KSG: Walt Planned To Step Aside Before Furor

Kennedy School of Government (KSG) Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt—who is facing criticism from some colleagues after co-authoring a paper assailing the United States’ pro-Israel policies—will step down from his administrative post this June, but school officials say that his move was long-planned and is not related to the controversy sparked by Walt’s paper.

Walt will remain a tenured professor at the school, but the announcement that he will leave the position of academic dean means that Walt will no longer be in charge of the KSG’s teaching and research at a time when his own scholarship is under attack.

KSG Dean David T. Ellwood ’75 said in a statement that Walt "had been due to depart last June after the normal three-year cycle, but had agreed, at my request, to stay on for one more year."

"His departure is completely unrelated to the current discussion surrounding the article he co-authored with John Mearsheimer," Ellwood said in the statement.

Ellwood said that he sent an e-mail to KSG faculty members on Feb. 21—before the uproar over the article—informing them that Walt would end his term as academic dean in June. Ellwood said he also asked professors for recommendations regarding the search for the next academic dean.

When asked to provide the Feb. 21 e-mail to The Crimson, Ellwood and KSG spokeswoman Melodie Jackson declined to do so.

Walt and Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argue in their paper that "unquestioned support" for Israel does not serve U.S. strategic objectives and fosters anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and beyond. The paper was posted on the KSG’s website last month, and an abridged version of it was published in the London Review of Books.

The professors argue that the "Israel Lobby"—a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" including national Jewish leaders, Christian evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Republican congressmen, and columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post—has pushed the U.S. to adopt excessively pro-Israel stances.

Rep. Jerold Nadler, D-N.Y., blasted the paper as a "dishonest piece of crap" in an interview with The New York Sun, and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., called the paper "anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel." Harvard’s Frankfurter professor of law, Alan M. Dershowitz, told The Crimson that Walt and Mearsheimer are "liars" and "bigots."

Meanwhile, Ellwood has fiercely defended Walt’s right to express his views. "Throughout this episode, I have sought to be driven by one principle above all others: maintain academic freedom for our scholars and our school," Ellwood wrote in an e-mail to members of the KSG community Friday.

Ellwood added that the school "does not make judgments about the content of working papers before posting. Academic work is best judged in the serious give and take of intellectual and scholarly debate."

Dershowitz has publicly challenged Walt and Mearsheimer to participate in a debate at the KSG.

Dershowitz also said that he had been scheduled to Mearsheimer on the BBC at 10:30 p.m Eastern time this past Thursday. But Dershowitz said that he received a call at 10:35 p.m. saying that Mearsheimer had canceled the debate.

In a statement to The Crimson, Dershowitz said that Mearsheimer and Walt "make outrageous and unsupportable claims; they invoke academic freedom in the marketplace of ideas, but then they refuse to participate in the marketplace of ideas by declining reasonable debate about their position."

"I renew my challenge to debate either or both of them at the Kennedy School," Dershowitz added.

Mearsheimer and Walt did not return phone calls to their offices seeking comment this past week.

Dershowitz is preparing a rebuttal to the Mearsheimer and Walt article that will be posted on the KSG website. Ellwood said in a brief phone interview last night that he would allow "full-time Harvard faculty members" to post responses to KSG professors’ working papers on the school’s site.

Walt’s term as academic dean will be one year shorter than that of his predecessor, Frederick Schauer, who held the post from 1997 to 2002.

According to Ellwood, the "normal three-year cycle" of academic deans began when Albert Carnesale, who had held the position for a decade, became the KSG’s top dean in 1991. Ellwood took Carnesale’s place as academic dean.

But the cycle has been interrupted several times since, according to Ellwood.

After a year as academic dean, Ellwood left to take a senior position in the Clinton administration Department of Health and Human Services. Alan A. Altshuler served in the position for two years in Ellwood’s absence.

When Ellwood returned to Cambridge, he completed the remaining two years of his term.

"When you take the job, you agree to it for three years," Ellwood said. He added that Schauer agreed to a two-year extension. And he said that Walt served an extra year to assist with the transition at the school’s helm. Ellwood became the KSG’s top administrator in the summer of 2004.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.