Free Speech Requires Responsible Judgment

To the editors:

The English department’s decision to re-invite poet Tom Paulin to Harvard is at once sad and disgraceful ( News, “In About-Face, English Dept. Re-Invites Anti-Israeli Poet,” Nov. 20). In light of Paulin’s pearls of wisdom and insight, the English department has decided that it must protect his freedom of speech and invite him to campus. Does the English department really need reminding that Paulin’s legal right to free speech does not in any way entail an obligation on Harvard’s part to provide him with a platform? University communities should be committed to freedom of speech, but also to the responsible and intelligent use thereof. Some speakers are presumably so egregiously offensive that common sense would dictate that they not be invited; evidently, those who deny Israel’s right to exist and call for the “shooting” of Jews are not among them. This moral obscenity speaks for itself.

A member of the faculty expresses his fear that members of the department who initially chose to disinvite Paulin “might have acted under a sense of pressure.” One hopes so. Perhaps it was the pressure of basic decency, which not everyone in the English department appears to share. This decision should serve as a reminder to the entire University community of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ critical and courageous warnings about statements and decisions which are anti-Semitic “in effect if not in intent.”

Shai A. Held ’94

Nov. 20, 2002