In Trying Times, Harvard Takes Safe Road

Since the beginning of this year, agitators among students and the Faculty have been pushing Harvard’s leaders to take a public stance on the host of new restrictions universities have encountered in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In September, when about a dozen Harvard students were unable to enter the country because of newly-tightened visa policies, several student groups wrote a letter to University President Lawrence H. Summers asking him to lobby on behalf of classmates stranded overseas.

“Standing by while these students are racially profiled goes against the very principles for which this university is respected,” the students wrote.

At a December Faculty meeting, an English professor asked how the University would respond if FBI agents requested the library or e-mail records of a foreign-born scholar—a possibility under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress in October 2001.

And in a February panel entitled “The State v. The Academy,” Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health Barry R. Bloom decried new restrictions on scientific research and criticized the decision of 32 peer-review journals to self-censor under the mounting pressure of national security concerns.

“It’s creating ignorance among the greatest universities and the brightest students,” he said.

At an April Faculty meeting, Summers took the microphone.

Speaking off the cuff, the president delivered his first bold statement on the University’s response to post-Sept. 11 legislation.

Summers invoked Harvards legendary protection of its faculty 50 years ago during the Red Scare, when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and other government officials pressured universities nationwide to purge themselves of communists.

“I think we all, as members of this community, recognize that one of this community’s proudest moments was the way in which it stood up for the rights of its members in the time of the McCarthy period,” he told his assembled colleagues.

Despite Summers’ assessment of the University’s sterling record in the 1950s, closer scrutiny of Harvard’s response to McCarthyism reveals a public façade not entirely consistent with reality.

During the Red Scare, the University’s leaders resolved to stand firm against government probes. But Harvard conducted its own investigations of faculty members suspected of having communist associations, and some of these faculty members lost their jobs.

Today—as fear of terrorism leads Harvard and other universities to grapple with renewed challenges to academic freedom—the president’s bravado masks a position that has been cautious and consistent with Harvard’s historic reluctance to oppose prevailing political winds.

Narrowing Gates

Senior Director for Federal and State Relations Kevin Casey, Harvard’s top lobbyist in Washington, says he ran into Sharon Ladd, Director of the Harvard International Office (HIO), a few days after Sept. 11, 2001.

“I said, ‘You and I are going to be talking a lot this year,’” he told the Faculty at their April meeting.

They have.

In the year and a half since the terrorist attacks, Ladd and Casey have worked together closely to help ensure that national security legislation aimed at keeping out terrorists doesn’t also keep out Harvard students and professors.

This year, more than a dozen foreign students experienced significant delays in getting their visas—and some never made it to Harvard.

Adrian Ow Yung Hwei, a student from Malaysia slated to enter Harvard with the Class of 2006 last fall, expected to receive his visa within a matter of weeks.

Instead, he had to wait three and a half months.

While Hwei was awaiting his visa’s arrival, the Malaysian government—which is funding his education—considered sending him to Australia or New Zealand.

“As one of my friends jocularly noted, ‘down under, and not just geographically,’” Hwei wrote in an e-mail this fall.

But when the visa arrived at last, the Malaysian government decided to allow Hwei to enter Harvard after all—this time with the Class of 2007.

Hwei attributes his unwanted delay to governmental restrictions. Harvard’s hands seemed bound, he explains.

“I’m not sure what more the HIO could have done,” he says.

Ladd says that the HIO was not in any position to act against the government’s new measures.

“We’ve never felt that we’ve had any choice but to meet these requirements,” she says.

And visa delays were far from the only problem on the HIO’s hands.

The Patriot Act also mandated that all institutions of higher education register their international students in a single, national database known as SEVIS.

But what was supposed to be a simplification of the previous paper system turned out to be a logistical nightmare for universities nationwide.

The SEVIS system was released late and ridden with technical flaws. Complaints and pleas from colleges and universities deluged Washington. A January 2002 deadline for approval to use the system was extended to February.

Through the first stages of this very public imbroglio, Harvard remained silent.

Ladd and Casey were working to conform diligently with government requirements.

While many other universities struggled to meet the extended SEVIS deadline, Harvard had been approved to begin entering information in the database before the original deadline fell.

Harvard’s strategy, Casey explained, was to gain credibility in Washington—and to avoid blame for any crises that might arise among hastily developed national-security programs—by complying with the letter of the new laws.

Even so, pressure at the HIO has been mounting in recent weeks. Ladd says her staff is now “working nights and weekends” to get all of Harvard’s data onto SEVIS in time. The HIO plans to close during certain days over the summer so that its staff can devote all of its attention to the SEVIS challenge, she adds.

Harvard’s publicly silent, nose-to-the-grindstone approach to issues facing international students was not the only path open to a university of its stature.

Some of Harvard’s peers quickly complained publically about the possible deleterious effects of national security regulations pertaining to foreign students.

MIT President Charles M. Vest, for instance, took these issues as the topic of his annual report last year, putting the full force of a Cambridge university behind these issues.

Hammerheads and Figureheads

Vest—a tall and lanky West Virginian with an understated, self-deprecating wit—has been among the most informed experts on the implications of post-Sept. 11 legislation for academic freedom.

Speaking at a conference on national security and the academy held at MIT last month, Vest outlined for a group of scholars the constellation of post-Sept. 11 legislation, a virtual alphabet soup of acts and procedures.

After discussing the history and implications of SEVIS, Vest spoke about the Technology Alert List—a combination of old and new procedures used to process the visa applications of researchers undertaking work that could potentially endanger national security. The list has grown rapidly since Sept. 11.

Vest also discussed the Interagency Panel on Advanced Science and Security (IPASS), a work in progress designed to make it easier for foreign scholars to pursue valuable research work in the U.S. under national security regulations.

He said he hoped that the scientific community would soon reach a “point where we have no restrictions on who can participate in research.”

He discussed legal precedents for a new research classification—“sensitive”—that has emerged in the post-Sept. 11 climate. He said he thinks that this new, ambiguously defined category will stymie the free exchange of ideas intrinsic to ordinary research.

Seen as a whole, Vest contended, the new legislation encompasses far more than visa concerns and flawed registration systems.

A host of restrictions on research—and new requirements about reporting information to the government—threaten to interject governmental influence into the fundamental components of academic inquiry, Vest has said repeatedly in public appearances since last year.

“Some people might say I’m being too alarmist on these matters, but I don’t think so,” Vest said. “I care about these things not just because of hoping for the interests of colleges and universities, but because I think it is a general interest for our country.”

John C. Crowley, MIT’s vice president for federal relations, says Vest leads a tight cadre of colleagues pursuing these issues.

“This is an issue of highest concern for the university’s central administration from the president right on down,” he says. “This is a core issue for Chuck, and it really is rooted in his commitment to continuing education in research and development.”

Research concerns have also mobilized some members of Harvard’s administration. The University’s top science adviser leveled similar criticism at the research restrictions mandated by the Patriot Act and other post-Sept. 11 legislation.

“Some of the restrictions are fairly onerous,” said Kathleen M. Buckley, Harvard’s assistant provost for science policy, last month. “They are in conflict with what we define to be our basic academic values.”

But while MIT’s Vest has purposefully and personally taken the role of public vanguard of these issues, Summers has been slow to take a stand—and students and faculty alike have demanded a firmer stance and more action than he has offered on his own.

In April, at the same meeting when Summers made his statement, an anonymous pair of non-citizen junior professors took Summers to task in a prepared statement, read by Professor of Classics Richard F. Thomas.

“We believe that the President and administration of Harvard University can and ought to do more than they have already done to promote and protect the responsible exercise of the right of free expression by all members of our academic community,” read the statement, entitled “The Chill at Harvard.”

The pair of anonymous professors weren’t alone in publicly criticizing Summers’ response to federal restrictions on academic freedom.

Ahmed T. el-Gaili ’98, a law student graduating this June, had to take his first semester of classes this year in London when he did not receive his visa renewal in time. The HIO and several members of the Faculty were helpful in working to help him clear a logistical path back to Cambridge, he says.

But in an e-mail to The Crimson last fall, el-Gaili expressed his hope that Summers would have done more to help students in his position.

“One benefit of having a former cabinet member as University president is the hope that he would deploy his political resources to the benefit of his students,” el-Gaili wrote.

A Supporting Role

Rather than putting the full weight of his Washington clout behind these issues from the start, Summers’ role throughout the year has been to set the tone for a cautious response.

According to Casey, Summers has been working closely with Vest and other university presidents in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to seek solutions to problems that rose as a result of post-Sept. 11 legislation.

He has asked Casey and other University experts to make presentations on their concerns and progress to several facets of the Harvard community.

But while Vest has become a highly-knowledgeable activist on these matters, often taking the role of explaining the problems to a roomful of his peers, Summers has delegated much of this responsibility.

In a January interview, after faculty members had raised concerns about the FBI’s ability to request the e-mail or library records of a foreign-born scholar, Summers expressed uncertainty about whether such a request had ever been made at Harvard.

When asked about the University’s guiding philosophy on such matters in the same interview, Summers said, “The guiding philosophy is that Harvard complies with the law.”

And while Casey says that IPASS has been one of the top items on Harvard’s agenda in D.C. this year, Summers could not provide a response when asked about the program in a recent interview.

Responsibility for issues of post-Sept. 11 legislation at Harvard rests on the shoulders of a few individuals—experts like Casey and Acting General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83—who have led a cautious administration through the brambles of recent government regulations.

With much of the post-Sept. 11 legislation targeted at scientific research, MIT’s president may feel a stronger need to become personally involved, since classified work is undertaken there but not at Harvard, says State Department spokesperson Stuart Patt.

“I think the situation for MIT is slightly different in that Harvard is more liberal arts-oriented than MIT,” Patt says.

But the relative silence of Harvard’s leadership can also be explained by a strategy of diligent compliance—a strategy that Casey says has begun to bear fruit this spring, as Washington has recently been more amenable to Harvard’s concerns.

He says this is largely the result of a relationship of trustworthiness that the University has worked to build.

And the quiet efforts that the University has undertaken to examine and understand the issues arising from recent legislation are about to pay off.

By the end of the month, the Provost’s Committee on Biodefense Research and Regulations will be issuing a report that promises Harvard’s first clear, in-depth and extensively discussed stance on research under new national security legislation.

In his public statement in April, Summers said he would set the University on a course of defending academic freedom, hearkening back to the days of the 1950s, the last time Harvard faced such a significant challenge from the government.

“It would be my pledge that the University will, in the future as in the past, uphold the commitment to academic freedom with all the vigor that we can,” Summers said.

But at the height of the Red Scare, while Summers’ predecessors did take strong public stances in defense of academic freedom, their actions did not always match the high ideals that Summers attributes to them.

Cold War Chills

As fear of communism swept the nation during the Cold War, universities across the nation felt the rapid change in political climate.

Many states instituted loyalty oaths for faculty, and Massachusetts lawmakers proposed a new bill calling for the removal of communist teachers.

In 1952, two congressional committees geared up for an investigation into the communist influence on the nation’s campuses—the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by Rep. Harold Velde, R-Ill., and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Sen. William Jenner, R-Ind.

With a reputation for liberal-leaning professors, Harvard was often referred to as the Kremlin on the Charles, and it came under special scrutiny from McCarthy and other Red-hunters in Washington.

While Harvard’s leaders would not allow any communist faculty on campus—a virtual impossibility in the tense climate of the 1950s—they did pledge to safeguard the intellectual liberty of the University and supported a tenured professor who came under suspicion.

“The common perception was that Harvard was unusually good in comparison to other universities in terms of protecting academic freedom,” says Julie A. Reuben, a historian of higher education and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

In a speech on the eve of Commencement in 1949, University President James Bryant Conant foresaw the challenges that the University would face, and pledged to stand firm.

“As long as I am President of the University, I can assure you there will be no policy of inquiry into the political views of members of the staff and no watching over their activities as private citizens,” Conant said.

“Any suggestion that we should employ here a procedure comparable to that required by the necessities of secret government work and investigate the loyalty of our staff is utterly repugnant to my concept of a university,” he added.

When Jenner and Velde began their investigations into communist influence on college campuses, Conant emphatically denied harboring communists on the faculty, but he also criticized the probes for interfering with universities’ academic freedom.

“There are no known Communists on the Harvard staff, and I do not believe there are any disguised Communists either,” Conant wrote in his final presidential report.

“But even if there were,” he continued, “the damage that would be done to the spirit of this academic community by an investigation aimed at finding a crypto-Communist would be far greater than any conceivable harm such person might do.”

In the spring of 1953, the investigations touched Harvard when Robert G. Davies ’29, then a professor of English at Smith College, testified before the HUAC that he had been part of a communist cell of 15 faculty members when he taught at Harvard in the 1930s.

He provided at least ten names of people who had been in the cell with him, including Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry, who was still teaching at Harvard.

When Furry himself appeared before Velde’s committee in February and again in April, he told the HUAC he was not currently a member of the Communist Party, but did not answer questions about his activities before 1951, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

“It is my strong feeling that the Committee’s policy of interrogating persons on their private beliefs and associations is utterly inconsistent with American traditions of freedom,” he said in a statement to the press in February.

Two other faculty members also invoked the Fifth when questioned by Jenner’s congressional committee—Helen Deane Markham, assistant professor of anatomy, and Leon Kamin, a teaching fellow in the Social Relations department.

The Harvard Corporation decided to retain the three faculty members, concluding in May that Furry and Kamin were no longer affiliated with the Communist Party and Markham had never been a member.

In a statement, the Corporation reaffirmed that it did consider the use of the Fifth Amendment to be “misconduct, though not necessarily grave misconduct”—the latter being the offense for which a faculty member could be fired.

The statement went on to say that the University had little tolerance for faculty who were currently affiliated with the Communist Party.

“We would regard with the gravest concern the presence on our teaching staff today of a person who is now under the domination of the Communist party...It is beyond the scope of academic freedom,” the statement read. “In the absence of extraordinary circumstances, we would regard present membership in the Communist Party by a member of our faculty as grave misconduct, justifying removal.”

In June 1953, The Crimson published a special edition on academic freedom, in which editors reported that 100 professors across the nation had pleaded the Fifth while under investigation by Congress that year.

“Fifty-four had been dismissed or suspended from their jobs. Others were on probation or under official censure. All, according to polls of public opinion, had received the tacit condemnation of their fellow citizens,” The Crimson reported.

Harvard’s decision to keep the three faculty represented a significant move at a time when the use of the Fifth Amendment was widely considered to be an admission of guilt.

But in other cases involving non-tenured faculty, the University’s record was not as exemplary, despite the oft-told story of Harvard’s bravery against McCarthyism cited in Summers’ speech.

“The reason that Summers is ‘congratulating’ Harvard is because the University did not fire its one tenured Fifth Amendment witness,” says Ellen Schrecker ’60, a professor at Yeshiva University and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.

“It did, however, get rid of untenured people. It just simply eased them out,” she says. “This was what every university was doing at the time. Harvard was no better than any school and it was no worse.”

Jobs in Jeopardy

With a finding of “grave misconduct” on his record for three years, Furry was not promoted from associate professor to full professor until 1962, but he fared better than Kamin and Markham, who did not have tenure.

Neither of their positions were renewed at the end of their terms, and both had trouble finding new jobs.

Kamin taught at a Canadian university until the late 1960s, when he was hired by Princeton’s psychology department, which he eventually chaired. Markham got a job at Albert Einstein Medical School, one of the few institutions that would hire blacklisted academics.

During the 1950s, at least five other non-tenured faculty appointees had their jobs put in jeopardy when Dean of the Faculty McGeorge Bundy questioned them about possible communist ties, according to Schrecker’s book.

Four of them left the University.

The fifth, History of Science graduate student Everett I. Mendelsohn, told Bundy he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He was allowed to stay and is now a professor in the department.

“As you can imagine, for a first-year graduate student about to become a teaching fellow, that was not a very comfortable moment,” says Mendelsohn, who received tenure in 1960. “Certainly other people were treated much more harshly.”

Mendelsohn says that he ran into Bundy at the bank several years after the incident. The former dean apologized to him, and told him that the University only suspected Mendelsohn because his name had turned up on a list Harvard bought from anti-communist groups.

Mendelsohn says his name may have appeared on the list because he had been a politically active pacifist in college.

Another member of the faculty who was suspected to have communist associations was Harvard Business School (HBS) Assistant Professor Raymond S. Ginger.

In 1954, HBS administrators questioned Ginger, a professor who had done research on Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. FBI files show that HBS had been given an anonymous tip that Ginger and his wife, civil rights lawyer Ann Fagan Ginger, were likely to be called before the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Communism.

When Ray and Ann Ginger refused to answer questions about their affiliation with the Communist Party, the administrators asked Ray Ginger to resign. He and his wife, who was pregnant at the time, were told that he would only receive the last month of pay remaining on his contract if the family left the area immediately, according to Ann Ginger.

Ray Ginger eventually found work in Canada.

In 2000, Ann Ginger wrote a letter to the Board of Overseers demanding an apology for the treatment of her late husband. The response she received, from then-Board of Overseers President Sharon Gagnon, admitted that the University had forced Ray Ginger to resign but stopped short of an apology.

“I would not presume to...second-guess the motives or judgments of individuals in that difficult time,” Gagnon wrote. “It seems clear, however, that Harvard took an action in the case of Mr. Ginger that many thoughtful people today, looking back, would not find appropriate.”

Ann Ginger, now the executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, Calif., has spent the past few years trying to get Harvard to issue an apology to her. She calls Gagnon’s response “absolutely unconscionable” and says Harvard should own up to its actions during the 1950s.

“To get a job at Harvard was a big deal. To lose that job for that reason means you’re blacklisted, means you cannot get a decent job anywhere in the United States,” she says. “That is a commission of a crime by Harvard University.”

According to Schrecker, other universities have issued apologies for firing professors accused of being communists during the McCarthy era—but those professors were often tenured, meaning that their universities specifically terminated lifetime contracts.

But since Harvard only let go of non-tenured people—whose employment was not permanently guaranteed—Schrecker says the cases are “muddier” and it is harder to prove the firings were politically motivated.

The University’s approach during the 1950s, Schrecker says, was to conduct its own investigations of any faculty members who came under government scrutiny, and to require graduate students with potential communist ties to “clear themselves with the FBI.”

“When faculty members were brought up and questioned before some of the investigative committees of that period, the University responded,” Schrecker says. “They were afraid of the public repercussions of not responding.”

And Mendelsohn agrees that, for non-tenured faculty whose jobs were more vulnerable, the University did not always allow them to stay as it had done with Furry.

“They were not specifically let go for political reasons,” he says. “They were not kept around.”

The Public Face

The University’s treatment of non-tenured faculty during the 1950s presents a stark contrast not only to the way it is remembered today but also to the image Harvard’s leaders projected at the time.

Conant’s public statements suggested that he would support any faculty member who came under congressional investigation.

But according to Brandeis historian Morton Keller, co-author of Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University, when Furry invoked the Fifth before the HUAC, Conant wanted the Corporation to revoke his tenure.

In 1953 Conant stepped down from the presidency and was replaced by Nathan M. Pusey ’28, a public foe of McCarthy. Unlike Conant, a scientist who took part in the Manhattan Project, Pusey did not have a background in national security and did not believe professors should be fired for taking the Fifth.

“Under Pusey, there was probably less danger to communists on the Faculty then there would have been if Conant had stayed,” Keller says.

McCarthy thought so too, telling the press that Pusey was a “rabid anti-anti-Communist.”

When McCarthy publicly demanded that the new University President fire Furry, Pusey said in a press conference, “Harvard is unalterably opposed to Communism. It is dedicated to free inquiry by free men.”

But under Pusey’s watch, many non-tenured faculty found their jobs in jeopardy.

“There were these public statements which were good,” Schrecker says. “But on the other hand, the University’s behavior was to essentially collaborate with many of the anti-communist investigations.”

She says this was common for university leaders at the time.

“There was a lot of hypocrisy about academic freedom,” she says.

Reuben says the understanding of academic freedom has changed since the 1950s, when it often meant that faculty could publish or speak freely only within their own field.

“That was a much more limited notion of academic freedom than our current conception of free speech,” she says. “From the perspective of many people at the time, they weren’t violating faculties’ academic freedom.”

According to Reuben, the more modern understanding of intellectual liberties developed in the 1960s.

“In part I think it was a response to the political repression of the ’50s,” she says. “People started thinking that universities should protect all kinds of speech, not just scholarly speech.”

Leading the Way

The national security concerns during the Cold War, and the government-initiated probes of communist activities, led leaders at Harvard and other universities to take precautions that many historians, with the benefit of hindsight, call unnecessary.

“Universities, like the rest of society, over-responded to the threat of communism,” Reuben says.

Now, as administrators face new national security concerns associated with terrorism, it is still too early to judge their response. But Reuben says she expects most institutions will cooperate with the government’s regulations.

“That’s pretty consistent with what they did in the ’50s and what they’ve always done,” she says. “Most universities are both too dependent on government money and also don’t want to be labeled unpatriotic.”

Schreker says that although the post-Sept. 11 legislation raises questions about free speech, individual rights and academic freedom, the current situation is distinct from the Red Scare.

“I’m always asked, is McCarthyism going to return,” Schrecker says. “It’s clearly not the same thing.”

Mendelsohn points out that people today are “a lot more aware of the implications of attempts to limit freedom of speech.”

Fifty years after his face to face encounter with McCarthyism, Mendelsohn is one of the more outspoken faculty members on issues of academic freedom that have arisen in the post-Sept. 11 era.

He says he believes administrators today are aware of the issues and calls the actions they have taken “responsible.”

Foreign students and faculty members alike have agreed that the University covered all of its bases in responding to post-Sept. 11 concerns.

But at an institution that prides itself on its flagship role in the world of higher education, citing a legacy of defending academic freedom, some faculty wonder why Harvard’s leadership has not taken a more prominent stance on the Patriot Act and other post-Sept. 11 legislation.

“I would love to see the president more outspoken on the necessity of protecting freedom,” Mendelsohn says. “That to my mind would be helpful, not only for Harvard, but I think the president of Harvard has the role of providing leadership on critical issues having to do with the academy.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.