Paranoia at Harvard

Paranoia at Harvard

By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist, 9/22/2002

Harvard University and the Archdiocese of Boston have more in common than healthy endowments and vast real estate holdings. Both institutions are being led by intellectual frauds.

In Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers' characterization of calls for the university to divest in companies that do business in Israel as ''anti-Semitic'' one hears echoes of Cardinal Bernard F. Law's reflexive dismissal of any criticism of the church as ''anti-Catholic.''

Ascribing bigotry to those with whom you disagree is the last refuge of cowards. It is especially offensive from a university president. During his address at morning prayers in Memorial Church last week, Summers tried to have it both ways. Insisting that he values vigorous debate and academic freedom, he nonetheless upbraided certain Harvard students and professors for ''advocating actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.''

Summers cited a petition urging the university to divest in Israel because of its policies toward the Palestinians, a call that the
president said serves unfairly ''to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested.''

The merits of divestment as a means of exerting political pressure on the government of Ariel Sharon is a worthy topic of debate, even of heated argument, but for Summers to suggest that proponents of that strategy are racists is to marginalize, in the ugliest possible way, the views of people no less principled than he. And singling out one bad actor on the international stage for retribution is hardly unique to these petitioners. Witness the Bush administration's focus on Iraq, to the exclusion of Iran and other unstable nations that also harbor terrorists.

That his business and political experience did not entirely prepare Summers for the freewheeling atmosphere of university life has been clear since his arrival at Harvard. It was evident again when he cited as an example of encroaching anti-Semitism a rally against global capitalism in which chanting students could be heard equating Sharon and Adolf Hitler.

Well, a German justice minister last week reportedly compared President Bush's tactics toward Iraq to Hitler's toward Europe before World War II. Is she anti-American or merely hyperbolic?

To lump, as Summers did, the intemperate chants of students with such genuine signs of the rise in worldwide anti-Semitism as the burning of synagogues and the popularity of neo-Nazi political candidates across Europe, is to mistake unpopular speech for race hatred.

It's the kind of paranoia we have come to associate with the man on Lake Street, not the man in Massachusetts Hall. It was only a few years ago that the cardinal appealed to then-governor Paul Cellucci to reconsider the nominations of two women to the state's highest court because Margaret Marshall and Judith Cowin displayed an ''attitude and mentality'' he found ''troubling.''

Law suspected Marshall, now chief justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court, of anti-Catholic bias because during her tenure as chief legal counsel at Harvard, she told Professor Mary Ann Glendon to stop using her Harvard Law School stationery to promote her anti-abortion views. Law targeted Cowin, now an associate justice of the SJC, because, in finding for the plaintiff in a discrimination suit against a Catholic hospital, she made the observation that suing as powerful an institution as the Catholic Church in Boston can be an uphill battle.

These days, Law reserves his suspicion of anti-Catholicism for those who would challenge his moral authority to lead the church through the sex abuse crisis that his own actions exacerbated. Summers would do better to follow the example of the president of Boston College.

Faced with polarized views about the future of the church, the Rev. William P. Leahy began last week to open his campus to all comers to debate all aspects of the crisis in Catholicism. ''We're trying to get at the large issues and stimulate thinking, encourage dialogue,'' he said, every inch the intellectual leader that the Harvard president has yet to become.