Puffery

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Just before the Spring vacation I received a piece of mail from the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies (and thus I presume from my colleague Prof. Nadav Safran) which contained an editorial-page column from The Wall Street Journal (March 12) defending Safran in his dispute with the Harvard administration over his C.I.A. ties. This mail saddened me very much. It saddened me because I had hoped my friend and colleague Prof. Safran would take the high-road rather than the low-road in the aftermath of his dispute.

The editorial-page column mailed by the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies was called "Harvard's Point of Order," by Mark Helprin, identified as a novelist and political writer. I can only assume that Prof. Safran endorses the incredible argument offered by Mark Helprin which had three main points: 1) That Prof. Safran's ties to the C.I.A. violate nothing--neither the university's rules regulating such ties nor normative/ethical rules governing scholarship and intellectual life; 2) that normative/ethical rules governing scholarship and intellectual life are humbug anyway, especially when set against the imperatives of state; and 3) that the real scandal surrounding l'affaire Safran is the combined pompous posturing of moral rectitude by Safran's colleagues and the Harvard administration (on both of whom Helprin comes down very hard).

Nowhere in The Wall Street Journal's column is there the slightest hint of error on Prof. Safran's part. But I have no doubt that Prof. Safran erred, especially in his failure of judgement in permitting the C.I.A. the right to review and edit his published scholarship. Prof. Safran should not permit The Wall Street Journal's kind of rightwing puffery in defence of the imperatives of state to stand between him and his larger intellectual obligations. I would hope he'd act otherwise. Martin Kilson   Professor of Government