DOOR DROPPED: How to Start a Fight

It only took two tries for Travis R. Kavulla ’06 to achieve his vision. As newly elected editor of The Salient, Kavulla wanted his magazine to get attention. The second issue of the conservative biweekly has done that—and maybe more. The Oct. 13 magazine won not just reaction on the editorial pages of The Crimson (standard fare for the controversial magazine) but also readership in University Hall, where the president and other members of the Harvard Islamic Society (HIS) sat down with Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd and S. Allen Counter, the College’s de facto diversity czar, to discuss the whether the back-page image adhered to standards of journalistic ethics.

Kavulla and his team had placed a parody ad for the Fulla doll, a Barbie alternative popular throughout the Islamic world for its “Muslim Values,” on the back page, taking some liberties with the “Muslim Values” claim. “And She Really Talks!” the fake ad boasts, listing some (also fake) programmed phrases: “Yes, Husband,” “Human Rights? That’s silly,” and “Let’s push Israel into the sea!”

The parody was part of Kavulla’s campaign to return The Salient to what he sees as its golden age: two years ago, when a Salient editor’s comments sparked a campus debate so ubiquitous the Undergraduate Council passed a bill in response. So in a way, the campaign was working: people were reading, people were talking, and people were getting angry. But Kavulla’s attempt to copy the style of his predecessor also resurrected some of the same issues that predecessor faced—namely, where to draw the line on provocative speech.

OVER THE RAINBOW

The October parody met criticism nearly as soon as it was published. Hebah M. Ismail ’06 wrote a Crimson editorial in response to the parody. “There are certain components necessary to have a tolerant and accepting community,” Ismail, who is also a Crimson editor, says. “And I think The Salient crossed the line.”

Kavulla, who is also a Crimson editor and a former Crimson editorial executive, answered Ismail’s concerns on the Crimson’s Editorial page the next day. The back page, he explained in an editorial, was a parody designed to critique the Fulla doll’s proud endorsement of Muslim values. “The Salient’s back page is a parody premised on the seemingly absurd yet real attempt to turn licentious, Western Barbie into an equivalent befitting the Arab world, where a number of states are dominated by radical Islamic values,” he wrote.

In an interview, Kavulla was less diplomatic. “I think the stereotypes are already out there. Their being mentioned in a campus publication certainly is not going to further them,” he says. “We’re just creating a discussion.”

Since its institution in 1981, the Salient has certainly done a lot of that. During the editorship of Gladden J. Pappin ’04, gay rights advocacy provided constant fodder for the magazine’s criticisms. In a Dec. 2002 letter to the editor, Pappin praised a 1920 secret court that disciplined homosexual students. The Harvard administrators’ actions had not been public until an article in Fifteen Minutes reported on them that December.

“Unfortunately, promoting morality is something both the College and religious ministries on campus do very little of these days,” Pappin wrote in the letter, titled “Secret Court Rightly Punished Immorality.”

“The College should reestablish standards of morality and strongly consider disciplinary measures for those violating them. Such punishments would apply to heterosexuals, of course, but even more so to homosexuals, whose activities are not merely immoral but perverted and unnatural,” he wrote.

The letter sparked exactly the kind of discourse Kavulla fondly looks back on today. A UC “Tolerance Bill” allocating UC money to student groups that promote tolerance was then passed only after heated debate, during which students described their personal experiences with homophobia, according to a Crimson article published at the time.

Pappin was voted extended floor time to respond to critics. “Homophobia is not something that even counts as a phobia,” the Crimson quoted him. “Homophobia is not based on anxiety or fear. It’s based on disgust for homosexual sexual actions.”

And while almost a dozen students reportedly described a homophobic Harvard with impassioned emotion, a few others felt comfortable disagreeing. Joshua A. Barro ’05, a UC representative who is also openly gay, opposed the bill, calling Harvard a “great place to be gay,” according to The Crimson. “Idiots like Gladden Pappin are lonely idiots,” he said.

But some worried the major product of the meeting, the $700 grant, might put limits on the free discourse that came before it. “If we are to discuss the issue of tolerance on this campus, then we must discuss our tolerance of Mr. Pappin and every other student who might profess an unpopular opinion,” wrote UC representative P. K. Agarwalla ’04 in an e-mail to the Council warning that the “Tolerance Bill” might chill free speech.

Though Pappin clarified the views expressed in his widely read letter in a longer Salient cover story, titled “Somewhere over the Rainbow: Towards a Dispassionate Look at Homosexuality,” a student observer at the time said few students noticed. “The Salient has become so reactionary that its views no longer raise a campus eyebrow,” wrote Kenyon S.M. Weaver ’04 in a Crimson editorial. Pappin and The Salient, concluded Weaver, an FM editor, had made themselves irrelevant. “Pappin’s views and The Salient as a whole have so clearly fallen almost entirely outside the circle of reasonable dialogue that it is simply not worth the time or energy to argue,” he wrote. “In short, nobody cares.”

TALKING ABOUT TALKING

During the past year, under the leadership of Kathryn A. Tiskus ’06, the Salient began to move away from the edge it had under Pappin. Most of the parodies decorating the back cover were tame, gently mocking the magazine itself.

Now that Kavulla has taken the reins, he is trying to mold The Salient into what it was during Pappin’s days, as he describes it: an engine for campus discourse. “You have to admire Pappin because the Salient was widely read then,” Kavulla says. But his first attempt to copy Pappin has led to the same threat Weaver diagnosed: self-marginalization.

True, Kavulla has people talking. But many of them are talking about him and his journalism—not about radical Islam. Salient editors spend a lot of their time debating how provocative to be, says Tiskus, who is also a Crimson editor. She and a few supporters believe that Kavulla should publish less controversial material, and they make their opinions heard. “I think it is a good idea to make the magazine into a broad spectrum of diverse thought,” she says. Using caution, she says, would avoid alienating readers.

The conservative publication is also feeling outside pressure to use discretion. HIS President Khalid M. Yasin ’07, who arranged the meeting with Harvard deans about ethics in Harvard journalism, is quick to remind that negative verbal jabs against Muslims can easily transform into physical violence. After 9/11, an Islamic graduate student at Harvard Divinity School was physically abused at the Harvard T stop because she was wearing hijab, The Crimson reported.

With cases like that in mind, Yasin contacted Kavulla and Ryan M. McCaffrey ’07, The Salient’s publisher, to voice his concerns with the Fulla doll parody. “I told them that we felt the piece was inappropriate and degrading to Muslims,” he says. “They told us to take it with a grain of salt and refused to apologize.”

Brushed aside by the Salient, Yasin decided to approach Dean Kidd and Counter. At their meeting last week, according to Yasin, the parties present quickly agreed free speech prohibited any punitive action against the Salient. But they also brainstormed two proposals to mitigate the effects of similar articles in the future. The first, a more specific goal, was to enlighten students about the Fulla doll—especially that the doll does not say what the Salient claims it says.

A second idea was for the College to hold a public panel of students and professors on “journalistic ethics,” Kidd wrote in an e-mail. The panel would be a “one-time” event, Kidd wrote, but she said she supports a longer-term structure.

“I personally feel that since we have so many publications, it would be helpful if there were something similar to the structure we have for other student organizations,” she wrote, citing Phillips Brooks House, the Office for the Arts, and the Harvard Foundation as examples.

The College has no specific plans for a response, and Kidd emphasized that building a permanent umbrella organization for student publications is not likely.

Presented with the possibility, Kavulla said he thought a permanent organization is not necessary. He has repeatedly expressed frustration with groups who attack his magazine. “Instead of taking out their rage on The Salient, campus Muslims would be wise to focus their attentions on those places from whence their faith came,” he wrote in the Crimson editorial, “those places where what is called ‘moderate Islam’ is today besieged.”

This may be happening, but it did not happen after his parody. Yasin, for one, has focused on The Salient’s tactics and not its message. “If their sole goal is attention,” he says, “they sound kinda like a selfish child.”