Poet Flap Drew Summers’ Input

University President Lawrence H. Summers corresponded with senior faculty members of the English department shortly before the department decided Tuesday to cancel a scheduled lecture by Tom Paulin, an award-winning Irish poet who has expressed anti-Israeli views.

English department chair Lawrence Buell and Alan J. Stone, Harvard’s vice president for government, community and public affairs, both said yesterday that Summers communicated with members of the department prior to the cancellation of Paulin’s appearance, which had been scheduled for this evening.

Summers has spoken publicly against anti-Semitism, including a statement at Morning Prayers two months ago when he called divestment movements “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

But Buell wrote in an e-mail that “President Summers did not request the cancellation of the lecture” and that the decision was motivated by the department’s desire to avoid undue controversy.

“The decision not to hold the lecture was not in any direct sense influenced by President Summers’ prior remarks on anti-semitism,” he wrote.

Instead, the department decided to cancel “when it became fully clear to us that Mr. Paulin’s visit was likely to produce undue consternation and divisiveness.... Mr. Paulin readily and graciously agreed.”

But at least one professor questioned the role played by Summers in the cancellation.

“As soon as the president contacts a department, his interests are known,” said Professor of Psychology Patrick Cavanagh, who signed the Harvard-MIT divestment petition and has criticized Summers in the past for equating the petition with anti-Semitism. “His influence is obvious. We ignore his requests at our peril.”

“It’s disingenuous to say that [Summers] contacted the department and that the decision was the department’s own,” he added.

But Stone said he would not call Summers’ correspondence with Buell and other department members “major.”

Buell wrote that he also conferred with Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and many other colleagues about how to handle the situation, adding that he does not know which other English department faculty members Summers may have spoken with.

Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was slated to deliver the annual Morris Gray Lecture tonight because of his literary accomplishments and stature as a poet, Buell wrote.

But those who had protested Paulin’s scheduled lecture on campus, including many students, pointed to some of his public statements about Israel.

According to Al-Ahram Weekly, the English-language edition of a leading Cairo newspaper, Paulin said in an interview that Israel as a state is “a historical obscenity.”

The paper also reported that Paulin said that Brooklyn-born Jews who move to Israeli settlements in disputed territories “should be shot.”

Public protest to the cancellation has not gone unnoticed by the English department. Though more than 100 students, alumni and faculty contacted the department on Tuesday protesting the scheduled visit, others have since expressed their concern about the security of free speech within the University.

“The chief concern of faculty and outsiders seems to be compromise to the principle of free speech within the academy,” Buell wrote. “Some have also noted that figures much more consistently identified with advocacy of violence, figures indeed responsible for perpetrating crimes of violence, have spoken at Harvard and other leading universities in the past.”

He added that he thinks a majority of the department feels the cancellation was a responsible decision.

Loker Professor of English Robert J. Kiely said the cancellation will “absolutely” be a discussion topic at the department’s Tuesday meeting.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.