In About-Face, English Dept. Re-Invites Anti-Israeli Poet

Concerned about the message it was sending on free speech, the English department yesterday renewed the invitation it cancelled just one week ago to Tom Paulin, an award-winning Irish poet who has expressed violently anti-Israeli views.

English department chair Lawrence Buell said the department’s faculty met last night for two and a half hours and voted to re-invite Paulin. The vote, which was unanimous apart from two abstentions, marks a reversal of an earlier decision by a smaller group of English professors to cancel the speech.

A main factor in the decision, Buell wrote in an e-mail, was the “widespread concern and regret for the fact that the decision not to hold the event could easily be seen, and indeed has been seen—both within Harvard and beyond—as an unjustified breach of the principle of free speech within the academy.”

University President Lawrence H. Summers, who said in a speech two months ago he is concerned that anti-semitism is on the rise in “progressive intellectual communities,” had conversations with English department faculty before Paulin’s invitation to deliver the annual Morris Gray Lecture was first cancelled.

According to The National Review, Summers said privately he was “horrified” that Paulin, who has called Israel a “historical obscenity,” had been invited to campus.

Facing protests from students, alumns and faculty, Buell announced last week that Paulin would not be coming to campus after all.

Then, last night, the department decided to re-invite Paulin.

“The meeting was patient, it was passionate, and it went to the heart of everything this—or any university—stands for,” said Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham.

Paulin, a renowned poet and Oxford lecturer who is currently teaching at Columbia University, has said that Brooklyn-born Jews who move to Israeli settlements in disputed territories “should be shot.”

His re-invitation is sure to ignite protest on campus.

“If this fellow is coming back to Harvard, we will be out there to give him the reception he deserves,” said Max P. Davis ’04, a member of Harvard Hillel’s Social Action Committee. “If he comes back and has his free speech, I’m sure I’ll have mine as well.”

Professor of English and American Literature and Language Peter M. Sacks cited a need for diverse ideas and viewpoints at Harvard as underlying the department’s decision.

“We felt that we wished to affirm our Constitutional and intellectual commitment to a vigorous and independent willingness to encounter and if necessary debate divergent points of view,” Sacks wrote in an e-mail, “and we therefore decided to renew the invitation.”

Buell also noted that the members of the English department who initially helped decide to cancel the talk “might have acted under a sense of pressure.”

At the time of the original decision, more than 100 students, alumns and faculty members were protesting anti-Israeli views expressed by Paulin.

Alan J. Stone, Harvard’s vice president for government, community and public affairs, said that as of last night, he was not aware of the English department’s decision, and that Summers had no comment.

Professor of Psychology Patrick Cavanagh, who signed the Harvard-MIT divestment petition and criticized Summers for exerting what he said was inappropriate pressure on members of the English department to cancel Paulin’s visit, called the renewal of the invitation “a positive move.”

“I’m happy that the English department has really decided on its own,” he said.

According to a colleague of Paulin, the poet is likely to accept the reinvitation.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University who said he is a colleague and friend of Paulin, returned a telephone message left for Paulin at Columbia’s English Department.

“I’m sure he’ll accept,” Shapiro said. “It’s not just Tom Paulin that’s relieved about this—it’s a lot of other people relieved about this.”

Some faculty members stressed the fact that yesterday’s meeting was the first by the entire English department.

“There had been no meeting of the English department, on this issue, before this one,” Graham said. “This was the first meeting the English department had a chance to convene on this matter.”

Buell said the decision to renew the invitation took place without consultation with Paulin, and “in no sense endorses the extreme statements by Mr. Paulin that occasioned last week’s protests against the invitation.”

Paulin has repeatedly said he is not anti-Semitic, and that he wishes for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East.

Harvard’s about-face may also have implications for other schools.

The University of Vermont originally scheduled a talk by Paulin on its campus for today, but canceled it some time after the lecture at Harvard was canceled, according to a receptionist for the University of Vermont’s English department.

No faculty members from the department or administrators from the school were available for comment yesterday afternoon.

—Alexandra N. Atiya contributed to the reporting of this story.

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