--  BBC story with pictures --  "On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card"

 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.

 The reaction to the news about Paulin illustrated, in a small way, a larger truth-that conservatives have become Israel's most  passionate supporters in the United States. Denunciations of the invitation to the poet began surfacing among several conservative  Internet bloggers-among them Andrew Sullivan and opinionjournal.com, the online counterpart to the Wall Street Journal editorial  page. As a result, over the long weekend waves of e-mail protests about the poetry reading fell down on members of the English  Department. "It spread like wildfire," Goldberg said.

 Struggling in the unfamiliar realm of public controversy, several faculty members in the English Department had the same idea-to talk  to their colleague Elisa New. Specifically, they wanted to ask her what Summers thought the department should do about the invitation  to Paulin. As most people at Harvard know, New, a forty-four-year-old American-literature scholar, has been dating Summers, who is  forty-eight, for more than a year. However, New had the same answer for everyone who asked about the president's views. "If you  want to know what Larry Summers thinks, you should ask Larry Summers," she said. So, on Monday night, Lawrence Buell called  Summers to ask him what to do.

 The president of Harvard works in an elegant, if snug, suite of offices on the ground floor of Massachusetts Hall, a brick building  nestled in the Yard. (The top floors of Mass Hall are a freshman dormitory.) In appearance, Summers has never betrayed his  academic roots; his outfit on the morning I met with him included a tweed jacket, an open-necked shirt, and casual pants, all in  clashing shades of blue. He propped his feet, which were shod in brown work shoes with thick rubber soles, on a glass coffee table,  and talked about academic freedom. A big, shambling man, Summers has a provocative conversational style, which seems to involve  disagreeing with every proposition that is put to him. For many at Harvard, that style, like Summers himself, has been unnerving.

 Since Summers became Harvard's twenty-seventh president, in 2001, he has rejected the reticent, university-focussed manner of his  predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, in favor of a broader and more opinionated mode, one notably hostile to campus pieties. Many have  welcomed the return of a Harvard president to national debates, but there is little question, too, that Summers has sometimes been  ill-served by his own pugnacity. For instance, an early confrontation with the Afro-American Studies scholar Cornel West (the precise  nature of which remains in dispute) led to West's decampment, last summer, for Princeton. On most issues, Summers, as an  economist, is given to a straightforward weighing of pros and cons, and that includes free speech.

 "There is enormously broad latitude for people to be able to invite people who they wish to the Harvard campus, for them to be able to  be heard without disruption, and for there not to be censorship," Summers told me. "That is the premise on which successful research  universities operate, and it's basically a policy that works because of the fallibility of human judgment." Summers went on to say that  there are times when it probably would be sensible to censor speech "but no one is smart enough or wise enough to be the censor.  Anytime one has an urge to censor something, one needs to think that there are plenty of people who thought advocacy of gay rights  was a superb idea for censorship, that criticism of the Vietnam War, or advocacy of Marxist notions, was a superb notion for  censorship. It is central to the kind of community we are that censorship not be a part of what the community is."

 In light of these beliefs, one might assume that Summers would have a simple view of the invitation to Paulin: let him speak. But  Summers himself has been especially outspoken on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism, so it was not surprising that the chairman  of the English Department wanted to take his pulse. In a widely noted speech on September 17th, Summers took to the pulpit of  Memorial Church, the symbolic center of the university, and said, "I speak with you today not as president of the university but as a  concerned member of our community about something I never thought I would become seriously worried about-the issue of  anti-Semitism." Harvard's first Jewish president-"identified but hardly devout," as he described himself-said that anti-Semitism had  been remote from his own experience, but "there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally." Moreover, he  continued, "profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful  people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent." As examples, Summers cited European  academics who shun contact with Israeli colleagues, the eviction of Israeli scholars from an international literary journal, and the  demands for universities to remove from their investment portfolios companies that do business with Israel. Summers had never  heard of Tom Paulin before November, but it appeared that the poet was just the kind of anti-Semite-in effect, if not in intent-that the  university president had targeted in his speech.

 Buell and Summers spoke on the night of Veterans Day, but there is some dispute about what the Harvard president said. Both Buell  and a person familiar with Summers's recollection of the conversation agree that Summers had both an official answer and a personal  response to the Paulin invitation. "As president of the university, my judgment is that the English Department should do what it sees  fit to do and thinks is best in the situation," Summers said. But Buell and the Summers camp disagree about what else the president  said. Summers, according to the person familiar with his version, thought the idea that no one knew about Paulin's views was  preposterous, even if it happened to be true. Second, Summers thought it would look bad to withdraw the invitation. But, third, if the  reading did go forward, the department should find a way to dissociate itself from Paulin's views about Israel. Buell took issue with  this characterization of Summers's statement but declined to elaborate. Clearly, though, whatever Summers's intent, he succeeded in  leaving a mixed message with Buell-one in keeping with the one that the Harvard president left around this time with William C. Kirby,  the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, that the Paulin matter had kicked up "kind of a shit storm."

 Generations of Harvard freshmen once took their meals at the stolid brick pile known as the Union, but the old McKim, Mead & White  structure has recently been renovated into the Barker Center for the Humanities, and on Tuesday morning, November 12th, the offices  of the English Department there were the center of the shit storm. As Robert Kiely, a longtime faculty member and former chairman of  the department, recalled, "Over that long weekend, we got an avalanche of messages and e-mail raising the question as to how could  the English Department invite such a person. The quote in the Cairo newspaper-'They should all be shot'-that was the key statement."

 Before deciding what to do-Paulin was due to arrive in Cambridge the following day and to speak on Thursday-the committee on the  Gray Lecture, Vendler, Graham, and Sacks, could at least share some rueful laughter. Faculty members who never came to poetry  readings were vowing to shun this one, too. By the standards of Harvard's English Department, the Gray Lecture was a modest honor,  which provided the speaker with only travel expenses and a small honorarium. At least, the committee members noted glumly, they  were likely to improve on the average of seventy or so people who usually showed up for poetry readings. Mostly, though, the  members started answering a question that had suddenly become ubiquitous in Cambridge: Who the hell was Tom Paulin?

 Paulin is a fifty-three-year-old Irishman, a professor at Oxford University, who was spending the fall as a visiting professor at  Columbia. He is a popular poet in England, where his work is widely praised and frequently anthologized. "Our committee deemed  Paulin an important voice in contemporary Anglo-Irish poetry, and one that might be usefully added to the chorus of other voices  reading at Harvard this year," Jorie Graham told me. Paulin has also sought to extend his franchise beyond poetry by becoming a  familiar face of the political left outside the academic world, particularly on British television and radio. In his poetry, as well as in his  literary criticism, Paulin often writes about politics, especially the Irish struggle against English occupation. Indeed, his views on Israel  and Palestine form a kind of proxy for his views on England and Ireland-oppressor and victim, occupier and dispossessed. Though  Paulin has over the years spoken out against anti-Semitism, notably in an essay about T. S. Eliot, his virulent hostility to Israel, if not  his precise language, reflects a common view among many European intellectuals.

 But, without a Rita Goldberg stirring up trouble at Columbia, Paulin had enjoyed a quiet, almost protest-free fall teaching a course on  Irish literature. "He was a terrific colleague-responsive, engaged, open-minded," James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia,  said. "On the last day of class, after the Harvard story broke, a couple of students entered his class and started yelling about Israel.  His students whipped out their cell phones and called security and then shoved the protesters out the door. You have to admire a  teacher who commands that kind of loyalty."

 Vendler, who had extended the invitation, had failed to reach Paulin over the weekend, so on Tuesday morning she tried him again.  Vendler is one of Harvard's few University Professors, an elite within an elite, and an eminent literary critic of the old school, and she  was plainly uncomfortable in the political maelstrom. (Declining to discuss the Paulin matter, she left me a message saying, with some  disgust, "I write about poetry . . . , I don't write about chain letters.") As Graham recalled the events of that day, "We thought it would  be a good idea to widen the scope of the event to include a question-and-answer session, or some kind of discussion, perhaps  involving poetry and politics, or regarding the nature and effects of different kinds of 'speech.' We decided to ask Paulin-as he had  only been invited to read from his work-whether he wished to include such an exchange after his reading." Vendler finally reached  Paulin at Columbia, and after a short discussion they decided he would not speak at all at Harvard on November 14th. Graham then  called him and expressed her sorrow about the whole situation. "He"-Paulin-"said he was very sorry, but had 'no stomach for it.' He  said he was tired of this whole thing, and that he just wanted some time while at Columbia-where he felt very comfortable-to get some  work done," Graham said.

 In his conversation with Vendler, Paulin agreed that the English Department would announce that the decision about the lecture had  been made "by mutual consent." But consent to what? Paulin declined to discuss the matter, and he told friends that he had agreed  only to a postponement of his appearance, not a cancellation. Vendler and the others on the committee have said that they, too,  believed Paulin would ultimately give the reading. On that Tuesday, Buell posted an announcement on the English Department's Web  site saying, "By mutual consent of the poet and the English Department, the Morris Gray poetry reading by Tom Paulin originally  scheduled for Thursday November 14 will not take place. The English Department sincerely regret sic the widespread consternation  that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided on last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin's lifetime  accomplishment as a poet." There was no suggestion that Paulin's lecture would ever take place.

 That, at least initially, seemed fine with just about everyone at Harvard. Summers praised the English Department's decision. "My  position was that it was for the department to decide," he said in a statement, "and I believe the department has come to the  appropriate decision." Rita Goldberg, the unlikely initiator of the controversy, was astonished and delighted by the success of her  electronic "chain letter." She said, "This was an honor for Paulin. Do you want to give this man this honor, when he has this history?  This was an actual call to murder people. It's not a joke in wartime. Someone might take him up on it. It's incitement." As for Paulin  himself, he had disavowed his call for the murder of the settlers months earlier, in a letter to the Telegraph of London. Since returning  to Oxford in December, he has limited his public comments to a self-pitying poem, "On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card," published in  January in the London Review of Books, which referred to "the ones who play the a-s card-/ of death threats hate mail talking tough /  the usual cynical Goebbels stuff."

 Controversial speakers have been coming to Harvard for decades, and over the years there have been occasional unpleasant  incidents, most memorably in 1966, when Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, was noisily confronted during the Vietnam  War. But Yasir Arafat, Malcolm X, the Shah of Iran, and scores of others have all spoken without incident. As Charles Fried, a  professor at Harvard Law School, observed, "We've had Fidel Castro here, we've had Al Sharpton, we've had monsters, charlatans,  and scoundrels." So why not Tom Paulin?

 Fried had served as Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration and as a Republican appointee to the Massachusetts Supreme  Judicial Court, and the Paulin matter roused his libertarian instincts. "I heard they were withdrawing the invitation because it caused  'consternation,' " Fried told me. "The reason that was given is they were disinviting him because people didn't like what he'd said.  There's a difference between what you decide to listen to and what you silence. This is silencing."

 Fried wrote a letter to the editor of the Crimson, the campus newspaper, and he recruited two law-school colleagues from a different  end of the political spectrum, Alan M. Dershowitz and Laurence H. Tribe, to sign it with him. "By all accounts this Paulin fellow the  English Department invited to lecture here is a despicable example of the anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel posturing unfortunately quite  widespread among European intellectuals," Fried wrote. "What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation because  a speaker would cause, in the words of English department chair Lawrence Buell, 'consternation and divisiveness.' . . . If Paulin had  spoken, we are sure we would have found ways to tell him and each other what we think of him. Now he will be able to lurk smugly in  his Oxford lair and sneer at America's vaunted traditions of free speech. There are some mistakes which are only made worse by  trying to undo them."

 The law professors' letter-along with the controversy-prompted the English Department to call a meeting for the following Tuesday, to  discuss the Paulin invitation. "The department, rightly, felt it has been misrepresented by the notion-untrue-that Paulin, because of  statements and views attributed to him on the Internet, and then somehow distributed to selected media over the weekend, had been  'disinvited' by us," Jorie Graham said. At the meeting, on November 19th, the thirty to forty senior and junior faculty members voted  to reaffirm their own prerogatives. As Robert Kiely, the former department chair, recalled, "There was a unanimous reassertion that  departments should be autonomous, free to invite whom they wish. And, after a long discussion, despite the unpleasantness of his  views it was unanimous with two abstentions that the department should reinstate its invitation." So far, Paulin hasn't said whether he  will come to Harvard after all.

 It wasn't surprising that a group of law professors helped nudge the English Department to change its mind. After all, lawyers are  trained to spot potential threats to freedom of speech, but this group of professors had special reason to raise their antennae. At the  time of the Paulin controversy, the law school had been struggling for several months with its own problem with freedom of speech.  This one, too, moved at Internet speed, and it, too, fed on enduring political animosities. Unlike the Paulin saga, however, the  would-be censors at Harvard Law School came from the political left.

 Throughout the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the law school endured several ideologically and racially charged tenure battles.  But recent years had been quiet until a series of bizarre incidents occurred last spring. It started with the summary of a Supreme  Court case posted on HLCentral.com, which is a student-run Web site where law students share course outlines and study aides. On  February 18th, a first-year student named Kiwi Camara-who happened to be seventeen years old-warned that he was using "offensive  racial shorthand" and posted the following description of Shelley v. Kraemer, a famous 1948 Supreme Court decision banning racially  restrictive covenants in real-estate contracts: "Nigs buy land w/ no nig covenant; Q: Enforceable?" On March 7th, a black student, F.  Michelle Simpson, complained to the Web administrator of HLCentral about Camara's use of "nigs." "If a person feels a certain way  towards a group, and the 1st amendment gives him the right to express those views, please don't allow your helpful public study tool  to be used by that person to degrade that group," she wrote. In response to the complaint, Camara removed his outlines from  HLCentral.

 On April 1st, however, Simpson received an e-mail from someone who called himself gcrocodile. "I am deeply saddened that as a  result of your complaint Kiwi Camara has decided not to share his outlines with the HLS community in the future," the pseudonymous  author wrote. "Shame on you! You have done a great disservice both to HLS and to the African-American community. If you, as a  race, want to prove that you do not deserve to be called by that word, work hard and you will be recognized. If you just complain and  ask others to do the job for you, it will have the opposite effect. To give you an example, as a result of your complaint I have actually  begun using the 'nigger' word more often than before the incident." The next day, someone put a leaflet in section members'  mailboxes which included the offending e-mail along with a swastika, the words "Fuck Jews," and the statement "I hope you rot in hell  with your yamukas. I bet that you will respond to this leaflet because Jews, unlike blacks, are a politically and economically favored  group at this university." The author of the leaflet, too, was a mystery.

 In light of the anonymous message to Simpson and the leaflet, the professors in the section, including Randall Kennedy, the author of  the recently published "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," convened their students. (Sections are groups of about  eighty students who take most of their first-year classes together.) Kennedy declined to comment.

 "There was an expression of revulsion at what was seen as abuse of a black student," recalled Charles Nesson, the torts professor for  the section, who emerged as a central figure in the controversy. At sixty-three, Nesson has taught at the law school for more than  three decades, specializing lately in Internet law, but he retains the gentle, slightly hazy demeanor of a grownup flower child. Earlier  last year, he caused a stir by telling a reporter for the law-school paper that he sometimes smoked marijuana before class. Describing  the section's reaction to the gcrocodile e-mail, Nesson continued, "I was upset that they were clearly talking about somebody in the  room. Gcrocodile was clearly sitting there in the room and being vilified in such strong terms . . . I actually made a statement urging  whoever the author of this was to come forward to me."

 For the moment, the identity of gcrocodile remained unknown. Meanwhile, there was another curious occurrence in a different  first-year torts class. David Rosenberg taught the same subject as Charles Nesson, but the similarities between the two men end  there. Rosenberg is a sixty-year-old loner who prowls the halls of the law school grimacing at what he regards as the decline of  standards and the rise of the fashionable left. He nurses a special loathing for Critical Legal Studies, a once popular school of thought  among radical professors who believe that the law is a vast system of oppression. One day in March, Rosenberg was conducting a  class discussion about the theories of John Rawls, whose 1971 work, "A Theory of Justice," is a touchstone of liberal political thought,  when a student mentioned that feminists had critiqued Rawls's theories. As Tel Cary-Sadler, an African-American member of the class,  recalled, "Rosenberg said, 'Feminists haven't put forth any positive theory of law, they just tear down other people's theories. Marxists  put forth nothing, either. Feminists, Marxists, and the blacks have contributed nothing to torts.' " Cary-Sadler raised his hand and said  he was offended by the notion that blacks had contributed nothing to tort law. " 'Good,' " Cary-Sadler said Rosenberg replied. "He  regarded offending students to be a pedagogical technique." Rosenberg later explained that he hadn't meant to disparage all black  people, merely those associated with Critical Race Theory, a subset of Critical Legal Studies. In class the following day, Cary-Sadler  read a statement about the remark, and Rosenberg again replied that he was attacking a group of theoreticians, not a race. The  law-school community, he wrote in a statement about the controversy, "should realize that for a faculty member to be strongly  criticized-and even threatened with formal sanctions-for making critical remarks about a genre of scholarship in class strikes at the  very heart of academic freedom."

 As the Rosenberg controversy simmered, a group of technologically adept students unmasked gcrocodile as Matthias Scholl, a  Polish-born member of the first-year class, who then came forward and admitted his authorship to Nesson. (The creator of the  swastika-bearing leaflet remains unknown.) On April 4th, Nesson and Scholl surprised Nesson's colleague Bernard Harcourt by showing  up at Harcourt's criminal-law class. There the student apologized to Simpson and the class for his anonymous e-mail. "Matthias was  chagrined," Nesson recalled. "He was eager to have himself understood. I believe Polish is his first language." (Scholl and Camara  refused to talk about the incident.) Nesson then proposed to the class that they use the gcrocodile episode as the basis for a mock trial  of Scholl, with Nesson as defense attorney and Harcourt as prosecutor. "This is a made-for-education kind of confrontation for a law  school," Nesson said. "This could be a learning experience that would avoid the necessity for an administrative tribunal and official  discipline on the record, which seemed somehow out of keeping with the air of community."

 This was where things took an especially unsettling turn. A friend of Simpson's, who had also received an e-mail from Scholl, burst into  tears and ran from the room. "To have her torts professor take a position which in her mind was opposed to her was more than she  could handle at that time," Nesson told me. Suddenly, in return for proposing the mock trial of the unmasked gcrocodile, Nesson  became the principal villain in the drama, widely denounced for his purported racial insensitivity. Black students mobilized against both  Rosenberg and Nesson. "People were really upset about not just these incidents but black students feeling marginalized, disenchanted,  and not really feeling represented by the administration," said Lacey Schwartz, a leader of the Black Law Students Association  (B.L.S.A.). "It's a sick university, and it really needs help." Three hundred and fifty students staged a silent protest, followed by  speeches from professors Charles Ogletree of the law school and Cornel West, who was still at the Afro-American Studies department.

 But what, after all, had the professors done wrong? Rosenberg had disparaged, inarticulately at first, a school of legal thought; Nesson  had tried, ineptly at best, to turn an unpleasant incident into a classroom exercise. Both men compounded the controversy in ways that  fit their reputations as campus eccentrics. Characteristically, Rosenberg declined to offer any kind of apology. Just as typically, Nesson  prostrated himself in remorse. When black students walked out of his class, Nesson abjectly e-mailed the B.L.S.A.: "I particularly  appreciate your consideration in giving me advance notice before class yesterday of your walk-out demonstration from my class."

 The responsibility for responding to the protests fell to Todd Rakoff, the dean in charge of the three-year law program. "Things got  very confused very fast," Rakoff told me. "The question about the mock trial had become so riled up that it was hard to get back to  torts." So Nesson agreed that Rakoff and another professor would give the remainder of his torts classes for the semester. As for  Rosenberg, Rakoff said, "The students were also upset because maybe there were viewpoints about torts that they weren't getting in  the class because he seemed to have such a strong viewpoint of his own. So, with his participation, they got a couple of guest  speakers to give alternative views. They also asked if they could tape his class instead of attending in person, because some people  really felt alienated or they didn't consider David's explanation sufficient." In other words, as a result of the two professors' purported  misdeeds, their students no longer had to show up and listen to them.

 These victories over Nesson and Rosenberg did not satisfy the B.L.S.A., which demanded that the law school move to create an office  of multicultural affairs, "dedicated to dealing with issues of racial harassment and providing diversity training"; to "prevent Professors  Nesson and Rosenberg from teaching first-year classes and publicly reprimand them in the Harvard Law Bulletin and Harvard  Crimson"; to require professors, deans, and incoming students to attend training in tolerance and diversity; and to "institute a policy,  applying to both students and professors, banning racial harassment analogous to the School's sexual harassment policy." By and  large, the administration responded favorably. Within days of the protests, the school put up posters around campus saying, "Some  appalling things have happened at Harvard Law School recently. . . . We emphatically condemn these acts." Scholl was disciplined for  his anonymous e-mail. The law school brought in a consultant to talk to students about racial issues in a series of meetings called  "Difficult Conversations"; it organized a series of faculty workshops designed to teach about race; and a consultant conducted focus  groups to learn the concerns of minority students. As for a possible racial-harassment code, the dean appointed a faculty, staff, and  student Committee on Healthy Diversity, which began meeting this fall, to address the issue. "But now it's just called the Committee on  Diversity," Rakoff said. "There were too many jokes."

 What may be most striking about the imbroglio is that such quirky and anomalous events generated such a consensus at the law  school-that racial bias was widespread and that immediate corrective action was needed. As Charles Ogletree put it, "We're stronger  as a result of these experiences. No faculty has left, no one has been punished or banished. Our minority acceptances are at an  all-time high." Still, the law school's comprehensive response may have given its students an unrealistic picture of the world beyond  Cambridge.

 "This was a hysterical, ridiculous overreaction to a couple of unfortunate incidents," Charles Fried told me. "This place is so politically  correct that the notion that we are rife with racism is never-never land." According to Alan Dershowitz, "The real world that we are  sending people out to is full of racism, sexism, and homophobia. It's not a place where our adult students should be running to Mommy  and Daddy Dean and saying, 'Please protect us from racist speech.' You want diversity? Rosenberg and Nesson are diversity."

 One lesson of both the law-school and the Paulin controversies may be the peril of making free-speech judgments at Internet speed.  The most questionable decisions-the cancellation of Paulin's lecture, and the abandonment of Nesson and Rosenberg-happened the  fastest. Just a few days' deliberation prompted the English Department to reiterate its invitation to Paulin. Learning from the English  Department's woes, Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies has vowed to proceed with a reading this spring by the New  Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka (ne LeRoi Jones), who wrote a poem that appeared to posit the conspiratorial notion that the Israelis  had advance notice of the attack on the World Trade Center. (The invitation to Baraka preceded his poem by many months.) At the  law school, the B.L.S.A. has continued its protest, but the diversity committee, under the leadership of Martha Field, a faculty  moderate, has set a cautious course this fall. "We've done some surveys and collected material from a lot of places, and real speech  codes punishing people seem to have had problems," Field told me. For his part, Lawrence Summers also seems dubious about the  value of speech codes. "I think it's almost impossible to legislate civility, just like it's almost impossible to legislate honesty," he said.  "There are a set of virtues that are very important for communities and that are very important for universities to uphold that are not  amenable to legislation and sanction as a means for their upholding."

 In late November, a group of faculty members held a forum on controversial speech and the power of literary expression, because, as  Professor Elisa New wrote in the invitation, "events of the past week make clear, at the very least, that literature does matter-that it  moves people and that it exerts force in the world." About fifty English majors at the college came to hear professors read and discuss  selections from such works as "Lolita" and "The Merchant of Venice." Robert Kiely, the former department chairman, read a verse that  addressed some of the same passions that had brought Harvard to this unlikely crossroads. Like Paulin's poem, the work Kiely read  addressed the conflict in the Middle East, and it concluded, "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the  stones." It was Psalm 137.