Harvard Rules (42 page)

Folks in Johnson City took it for granted that their neighbors were Christian. When Fish started grade school, each day would begin with Christian prayer, and Fish sat outside her classroom while the other students bowed their heads. When she told her parents, they met with the teachers and the school board, and eventually the prayer was dropped. Of course, virtually everyone in school soon knew what had happened, and some of Fish's classmates decided that the appropriate response was to try to convert her to Christianity. “It wasn't malicious,” she said. “Just ignorant.”

Some behavior was especially ignorant. In sixth grade, a classmate scratched a swastika onto the front of her locker. Her teacher wanted to suspend the boy, but Fish thought that would only make the problem worse. He didn't come from much of a family, this kid. Even though he was in sixth grade, he was illiterate. Suspending him from school would only make things worse. So Fish proposed another option: after school every day, she'd teach the boy to read. “Because if he knew what the swastikas meant, he probably wouldn't have done it.” And for four months, she did just that. “I didn't understand how he couldn't know how to read,” Fish said. “He taught me about that, and how his family didn't support him.”

After high school Fish attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she double-majored in Judaic studies and Middle Eastern studies. She spent her junior year abroad at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. Her identity as a Jew was important to her, and after college Fish wanted to pursue the study of the religions of the Middle East. The Harvard Divinity School seemed a natural choice. Graduates included such inspiring figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker. “Harvard is
the
university,” she explained. “It's the place where people go to make something of themselves.” Fish liked that the divinity school application said that the school was seeking people who could create change in the world. “The notion of ‘veritas' seduces you,” she said.

When Fish took a closer look into what else Sheik Zayed did with his money, what she found was disturbing. In 1998 the sheik's wife donated $50,000 to support Roger Garaudy, a French writer whose book
The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics
argued that the Holocaust had not happened, but that Jews had died of disease and starvation during World War II. And in 1999, Sheik Zayed founded the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, intended to be the official think tank of the twenty-two–nation Arab League. Sheik Zayed's son, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, was the center's director.

Over the next few years, the Zayed Centre hosted a number of foreign dignitaries, including Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and former secretary of state James Baker. But it also engaged in some less savory activity, including the publication of anti-Semitic literature charging that Israel is the tool of “forces of world hegemony.” The center offered programs on topics such as “the Jewish control of the American government and media”; its director announced at one conference that “Jews are the enemy of all nations.” One guest lecturer, Saudi professor Umayma Jalahma, declared that “the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare holiday pastries.” And the center had published a translation of French writer Thierry Meyssan's crackpot book,
The Horrifying Fraud,
which charged that the United States attacked itself on September 11, flying planes into the World Trade Center by remote control in order to justify imperial war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Reading the Zayed Centre's literature, Fish said, “was like reading history written by the Nazis.”

Here was a new challenge of globalization. As Harvard extended its presence around the globe, it also searched for donors worldwide. The idea made perfect sense. In many countries, the Harvard name is even more revered than it is in the United States, and for wealthy foreigners, the idea of linking themselves to the Harvard brand holds enormous appeal. The problem for Harvard is that it's considerably more difficult to investigate how foreign donors make and spend their money than it is to conduct background checks on Americans. In 1993 and 1994, for example, Saudi Arabia's Bin Laden Group contributed $2 million to the law and design schools. After 9/11, the bin Laden contributions became an issue, but Harvard officials insisted that the business had no connection to Osama bin Laden, and that if anyone could show that the money was tainted, Harvard would return it. Of course, trying to disentangle the finances of the bin Laden family is a task that the FBI and the Justice Department have found challenging, and Harvard didn't appear to be trying very hard to do it. Its only public action was to delete details of the bin Laden gift from the university website. And if a connection could be found, a common argument made at Harvard (and, to be sure, at plenty of other universities) is that it's better for crooks, tyrants, and killers to give their cash to a university than to spend it on nefarious evildoing. At least a university would put it to good use.

Rachel Fish did not agree. She took all that rhetoric about truth seriously. What did the Harvard name stand for if it could be rented out to any bidder, no matter how unsavory? “Harvard sets the tone for so many universities,” she said. “It sets the precedent.” On March 19, Fish met with divinity school dean William Graham to argue that Harvard should return Sheik Zayed's money. After all, Larry Summers had taken to the pulpit of Memorial Church to denounce anti-Semitism. The president of Harvard, she was sure, would be on her side.

Fish's due diligence put Graham in an extremely awkward position. A scholar of Middle Eastern religious history, Graham is an affable North Carolinian who has been a member of the Harvard faculty since1973. Though he had served as acting dean since January 2002, when Father J. Bryan Hehir resigned the position, Graham did not want to run the divinity school. He had apparently been a candidate for deanships at Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was not offered either job. Now he was interested in an FAS position. For years he had paid his dues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by volunteering for soporific committees and thankless administrative positions. He had been a dedicated master of Currier House, well known for his support of the students. But the head of the divinity school presided over a lackluster endowment, a fractious faculty, and a politicized student body. Graham wanted something better.

Such a post was not in the offing, however, and so Graham accepted Summers' imprecations to take the divinity school job. “Bill probably figured that he had the opportunity to turn the divinity school into a truly secular, intellectual institution,” said a colleague who knows him well. The appointment was greeted with suspicion in some quarters; Graham would be the divinity school's first dean who was not an ordained minister or priest, fueling the theory that Summers wanted to make the divinity school less of a training ground for ministers and more a center for scholars of religion. As Summers had said, somewhat obliquely, in a September 2002 speech at the school, “In what ways should Christianity be privileged and not be privileged, recognizing the school's traditions, strengths, and need for focus, and also taking into account growing religious pluralism?” His audience could read between the lines.

Graham also had another question mark hovering over his deanship. In the spring of 2002, he had signed the petition to divest from Israel. A week or so later, he changed his mind and asked that his name be removed, which it was. “I took my name off when I discovered that [the petition organizers] were putting the petition online,” Graham said. According to Graham, the divestment website contained links to “at least” one website that he considered anti-Semitic. (Petition organizers deny the accusation.)

Inevitably, Graham's change of heart convinced no one. When Summers announced that Graham was his choice to be the divinity school dean, both opponents and supporters of divestment instantly suspected that Graham had taken his name off the petition because Summers had demanded that Graham renounce the petition as a condition of being appointed. Graham denied the charge, saying, “You'll have to ask Larry about that. He appointed me. He knew very well that I had signed [the petition]. I told him I had signed it.”

Though he officially became dean in August 2002, almost two years after the Sheik Zayed donation was made, Graham had welcomed the money when it was given. “This endowment is a most welcome gift,” he told the
Harvard Gazette.
But when Rachel Fish informed him of Sheik Zayed's extracurricular activities, Graham was concerned. He promised to investigate the matter, and he subsequently told reporters that if the charges were true, the divinity school would give back the money. But when Fish mentioned that she was sending a copy of all her research to President Summers, Graham insisted she needn't do that. “He said, ‘I'll keep [Larry] informed,'” Fish said.

Fish responded that she would send her research to Summers anyway. “I'm giving you the chance to reclaim the moral authority of the divinity school,” she said.

It was a tense meeting at an already tense time on campus. At 10:30 that night—5:30
A
.
M
., March 20, Bagdad time—United States aircraft began dropping bombs on Iraq. The war had begun.

 

The peace rally commenced at 12:30 the next afternoon, when some one thousand students, faculty, and Cambridge locals gathered in front of the statue of John Harvard. It was a miserable day, cold and wet and gray. The winter snow had melted—more would fall soon enough—leaving the Yard so muddy that it resembled the pig pen it had been during the seventeenth century. The protesters walked gingerly lest the mud suck the shoes off their feet. Some people stood on the cardboard signs that they had intended to wave.

As Harvard police cars quietly cruised along the Yard's paved paths and parked in its corners, a group of protesters chanted, “No war on Iraq / Bill of rights / Take it back!” Near them a man carried a sign that said
DRAFT BEER NOT BOYS
. One student waved a sign saying
HARVARD STUDENTS WANT PEACE
, the words scrawled on the back of an Amazon.com box. Members of a local church were passing out granola bars.

There were counterprotesters too, a group of young men with shaved heads dressed up in military fatigues. Their signs read,
I LOVE BUSH AND RUMSFELD
, and
IF YOU WANT TO PROTEST
,
GO TO FRANCE
. They looked too young to be Harvard students, and they hung out on the fringe of the protest. About half the crowd, though, just seemed curious, milling around and talking. In fact, there was no consensus at Harvard about the war. Most of those who supported it did so with reservations; most of those who opposed it admitted that they might be wrong. The anti-war certitude of 1969 was ancient history.

A couple of hundred yards away, in Memorial Hall, the freshmen were receiving their housing assignments for sophomore year. Whooping and hollering, they made so much noise that one local news crew would air footage of them, mistaking the rambunctious freshmen for anti-war protesters. Almost directly opposite John Harvard, on the other side of the Yard, a burly police officer stationed himself outside the front door of Massachusetts Hall. No one had threatened the president's office, but Harvard was taking no chances. Everyone knew how Summers felt about protesters.

A student named Michael Getlin stood before the microphone. Just days before, Getlin told the crowd, he had withdrawn his application to join the Marines. It was not an easy decision, Getlin said. Both his father and uncle had fought in Vietnam; their family took military service very seriously. But the war, Getlin said, “represents a trajectory for our foreign policy of which I will take no part. It is an effort that will alienate our country from the global community that we have worked so hard to create.” Getlin looked distraught and a little lost.

After Getlin came a lecturer in the Department of Religion named Brian Palmer, a thin, wispy thirty-eight-year-old with a shock of dark hair, thick glasses, and a voice so fragile it sounded as if he were struggling for breath. Palmer taught one of Harvard's most popular courses, Personal Choice and Global Transformation, which had some five hundred students that semester. Like Tim McCarthy, Palmer knew that, as an untenured professor, his political activities would not help his chances of staying employed at Harvard—but he also knew that many students were desperate to hear professors who connected the classroom to the real world. “The press won't tell the truth about this war,” Palmer declared. “CNN will show Iraqis dancing in the streets, but it won't show burned and crushed and obliterated bodies.” The line brought an approving cheer.

Behind him and to the right was Tim McCarthy, wearing khakis and a black windbreaker with a white armband on his left arm. He kept striding back and forth in front of John Harvard. McCarthy looked impatient, as if he had something to get off his chest and couldn't wait much longer. He would not have to. Palmer finished, and McCarthy took the megaphone from him. The crowd applauded just to see him. Many of these people seemed to know McCarthy, and not only because there was a large contingent from the Protest Lit class on hand.

McCarthy began intensely but almost quietly, so the crowd had to hush to hear him. “I came here today to talk about two things: dissent and God,” McCarthy said. “We live in a truly historic moment…where dissent is vilified and where God is invoked to justify the most sinful impulses of our humanity. Our leaders tell us that dissent is actually ‘un-American' and that God loves the United States more than any other nation on earth. We are expected to shut up and pray that God continue to bless America. But I am here today to speak out against this war, and to pray for peace.”