Harvard's Selective Anti-Bigotry

This column was originally published in the Sept. 30 Harvard Independent. It responds directly to Max’s blog post from the previous week.
Harvard’s position on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, banning the group from campus until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) is overturned, has always struck me the wrong way. It just doesn’t make sense to punish ROTC cadets for the decisions of anti-gay politicians.
Still, you have to admire Harvard’s stand against DADT (and on behalf of the DREAM Act, for that matter) when you compare it with the moral mushiness recently on display in the case of Martin Peretz. Earlier this month, Peretz, the New Republic’s editor-in-chief, issued some characteristically sweeping denunciations of Muslims, which coincided awkwardly with, first, a plan to establish a Harvard research fellowship in his name, and second, a plan to honor him at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Social Studies program.
Now, we have seen that the university will go to great lengths to defend its gay students—banning all groups that would discriminate against them, even when that means hurting cadets who may very well oppose DADT. And we have seen that Harvard will protect its immigrant students when their presence in this country is threatened.
So, in this current climate of Islamophobia, with mainstream politicians comparing moderate Muslims to Nazis and terrorists, surely Harvard will renounce Peretz at least as squarely as it has renounced DADT and anti-immigrant fear-mongering? Surely refusing the Peretz research fellowship is not too much to ask?
Surely nothing. Harvard is going to keep the money, thank you very much. And reports that Peretz was “disinvited” from speaking at the Social Studies event were exaggerated. In a September 21 email to Social Studies concentrators, Professor Anya Bernstein said that Peretz’s anti-Muslim statements are the “diametric opposite of what we in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies stand for,” but she reiterated that Peretz would still be honored at the event. (As indeed he was, this past Saturday.)
A statement from the university tried to pass this off as a brave stand for freedom of speech: “We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas.” The irony, of course, is that Peretz’s opposition to those basic freedoms is precisely what got him in trouble. He said on his blog earlier this month that it is hard for him to “pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” He apologized, as he had to, but he did not apologize for the statements that “routine and random bloodshed… defines [Muslims’] brotherhood” and that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”
So the question becomes, do we need to be tolerant of intolerance? Harvard’s answer is clear: only if there’s money involved. There’s no need to tolerate intolerance of gays or illegal immigrants. But Peretz’s intolerance of Muslims is just part of the “robust exchange of ideas.”
What should the more principled among us conclude? On the Harvard Political Review’s blog, Max Novendstern proposes that we adopt what he calls the “intent/effect principle”: Speech that hurts others by design is clearly repugnant to the university atmosphere, but speech that hurts others unintentionally is “the direct consequence of diversity itself, of high contact struggles between people of genuine difference.”
Novendstern’s paean to “the unease of the new, the uncomfortable, the forbidden” is admirable and articulate, but his intent/effect principle is, in the end, unworkable. The line between what is hurtful-by-design and what is hurtful-in-effect could never be drawn reliably. Intent to harm is a very high bar, and a lot of reprehensible people and statements would not clear it.
The key, of course, is that we aren’t talking about censoring Peretz or taking him “away from the table,” to borrow Novendstern’s terminology. We’re just talking about refusing to honor him. Peretz is welcome to come to campus to express his views, and anybody who shouts him down or disrupts his speech should be ashamed.
But the Peretz fellowship is different. It will inevitably bear the university’s seal of approval. Yes, of course there have been problematic donations in Harvard’s past; just imagine how many donors must have owned slaves. But the modern university is a more self-conscious place, and that’s by and large a good thing—it contributes to an atmosphere of inclusivity.
The editors of the Harvard Crimson downplay such symbolic concerns; for them, all that matters is the tangible good that the Peretz fellowship might do. But symbolism matters: It helps to define what our community values, and what it doesn’t. And if ever there was a time when Harvard needed to take a symbolic stand, to demonstrate its core values to the world, this was it. I can only imagine how difficult the last couple of months have been for Muslims at Harvard and elsewhere, to see their community vilified, their holy book desecrated, their motives suspected.
In this context, Harvard’s Muslim community deserved more than perfunctory noises about the evils of bigotry. It deserved something on par with the support Harvard has offered to gay men and women through its opposition to DADT, and to illegal immigrants through its support of the DREAM Act. As an Economist blogger recently pointed out, the Peretz affair and others like it help to “delineate the boundaries of acceptable discourse.” Unfortunately, Harvard has only helped to blur them.