Kennedy Assails Bush Policy at Sanders Event

U.S. Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy ’54-’56 joined several Harvard professors and other accomplished artists, academics, politicians and scientists inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at a ceremony in Sanders Theater on Saturday.

Among the 177 academy inductees were 13 Harvard professors, including William L. Fash, Bowditch professor of Central American and Mexican archaeology and ethnology, Higgins Professor of Mathematics Joseph D. Harris and Katharine Park, chair of women’s studies and Radcliffe professor of the history of science.

U.S. Rep. Amory Houghton ’50 (R-N.Y.) was also included in Saturday’s ceremony.

“Election to the American Academy is the result of a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions,” said President of the Academy Patricia Meyer Spacks.

Kennedy used his speech at the ceremony to criticize President Bush’s national security strategy and compare it to past American political and military precedents.

“The Administration’s discussion of self-defense often uses the terms ‘pre-emptive’ and ‘preventive’ interchangeably.

However, in the realm of international relations, these two terms have long had very different meanings,” he said.

Kennedy explained past examples of preventive and pre-emptive warfare and went on to classify Bush’s plans for military reaction against Iraq as “21st century American Imperialism.”

“Might does not make right,” he said.

“America cannot write its own rules for the modern world. To attempt to do so would be unilateralism run amok.”

The list of inductees is divided into five distinct classes, including mathematics and physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts and public affairs and business.

During the ceremony, a new member of each class delivered remarks about his or her research.

Speakers from each class included astrophysicist Edward Kolb, African novelist Chinua Achebe and reporter Daniel Schorr.

The Academy, whose headquarters is behind the Harvard Divinity School, was founded in 1780 to “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”

It annually inducts a class of American fellows and a smaller group of honorary foreign members.