But now the English Department may be on the verge of offering a permanent appointment to a racist hoodlum (in a line descending from Ezra Pound to Leroi Jones-Amiri Baraka) who makes Said and Spivak look morally sensitive and intellectually tactful. This, of course, is the notorious Tom Paulin, the Irish poet apparently seeking to relocate from England to NY. Mr. Paulin, long known as a stalwart of the IRA school of poetics, has more recently turned his attention to Israel. According to the London Daily Telegraph ("Oxford poet 'wants U.S. Jews shot'," 13 April 2002), Mr. Paulin told an interviewer for Al-Ahram that he abhorred "Brooklyn-born" Jewish "settlers" and believed "they should be shot dead." He added, for good measure, that he had quit the Labor Party because Tony Blair presides over "a Zionist government" and that he for his part "never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all." Columbia's James Shapiro, English professor and one of Paulin's ardent defenders, has told the Columbia Spectator (20 November 2002)) that these remarks "did not step over the line."

Apparently Professor Shapiro's moral dividing line is like the receding horizon: he walks towards it, but can never reach it. Has incitement to murder now become one of the qualifications for appointment in a department that once employed John Erskine, Mark Van Doren, F.W. Dupee, and Lionel Trilling? As alumni of Columbia, we hope not. Do we, as Orwell famously asked, have the right to expect common decency even of a (minor) poet? We hope yes.

Sincerely yours,

Edward Alexander (BA, '57)
Jerold S. Auerbach (PhD, '65)
Stephen M. Rittenberg (BA,'57, MD, '63)
Sol Z. Rosen (LLB, '60)
Albert Silbowitz (BA, '62)
 

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Flip-Flop Not About Free Speech

Ruth R. Wisse

What is most pernicious about the English department's decision to re-invite poet Tom Paulin to Harvard is its representing that decision as a stand for freedom of speech. As a poet and a public agitator against Israel, Paulin has always enjoyed complete freedom of speech. He was free to publish and publicize his poem about a Palestinian child who, he alleges, was "gunned down by the Zionist SS" (the boy in question was probably killed by a Palestinian bullet and mendaciously turned into a poster-child of the Intifada). Paulin was free to boast, "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all," to advertise his sympathies for suicide bombers, to encourage terrorism, and even to incite to murder. The British government guaranteed his freedom of speech; the American government guarantees it while he is in this country. The Harvard English department can neither add to nor subtract from his right to say anything that he pleases.

The English department exercised its own freedom of speech by inviting Paulin to give an endowed lecture under its auspices. Precisely because Paulin is so very outspoken, no literate person could doubt what he stood for. The question at issue is therefore not free speech, but the faculty's cultural taste and political priorities. Members of the English department decided to invite a speaker known for slandering the Jewish homeland: Had they not wanted a person so known, they would have invited someone else. If they then regretted their decision, they could have said so when they withdrew their invitation. Instead, they bowed first to one form of pressure and then to an evidently much greater one, trying to turn their flip-flop into a bold defense of principle.

Although members of the English faculty preen themselves in the Boston Globe for "standing strongly by the First Amendment," their posture of defiance camouflages what is mere conformity with the prevailing norms of political correctness. The faculty would never have invited anyone who defames blacks, hispanics, women or homosexuals, the minorities currently under liberal protection. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is quite the trend. The dramatization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is currently primetime fare for much of the Arab and Muslim world, to the notable silence of the Harvard English department or any other Harvard department. Europe is enjoying a revival of the oldest hatred, though even some of Paulin's British colleagues complain that he has gone somewhat overboard in his enthusiasm. And right here in America, the latest form of campus protest is a unique petition campaign against Israel. No wonder inviting Paulin seemed like a safe call.

The choice was the English department's to make, and may the shame of their endorsement follow them to the grave. But those who love freedom may also

Outpost               - 10 -               January 2003