Here was a new challenge of globalization. As Harvard extended its presence around the globe, it also searched for donors worldwide. The idea made perfect sense. In many countries, the Harvard name is even more revered than it is in the United States, and for wealthy foreigners, the idea of linking themselves to the Harvard brand holds enormous appeal. The problem for Harvard is that it’s considerably more difficult to investigate how foreign donors make and spend their money than it is to conduct background checks on Americans. In 1993 and 1994, for example, Saudi Arabia’s Bin Laden Group contributed $2 million to the law and design schools. After 9/11, the bin Laden contributions became an issue, but Harvard officials insisted that the business had no connection to Osama bin Laden, and that if anyone could show that the money was tainted, Harvard would return it. Of course, trying to disentangle the finances of the bin Laden family is a task that the FBI and the Justice Department have found challenging, and Harvard didn’t appear to be trying very hard to do it. Its only public action was to delete details of the bin Laden gift from the university website. And if a connection could be found, a common argument made at Harvard (and, to be sure, at plenty of other universities) is that it’s better for crooks, tyrants, and killers to give their cash to a university than to spend it on nefarious evildoing. At least a university would put it to good use.
Rachel Fish did not agree. She took all that rhetoric about truth seriously. What did the Harvard name stand for if it could be rented out to any bidder, no matter how unsavory? “Harvard sets the tone for so many universities,” she said. “It sets the precedent.” On March 19, Fish met with divinity school dean William Graham to argue that Harvard should return Sheik Zayed’s money. After all, Larry Summers had taken to the pulpit of Memorial Church to denounce anti-Semitism. The president of Harvard, she was sure, would be on her side.
Fish’s due diligence put Graham in an extremely awkward position. A scholar of Middle Eastern religious history, Graham is an affable North Carolinian who has been a member of the Harvard faculty since1973. Though he had served as acting dean since January 2002, when Father J. Bryan Hehir resigned the position, Graham did not want to run the divinity school. He had apparently been a candidate for deanships at Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was not offered either job. Now he was interested in an FAS position. For years he had paid his dues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by volunteering for soporific committees and thankless administrative positions. He had been a dedicated master of Currier House, well known for his support of the students. But the head of the divinity school presided over a lackluster endowment, a fractious faculty, and a politicized student body. Graham wanted something better.
Such a post was not in the offing, however, and so Graham accepted Summers’ imprecations to take the divinity school job. “Bill probably figured that he had the opportunity to turn the divinity school into a truly secular, intellectual institution,” said a colleague who knows him well. The appointment was greeted with suspicion in some quarters; Graham would be the divinity school’s first dean who was not an ordained minister or priest, fueling the theory that Summers wanted to make the divinity school less of a training ground for ministers and more a center for scholars of religion. As Summers had said, somewhat obliquely, in a September 2002 speech at the school, “In what ways should Christianity be privileged and not be privileged, recognizing the school’s traditions, strengths, and need for focus, and also taking into account growing religious pluralism?” His audience could read between the lines.
Graham also had another question mark hovering over his deanship. In the spring of 2002, he had signed the petition to divest from Israel. A week or so later, he changed his mind and asked that his name be removed, which it was. “I took my name off when I discovered that [the petition organizers] were putting the petition online,” Graham said. According to Graham, the divestment website contained links to “at least” one website that he considered anti-Semitic. (Petition organizers deny the accusation.)
Inevitably, Graham’s change of heart convinced no one. When Summers announced that Graham was his choice to be the divinity school dean, both opponents and supporters of divestment instantly suspected that Graham had taken his name off the petition because Summers had demanded that Graham renounce the petition as a condition of being appointed. Graham denied the charge, saying, “You’ll have to ask Larry about that. He appointed me. He knew very well that I had signed [the petition]. I told him I had signed it.”
Though he officially became dean in August 2002, almost two years after the Sheik Zayed donation was made, Graham had welcomed the money when it was given. “This endowment is a most welcome gift,” he told the Harvard Gazette. But when Rachel Fish informed him of Sheik Zayed’s extracurricular activities, Graham was concerned. He promised to investigate the matter, and he subsequently told reporters that if the charges were true, the divinity school would give back the money. But when Fish mentioned that she was sending a copy of all her research to President Summers, Graham insisted she needn’t do that. “He said, ‘I’ll keep [Larry] informed,’” Fish said.
Fish responded that she would send her research to Summers anyway. “I’m giving you the chance to reclaim the moral authority of the divinity school,” she said.
It was a tense meeting at an already tense time on campus. At 10:30 that night—5:30 A.M., March 20, Bagdad time—United States aircraft began dropping bombs on Iraq. The war had begun.
The peace rally commenced at 12:30 the next afternoon, when some one thousand students, faculty, and Cambridge locals gathered in front of the statue of John Harvard. It was a miserable day, cold and wet and gray. The winter snow had melted—more would fall soon enough—leaving the Yard so muddy that it resembled the pig pen it had been during the seventeenth century. The protesters walked gingerly lest the mud suck the shoes off their feet. Some people stood on the cardboard signs that they had intended to wave.
As Harvard police cars quietly cruised along the Yard’s paved paths and parked in its corners, a group of protesters chanted, “No war on Iraq / Bill of rights / Take it back!” Near them a man carried a sign that said DRAFT BEER NOT BOYS. One student waved a sign saying HARVARD STUDENTS WANT PEACE, the words scrawled on the back of an Amazon.com box. Members of a local church were passing out granola bars.
There were counterprotesters too, a group of young men with shaved heads dressed up in military fatigues. Their signs read, I LOVE BUSH AND RUMSFELD, and IF YOU WANT TO PROTEST, GO TO FRANCE. They looked too young to be Harvard students, and they hung out on the fringe of the protest. About half the crowd, though, just seemed curious, milling around and talking. In fact, there was no consensus at Harvard about the war. Most of those who supported it did so with reservations; most of those who opposed it admitted that they might be wrong. The anti-war certitude of 1969 was ancient history.
A couple of hundred yards away, in Memorial Hall, the freshmen were receiving their housing assignments for sophomore year. Whooping and hollering, they made so much noise that one local news crew would air footage of them, mistaking the rambunctious freshmen for anti-war protesters. Almost directly opposite John Harvard, on the other side of the Yard, a burly police officer stationed himself outside the front door of Massachusetts Hall. No one had threatened the president’s office, but Harvard was taking no chances. Everyone knew how Summers felt about protesters.
A student named Michael Getlin stood before the microphone. Just days before, Getlin told the crowd, he had withdrawn his application to join the Marines. It was not an easy decision, Getlin said. Both his father and uncle had fought in Vietnam; their family took military service very seriously. But the war, Getlin said, “represents a trajectory for our foreign policy of which I will take no part. It is an effort that will alienate our country from the global community that we have worked so hard to create.” Getlin looked distraught and a little lost.
After Getlin came a lecturer in the Departme
nt of Religion named Brian Palmer, a thin, wispy thirty-eight-year-old with a shock of dark hair, thick glasses, and a voice so fragile it sounded as if he were struggling for breath. Palmer taught one of Harvard’s most popular courses, Personal Choice and Global Transformation, which had some five hundred students that semester. Like Tim McCarthy, Palmer knew that, as an untenured professor, his political activities would not help his chances of staying employed at Harvard—but he also knew that many students were desperate to hear professors who connected the classroom to the real world. “The press won’t tell the truth about this war,” Palmer declared. “CNN will show Iraqis dancing in the streets, but it won’t show burned and crushed and obliterated bodies.” The line brought an approving cheer.
Behind him and to the right was Tim McCarthy, wearing khakis and a black windbreaker with a white armband on his left arm. He kept striding back and forth in front of John Harvard. McCarthy looked impatient, as if he had something to get off his chest and couldn’t wait much longer. He would not have to. Palmer finished, and McCarthy took the megaphone from him. The crowd applauded just to see him. Many of these people seemed to know McCarthy, and not only because there was a large contingent from the Protest Lit class on hand.
McCarthy began intensely but almost quietly, so the crowd had to hush to hear him. “I came here today to talk about two things: dissent and God,” McCarthy said. “We live in a truly historic moment…where dissent is vilified and where God is invoked to justify the most sinful impulses of our humanity. Our leaders tell us that dissent is actually ‘un-American’ and that God loves the United States more than any other nation on earth. We are expected to shut up and pray that God continue to bless America. But I am here today to speak out against this war, and to pray for peace.”
Throughout the crowd, heads began to nod.
“Today we have walked out of classes, out of work, to show our opposition to the Bush administration’s war on Iraq,” McCarthy continued. “We have decided to encourage our students to walk out with us, because we are not content to simply read and study American protest writings. We are not content with confining our work to classroom discussions…. We believe that education means nothing if we, your teachers, do not practice what we teach.
“We are at war,” McCarthy said. “We must articulate—as clearly and loudly as possible—our grievances with those currently in power. The Bush administration has made the case for war against Iraq….They would have us believe that there is a connection between the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the country of Iraq.
“There is not.
“They would have us believe that there is a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
“There is not.
“They would have us believe that Saddam Hussein poses a clear and present threat to the security of the United States.
“He does not.”
McCarthy knew what he was doing, appropriating the rhythm and repetition of orators such as Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the call and response of African American music and prayer. The crowd murmured its approval. McCarthy was so focused, his cheeks were turning red. His voice had increased in volume until he was almost shouting. He was connecting with this audience, firing them up, making them believe, at a moment when they felt demoralized and helpless, that they were neither.
“I can’t help but think that God is not happy with the world right now,” McCarthy continued. “He cannot be pleased with our greed and arrogance and violent disregard for His children. But we can still save our world. As Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow countrymen to do during another time of great national crisis, we must embrace ‘the better angels of our nature.’
“We are at war, my brothers and sisters. This great crisis will be the first test of our generation. May we find the moral courage to resist this unjust war. May we find the strength to be prophets of peace. And may the God we all share bless those of us in America and across the globe who are engaged in the work of peace, so that we can save our souls before it’s too late.”
McCarthy was done and the crowd cheered its appreciation, and then the demonstration shifted to march down Massachusetts Avenue, toward MIT and Boston. In front of Mass Hall, immobile and unresponsive, the police officer looked on, his hands clasped behind his back.
About a week after she met with Dean Graham, Rachel Fish sent her research on Sheik Zayed to Larry Summers’ office. When she didn’t hear from him after a few days, she called to confirm that he’d received it. Clayton Spencer, a presidential aide, assured Fish that he had and that she shouldn’t “panic.” President Summers was well aware of the issue, but he expected Dean Graham to handle it.
In the meantime, Graham had hired a graduate student to look into Fish’s accusations, saying he’d report back to her in four to six weeks. Fish was skeptical. “He was very polite,” she said. “I think he probably thought that I would go away.” After all, time was on Graham’s side; Fish would graduate in early June, and after graduation, students tended to let such issues fall by the wayside. They moved away. They got jobs. Things that seemed important on campus were relegated to the back burner, then gradually abandoned.
Weeks passed, and Fish didn’t hear anything, but she was far from idle. She was working with other Jewish students and Jewish organizations on campus to spread the word about the Zayed gift, so that they could bring pressure to bear if Harvard did not address the issue. At the same time, Bill Graham was doing his best to investigate her claims. He was in contact with the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and a former UAE ambassador to the United States. “We were all appalled when we heard about this center,” Graham said. “But it’s very difficult to find out who’s running what and who’s paying attention to what in a situation like that. There are thousands of things named Zayed in the UAE. I mean, you can find Taco Bells with Sheik Zayed’s name on them.” Graham certainly agreed with Fish’s estimation of the Zayed Centre. “This was producing very ugly anti-Semitic stuff,” he said. “Stuff that we wanted to have no part of whatsoever.”
The situation was delicate not just for Harvard, but also for the United States government. Even considering the work of the Zayed Centre, the UAE is one of the most moderate, pro-Western countries in the Middle East, and it has made itself into a locus for international business. Companies such as CNN and Microsoft have regional headquarters there. And it is an important U.S. ally; the UAE is the only Middle Eastern country with a port large enough to dock an aircraft carrier, and it allows the United States to do so. For Harvard to return Sheik Zayed’s money could spark an international incident that would damage U.S.-UAE relations at a time when the United States needed every Middle Eastern ally it could get.
Harvard was also building a relationship with the UAE, of which the divinity school gift was probably the least important part. In April, officials from that country attended a conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. GSD dean Peter Rowe lauded Dubai, one of the seven “micro-kingdoms” that constitute the UAE, as “a very important…connecting link between the East and the West.” Meanwhile, representatives from the Harvard Medical School were meeting with officials in Dubai to discuss a joint venture between the medical school and a UAE complex called Dubai Health Care City, in which Harvard would set up a medical education program. One Harvard medical conference there had expected 300 attendees and instead hosted 1,300.
A strong relationship between Harvard and the United Arab Emirates would further Larry Summers’ goal of globalizing the university and could also prove immensely lucrative. If, on the other hand, Harvard returned Sheik Zayed’s money, it could damage the university’s relationship not only with Sheik Zayed, but any number of Arab leaders who might not appreciate the idea of an American university insulting an Arab head of state—thus alienating a pool of potential donors with almost infinite wealth.
After eight weeks with still no word from Dean Graham, on Friday, May 10, Fish got a phone call from a B
oston Globe reporter who’d heard about the controversy. She e-mailed Graham that she wanted to meet again, but that she planned to talk to the reporter. The next day, an angry Graham wrote back. “Dear Rachel, I was about to write to you just now to set up a time [to meet] when I got a call [from the Globe] indicating that you have already been talking to the media,” Graham said. “If that is true, I don’t think I can be of much help to you or meet with you…. This kind of irresponsibility and unwillingness on your part to act in good faith when that is how I have dealt with you does not make me feel able to take this matter up with you in the detail that I wanted to…. I expect to have a full report for the community before the end of May, and I think you might as well wait for that with everyone else. Sincerely, William Graham.”
Fish would not simply “wait for that.” The Globe ran its story on May 11; it prompted an explosion of media interest. NPR, the CBS Evening News, the Los Angeles Times, and other news organizations all ran features on the controversy. Convinced that working within the system was doing no good, Fish granted interviews, appeared on talk shows, and wrote an op-ed piece in the Crimson. “I honestly thought—and this may have been naïve—that once the issue was brought to [Dean Graham’s] attention, he would contact the president of the UAE and say, ‘I disassociate myself with this,’” she said. “What made me question his intent was that he’d been dragging his feet, and that made me nervous.”
What Fish later found out was that, around mid-May, Larry Summers had taken the decision out of Bill Graham’s hands. He had come to the conclusion that the matter was too sensitive, the stakes too high, for him not to take control. But Fish couldn’t have known that from press accounts; Summers refused to speak about the issue, either not returning reporters’ phone calls or letting spokeswoman Lucie McNeil proffer a vague comment. The stonewalling typified Summers’ approach to the media: If something good happened, he wanted credit. If a controversy arose, he let an underling take the hit. In this case, he had no intention of being tarred by what seemed a no-win controversy over a gift made before he became president to a school that he didn’t respect. That approach to press management was business as usual in Washington, but to the growing number of people around campus who noted their president’s chronic invisibility on matters where his reputation might be even slightly nicked, it suggested that Summers was more concerned with his image than with Harvard’s.
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