Professors Criticize Huntington In Debate

Two professors criticized Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial argument that current immigrants are not assimilating into American culture at a debate yesterday afternoon at the Harvard Divinity School.

Huntington, the Weatherhead University Professor and author of Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, defended his recent book against arguments by Divinity School Professor David Little and Rudenstine Professor of Latin American Studies David Carrasco, who said that immigrants add rather than take away from American identity.

In the most controversial chapter of the book, Huntington writes of Hispanic immigration and how differences between immigrant and American values can blur a nation’s sense of culture.

“Immigrants see themselves as citizens of the world, not necessarily American citizens,” he said in the debate yesterday. He said that the values that used to be defined as uniquely American—like work ethic, religiosity and individualism—are challenged by immigrants who bring with them their own particular values.

The event attracted a large Latino presence, partly due to the efforts of Latino student groups whose members disagree with Huntington.

“I wanted to see a lot of Latinos coming out to this event,” said Leyla R. Bravo ’05, the former president of Fuerza Latina and current business manager of La Vida at Harvard: The Unofficial Latino Guide to Harvard University.

Bravo, who said Huntington’s book was “irresponsible work for someone of his caliber,” sent out e-mails to student groups to encourage them to attend.

“I wanted to make sure people knew about it. It should be an intellectual debate between two very different views,” she said.

Huntington, who has written numerous books about American foreign policy and culture and serves as chairman of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, wrote an article in the March issue of Foreign Policy called “Jose, Can You See?” In it he was skeptical that Mexicans would succeed in the same way earlier immigrant groups had. “There is no Americano dream,” he wrote in the article. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

Carrasco, however, suggested that social scientists should take a “crossroads approach” to analyzing America’s identity.

He said that the democratic process has often been “obstructed by white supremacy,” or an insistence that America’s culture is based at its Anglo-Saxon center, and not at its ever-changing immigrant landscape.

Carrasco showed slides challenging Huntington’s evidence about the status and values of Hispanic immigrants in America and a comic strip that poked fun at the book.

He said that the book’s chapter on Hispanics “says that Latinos are the top of every problem or the bottom of every achievement.”

Huntington said that the high school graduation rate for Mexican immigrants was below the rate for both blacks and whites and that much of the material in the chapter about Mexican culture came from Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

Little argued that the majority in a society should not necessarily dictate the society’s identity, citing the Supreme Court case involving the “under God” clause of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Little has also debated with Huntington in the classroom, where he teaches Government 2785, “Religion in Global Politics,” with Huntington and Kennedy School Professor Michael Ignatieff.

Jorian P. Schutz ’05, who took a freshman seminar with Carrasco and attended the debate after reading an e-mail from Bravo, said he came expecting “a very important exchange of ideas on one of the most important issues in the country.”