Discredited Dean

Editorial of The New York Sun
March 20, 2006

It's going to be illuminating to watch how Harvard handles the controversy over the decision of its John F. Kennedy School of Government to issue a "Faculty Research Working Paper" on "The Israel Lobby" that is co-authored by its academic dean, Stephen Walt. On page one this morning we report that Dean Walt's paper has been met with praise by David Duke, the man the Anti-Defamation League calls "America's best-known racist." The controversy is still young. But it's not too early to suggest that it's going to be hard for Mr. Walt to maintain his credibility as a dean. We don't see it as a matter of academic freedom but simply as a matter of necessary quality control.

The Kennedy School, to cite but one example, is home to the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy, whose Web site claims it "promotes serious, probing analysis of how the news media affect politics and public policy in the United States and globally." How is the Center's Alex Jones going to be able to work for a dean who prattles on the way Mr. Walt does about how the pro-Israel lobby is "manipulating the media" on the basis, in part, of the false claim that "the American media contains few criticisms of Israeli policy, rarely questions Washington's relationship with Israel, and only occasionally discusses the Lobby's profound influence on U.S. policy"?

No doubt this contretemps is going to give students at Harvard a glimpse of who's willing to stand up and be counted. One of the professors at the Shorenstein Center, Marvin Kalb, ducked the issue when we called him for comment. Only recently Mr. Kalb was publicly petitioning the Newspaper Association of America about its failure to address its predecessor's inaction in respect of Jewish journalists trapped in Nazi Germany. Now - at a moment when Israelis and Jews everywhere are under attack in a global war against America and Israel launched by Islamofascists - the cat has got his tongue.

This is an important moment for Harvard. For a while it looked like its campus might escape the kind of scandal that rocked Columbia in the past couple of years. But that was not to be. Students have just watched its president, Lawrence Summers, driven from office in a fight that was triggered by, among other things, Mr. Summers' willingness to stand up in the university's famed Memorial Church and declare that the drive for disinvestment in Israel was anti-Semitic in its effect if not its intent. Mr. Summers learned that these issues can't be dealt with in a glancing fashion, a point that is underscored by Columbia's travail. The Ford Foundation recently had its own learning experience. If the authorities at Harvard take an honest look at Mr. Walt's paper they are going to see that one of their deanships is being used as a pulpit for a cause that John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have found abhorrent.