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Harvard at Bay

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 3

The back and forth at Harvard is much-noticed news almost everywhere. In Israel, to be sure, as also in the Arab press. But also in Great Britain and France, where anti-Semitism is a way of life, however well- mannered. The issue is a poet, Tom Paulin, an Oxford don who teaches this season at Columbia and was invited to give the Morris Gray lecture at Harvard.

Well, when this happened, some spoilsport publicized a remark the poet had made to an Egyptian weekly, to wit, that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." That stretch of prosody is without discernible poetry, but this of course was not considered in ensuing events. The English department at Harvard, on second thought, rescinded the invitation. President Lawrence Summers applauded this decision. But what then happened was a firestorm of free-speech protest, in which three Harvard Law School luminaries figured, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and Charles Fried. The English department, on third thought, re-invited the poet to speak, and now it was news all over the country and indeed the world. We are asked to consider what are the bounds, if any, on utterances of a particular nature if inconsistent with civil comity in a university. We are asked what hate speech should the colleges hate, and how exactly to give voice to that hate. And, inevitably, whether academic freedom is exercised, or is flouted, by speech of a particular character.

What then to do? The New York Observer, which usually flutters if there is the faintest liberal breeze in the air, is stentorian on the subject. In its editorial, it says, "Columbia should fire Mr. Paulin immediately, on the principle that having an anti-Semite on the payroll does a disservice to Columbia professors, students, and alumni who don't subscribe to the view that calling for the murder of Jews is something an Ivy League professor should be doing in his off hours."

The other view, that of the law professors cited above, is that freedom of speech is absolute, and nowhere more ideally protected than in universities.

Well, what concretely to do about the poet's forthcoming lecture? There will of course be some picketers outside, but doesn't something a little more resourceful come to mind?

In the spring of 1962, Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by a student committee at Hunter College in New York to be the speaker at one of its monthly events.

Rockwell was the "Commander" of the American Nazi Party. He dressed in a Nazi commander's uniform, with swastikas here and there, and preached the faith of Hitler. He had a cadre of a dozen or so subordinate Nazis, and took such opportunities as he could to display the Nazi faith in Washington, where he was based, and elsewhere.

Hunter College's undergraduates were predominantly Jewish, and when news of the scheduled event was brought to Hunter president John Meng, a Roman Catholic, he made a decision which lives in Solomonic heraldry. It took the form of a letter to the faculty.

Today's students (he wrote) know of Nazism and what it did only by cursory reading. You and I know of it from direct experience in a world war. I will not overrule the invitation because I am committed to giving the student association plenary authority in the matter.

But, as a symbol of the gravity of the invitation to Mr. Rockwell, I call on members of the faculty to join me in attending the Passover Assembly at Park Avenue at 7 p.m. That is when the meeting with Commander Rockwell is scheduled. I feel sure that many members of the student body will wish to join us in that memorial meeting.

That was a truly eloquent means of handling an aberrational invitation.

Granted that Mr. Paulin is a poet, and not a Nazi. His problem is that he speaks Nazi language when he addresses the problems of the Mideast. That he is a poet is not, in the circumstances, what anybody is interested in, any more than it would have distracted the Hunter College community if George Lincoln Rockwell was also a rock star. There are salient considerations that have been raised at Harvard, and it is these that President Summers needs now to act on.

Get That Billionaire

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 6

You know, we are trained not to be sorry for the rich, but I confess to yielding to that weakness where it's the very rich who are ridiculed. The term "billionaire" is -- check this out -- almost always used derisively, or condescendingly. I haven't counted how many billionaires there are, but you don't need the answer to that to know that they arouse a special kind of killer-envy. The web gives you a farcical site for "Who Wants to Be a Billionaire" and the entry page gives five headings. "The Stats" is a philosophical introduction to the whole question: "Did you know that 90% of American wealth is controlled by ONE PERCENT of the population? Are these people smarter than you? Are they more creative? No? Then who allows these people to retain their wealth?" Elucidating on this, item four ("The Target") reads, "Wealth is neither created nor destroyed -- it merely changes hands. Which billionaire will be our first target?" Why not the man who invented penicillin?

You don't have to sound like a Marxist to stick it up their behind, and this is nicely exemplified in the jocose mode in the current Slate magazine. The headline is, "The joy of watching billionaires lose the America's Cup."

The spirit of this account of the racing classic may be that of Madame Defarge, the lady who sat knitting with ecstatic pleasure at execution square in 1793 in Paris, watching the guillotine come down, but the language is jocose. Caution! Derision is deadlier than denunciation. If Lenin had had that skill, he could have made headway without having to kill so many people.

The story on the America's Cup begins by telling us that "At least three of the world's richest men are about to be publicly humiliated in the waters off Auckland. Such a delightful spectacle should not pass unnoticed." Every billionaire's death exalteth me.

"For the hoi polloi, the perennial appeal of this periodic regatta is that it attracts egomaniacs who spend freely and then lose badly." Yes, once in a blue moon you get a rich egomaniac who actually demonstrates his own skill. But "most seagoing plutocrats serve mainly as ballast when they're not writing checks."

The author goes on to describe the principal players this time around. The Seattle team, the OneWorld team, "is backed by not one but two billionaires, cell-phone impresario Craig McCaw and Microsoft co- founder Paul Allen."

Now how shall we condescend to McCaw? Well, "he is an earnest fellow from Seattle with an environmentalist agenda -- the OneWorld website proclaims the team's ambition 'to win the oldest trophy in sports in the name of the health of the world's oceans.'" Anything wrong with that? Well, not obviously wrong, so the author has to rev up the ridicule. "McCaw is well-known for having helped save Keiko, the Free Willy killer whale, by bankrolling a program to return the captive orca to the wild."

We have here a stylistic problem, because to make fun of saving whales is the kind of thing one expects from insouciant dilettantes, acting out P. G. Wodehouse. You're not, theoretically, supposed to make fun of people who care about whales. Unless they are billionaires.

What happened to OneWorld is, we are told, that the recession brought down McCaw's fortune "from $7.7 billion to a paltry $2.3 billion . . . That put something of a crimp in McCaw's do-gooder budget, so he brought in Allen to keep OneWorld funded at a respectably obscene level."

Enter another billionaire, Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle. "Ellison for years has been trying to stick a harpoon in his rival Microsoft and surpass Bill Gates as the world's richest man." But he is "down to $15.2 billion," because of the recession.

Enter then a Swiss billionaire, and on and on it goes. Mark Lewis, the author, is rooting for the New Zealand team, current proprietors of the Cup. That way, "the four billionaire-backed syndicates would have nothing to show for their collective expenditures of at least $300 million. The rest of us would cackle with glee."

Cackle! Was that the word Dickens used to describe the sounds in revolutionary Paris? What's nice about all this is that the article was published in Slate, property of billionaire Bill Gates, and the author works for Forbes, property of billionaire Steve.

It's the Rules, Stupid

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 10

It needs to be stressed, especially in moments of high confusion, what the rules are for a dynamic economy. These rules tend to fritter down, under political pressure, but they are latently there, and the City of New York and United Airlines have both run into them.