Why Am I Banned From Harvard?

The Harvard University Police, after committing one of their biggest blunders by arresting and incarcerating an innocent man, me, on frivolous charges of threat and extortion, have now resorted to the illegal act of banning me from the Harvard campus. On Friday, April 12, the very day when the D.A. dropped the charges against me, the Harvard Police, instead of issuing a sincere apology for maltreating a former post doctoral fellow who is a university professor (at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell), sent me a stern warning that from now on I have no right to even attend public lectures at Harvard, and that I will be considered a trespasser facing arrest if I refuse to comply.

The fact that I am on the verge of filing a comprehensive lawsuit against the University (see news story, April 8) is, of course, the real reason behind HUPD's latest move against me. By banning me from Harvard, these gentlemen want to prevent me from getting the truth out to the students and others at Harvard, naively thinking that they can thus close the Pandora's box they opened when they took part in the campaign of character assassination orchestrated by my political opponents at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies.

The HUPD's latest mistreatment of my rights has given me another probable cause in my charges of libel and conspiracy to be filed in the Federal District Court shortly. In the meantime, I appeal to the progressive student groups on the Harvard campus to extend a formal invitation to me to speak on this issue which, in a word, represents the ugly, Kafkaesque side of Harvard University. Surely, there must be some one on campus who cares about the freedom of speech! --Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Ph.D. Professor of American Politics University of Massachusetts at Lowell