech called “My American Jihad.” They didn’t know what the speech said, as it was customary not to disclose the contents of such speeches before they were delivered. But they didn’t like the sound of it, and some began to circulate a petition requesting that the Harvard administration let them read the speech before commencement.
On May 29, Patrick Healy, the Boston Globe reporter who’d authored the grade inflation articles, wrote a piece on Yasin. Almost instantaneously the media swarm descended. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all the print heavyweights. “Harvard’s Holy War,” proclaimed an editorial in the New York Daily News. Next followed the TV acronyms: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC. Many of the stories and articles questioned Yasin’s definition of jihad. On the Today show, Katie Couric said to Yasin, “In fact, Jayed…Zayed, the dictionary definition describes jihad as ‘a Muslim holy war or spiritual struggles against infidels.’” Couldn’t Yasin understand “why some people might be unnerved by the title of your speech?”
“You’re using an American dictionary to try to find a definition of an Arabic word,” Yasin shot back.
Larry Summers was livid. “The controversy took him by surprise, and he was furious,” said one person familiar with his thinking. This was his first commencement as president. He’d invited his closest professional friend, Robert Rubin, to speak. He’d spent much of the year talking about the importance of patriotism and the university’s respect for military service. And now all anyone was discussing was a five-minute undergraduate speech that he hadn’t even known about. But he was taking heat for it. Summers was receiving hundreds, perhaps thousands of e-mails through his public address, lawrence_summers @harvard.edu. Many of them contained similar language, as if they were part of an organized campaign. Jewish alumni in particular were furious, and some were threatening to withhold donations.
“The speech was obviously an assault,” said Ruth Wisse, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, who is known for her uncompromising pro-Israel views. “Primarily an assault on the Jews, secondarily an assault on America,” she said. “You could so obviously see the professoriat thinking, ‘Oh, isn’t this wonderful? Here we’re really going to show our bonafides as multiculturalists by taking the most unpopular minority view of the moment.’ But jihad is serious. This was an act of contempt for the sensitivities of Jews and Americans.”
Summers was irritated with Yasin, but he was furious with the people who had chosen him. He thought that the members of the commencement committee were just the kind of aging radicals for whom he had no use—classics professor Richard Thomas, for example, was one of Harvard’s most liberal faculty members—and Summers blamed the committee for provoking an unnecessary controversy. Rick Hunt, who organized the commencement ceremonies, bore the brunt of Summers’ outrage. The president couldn’t understand why Hunt could have permitted such apparent insensitivity. Summers felt blindsided. “My guess is, Larry didn’t even know there was a committee on commencement,” Marty Peretz said. “Why would anyone care?”
Summers cared now. He wanted the university on message, just like the White House would be. Harvard staged a commencement to salute its graduates and advance its fundraising and public relations goals, not to ignite international controversy or celebrate freedom of speech. If he could have, Summers would have replaced Yasin as speaker, but he knew it was too late for that—if he ousted Yasin, he’d only provoke more publicity. To regain control, Summers forbade members of the administration from speaking out about Yasin. “Larry told all his top administrative people not to say anything in support of me,” Yasin said.
Privately, Harry Lewis and the members of the committee were appalled. To them, Summers was leaving a Harvard student in the lurch. The president had read the speech; he must have known that its intended message was one of healing and reconciliation. Yet Yasin, a twenty-two-year-old student, one of the best Harvard had to offer, was being ripped to shreds in the press. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews announced that Yasin was a supporter of terrorism who had once thrown a fundraiser for Hamas. People were calling him an anti-Semite. And Summers’ official response was to say that no one could speak on his behalf?
“His attitude about Zayed Yasin was just about the most un-American thing any Harvard president had done in years,” said one faculty member involved in the controversy. Harry Lewis told colleagues that Summers had personally forbidden him to say anything in support of Yasin. Lewis obeyed that command, but he didn’t feel right about it. Later, he would decide that in all his forty years at Harvard, that was the decision he most regretted. “I should have resigned right then,” he told one friend.
As commencement approached, Yasin was under mounting pressure. The debate on campus was only getting hotter. Jewish students were particularly upset, and the angriest among them announced that, to protest Yasin, they would hand out twenty thousand red-white-and-blue ribbons at commencement. That way, twenty thousand people could show Yasin that they were patriots and he was not. An e-mail chain letter was urging attendees to stand up and turn their backs on Yasin when he spoke. Another e-mail petition called on Yasin to publicly condemn “all organizations that directly or indirectly support terrorism anywhere in the world,” and urged his ouster as commencement speaker. Some five thousand students, faculty, parents, and alumni were reported to have signed the petition.
Someone sent Yasin a death threat in the form of a Blue Mountain Arts e-card. The card showed a cute bunny rabbit pulling itself out of a hat. “It seems that you want to die early by making such a sucked-up speech on jihad,” it said. “Yo
u can jolly well take you and your pig religion elsewhere. After september 11th—take this as a warning: Your life will be in danger if you choose to go ahead. You should really go back to whichever country you came from. America does not welcome Moslems. Eat pork and die sucker.”
It was signed, “One Shot One Kill.” The police traced it to a small town in Colorado, but couldn’t identify the sender.
Another e-mail mentioned that “your University allowed Muslim groups to hold fund-raisers on your campus…linked to the support of terrorists. At the same time you do not allow ARMY ROTC classes on campus because you do not like their ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy toward homosexuals. Sounds like your University is out of touch with the zeitgeist of America. Get with it. You are either fer’ us or agin’ us.”
Yasin, who was thin to start with, was losing weight. He wasn’t sleeping. He kept misplacing his commencement cap and gown. His brother Tariq, a Harvard sophomore, had to keep finding them for him. The members of the committee told him that Summers was convinced that he planned to hijack commencement—that on that special and important day, Yasin was going to walk up to the podium in front of tens of thousands of listeners, throw away his speech, and deliver some fire-breathing pro-Palestinian, anti-American screed. That pissed Yasin off—he’d worked hard on his speech; he wasn’t about to just discard what he’d written—but it also demoralized him a little. He’d never intended to provoke such bitter words.
So he compromised. He changed his title from “My American Jihad” to “Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad.” “I was naïve,” Yasin said. “There was more than I realized when we came up with the title—it was a little incendiary. At the same time, I couldn’t just get rid of the word jihad, because that would have been backing down too much.” In a sense, though, the word was removed for him; the Harvard commencement program and every official Harvard publication would simply delete the subtitle.
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