SPEECHLEss.(furor caused by invitation to poet Tom Paulin to speak at Harvard University and ramifications on students at Harvard Law School)

At the beginning of November, Rita Goldberg was among the members of the Harvard academic community to receive a routine e-mail announcement of a poetry reading--not, at first glance, the sort of thing to reawaken the somewhat musty issue of free speech on campus. The e-mail said merely that Tom Paulin, an Irish poet, would give a poetry reading, known as the Morris Gray Lecture, on November 14th.

Goldberg occupies a humble professional niche at the university. She is a non-tenured lecturer in the literature concentration, which itself is a poor cousin to the larger and more powerful Department of English and American Literature and Language, the sponsor of the Paulin lecture. "I had lived in England for many years," Goldberg told me, "and I knew Paulin's work. He's on television all the time there, and I knew the kind of things he had said about Israel. I put his name in Google, and it didn't take long to see just how bad it was."

Goldberg herself had little clout, but she knew a good deal about how universities worked and possessed some proximity to real power at Harvard. Her husband is Oliver Hart, the chairman of the Economics Department, and, as it happened, he was the host of the department's annual dinner, at the Fogg Art Museum on Thursday, November 7th. Among the guests was Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, who had been a member of the Economics Department in the years before he went to Washington, where he ultimately became Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. Goldberg sought out Summers at the dinner and informed him of the invitation to Paulin. "I told him about Paulin's views," Goldberg recalled, "and he said, 'That sounds pretty bad,' but then he also said, 'Be careful. This is a free-speech issue, too.' "

The following morning, six days before Paulin was to speak, Goldberg sent an e-mail to Lawrence Buell, the chairman of the English Department. "Dear Larry," she began, "I'm writing in response to your invitation to come hear Tom Paulin on November 14. I assume that the people who selected him for the Morris Gray Lecture know about the reputation he has recently made for himself in the U.K., not only because of his poem 'Killed in Crossfire,' but also because of statements he has made in the press and on television." Goldberg quoted an interview that Paulin had given to Al-Ahram Weekly, an English-language newspaper in Cairo, in April. "That interview is notorious for several remarks," Goldberg wrote, "especially the closing one, in which he refers to Jewish settlers on the West Bank: 'They should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.' " She also included a copy of the poem:

We're fed this inert, this lying phrase, like comfort food, as another little Palestinian boy, in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt, is gunned down by the Zionist SS, whose initials we should, --but we don't--dumb goys, clock in that weasel word, crossfire

She noted further, "I'm reluctant to intrude on anyone's right to free speech or free access. But in the minds of many thoughtful people both in England and here in the U.S., Paulin's vitriolic attacks have crossed a certain boundary between civilized discourse and something much more sinister. You ought at least to attach a warning label to your announcement of the reading."

Buell and Goldberg exchanged e-mails over the Veterans Day weekend, and the department chairman said he had known nothing about Paulin's political views. The invitation had been made nearly a year earlier, by a committee of three English professors--Helen Vendler, the chair, and two poetry professors, Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks. (Paulin was invited after the publication of the "Crossfire" poem but before his interview with Al-Ahram.) As Goldberg recalled, "I suggested two things to Larry--that they disinvite him or at least that they disclose what he'd said about Israel." Goldberg sent a version of her e-mail to a friend at Harvard's Hillel, the campus Jewish organization, urging the group to join her protest to the English Department. That e-mail, in turn, was forwarded to friends around and beyond the university.