Harvard Rules (27 page)

So Yasin wrote a short essay about the tensions between being Muslim and being American, and how in fact they weren't really tensions at all. How both the Koran and the Constitution promoted peace, justice, and compassion. “As a Muslim, and as an American, I am commanded to stand up for the protection of life and liberty, to serve the poor and the weak, to celebrate the diversity of humankind,” he wrote. “There is no contradiction.”

Yasin focused on “the constant struggle to do what is right.” That, he claimed, was the true meaning of the word
jihad
—a word that had been “corrupted and misinterpreted” by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In fact, jihad was a universal concept, even an American one. “The American Dream,” Yasin wrote, “is a universal dream, and it is more than a set of materialistic aspirations. It is the power and opportunity to shape one's own life; to house and feed a family with security and dignity; and to practice your faith in peace. This is our American Jihad.”

The judges were a committee of five: Peter Gomes; Rick Hunt; Nancy Houfek, an acting teacher at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre, a classics professor named Richard Thomas; and the dean of the extension school, Michael Shinagel. Together they had more than a century of Harvard experience, and they took the university's traditions seriously. Competing against about twenty other students, Yasin had to submit a draft of the speech in advance and then make it through three rounds of auditions. But in early May, he got the news that he had been chosen to speak at commencement on June 6. There was really only one concern—his speech didn't have a title. “I was slow on the title bit,” Yasin remembered. So Michael Shinagel suggested one that he thought summed up the speech in a concise way: “My American Jihad.”

About three weeks later, the
Crimson
ran a short piece on the student commencement speakers. The article listed the title of Yasin's speech. After that, all hell broke loose.

 

The protest began with some discussion on the house bulletin boards, websites that each undergraduate house uses to disseminate news and events. Each site has a discussion forum, and in the days after the
Crimson
story, several students began posting messages to the bulletin boards in which they questioned the appropriateness of a Muslim student giving a commencement speech called “My American Jihad.” They didn't know what the speech said, as it was customary not to disclose the contents of such speeches before they were delivered. But they didn't like the sound of it, and some began to circulate a petition requesting that the Harvard administration let them read the speech before commencement.

On May 29, Patrick Healy, the
Boston Globe
reporter who'd authored the grade inflation articles, wrote a piece on Yasin. Almost instantaneously the media swarm descended. The
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
all the print heavyweights. “Harvard's Holy War,” proclaimed an editorial in the
New York Daily News.
Next followed the TV acronyms: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC. Many of the stories and articles questioned Yasin's definition of
jihad.
On the
Today
show, Katie Couric said to Yasin, “In fact, Jayed…Zayed, the dictionary definition describes jihad as ‘a Muslim holy war or spiritual struggles against infidels.'” Couldn't Yasin understand “why some people might be unnerved by the title of your speech?”

“You're using an American dictionary to try to find a definition of an Arabic word,” Yasin shot back.

Larry Summers was livid. “The controversy took him by surprise, and he was furious,” said one person familiar with his thinking. This was his first commencement as president. He'd invited his closest professional friend, Robert Rubin, to speak. He'd spent much of the year talking about the importance of patriotism and the university's respect for military service. And now all anyone was discussing was a five-minute undergraduate speech that he hadn't even known about. But he was taking heat for it. Summers was receiving hundreds, perhaps thousands of e-mails through his public address, lawrence_summers @harvard.edu. Many of them contained similar language, as if they were part of an organized campaign. Jewish alumni in particular were furious, and some were threatening to withhold donations.

“The speech was obviously an assault,” said Ruth Wisse, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature, who is known for her uncompromising pro-Israel views. “Primarily an assault on the Jews, secondarily an assault on America,” she said. “You could so obviously see the professoriat thinking, ‘Oh, isn't this wonderful? Here we're really going to show our bonafides as multiculturalists by taking the most unpopular minority view of the moment.' But jihad is serious. This was an act of contempt for the sensitivities of Jews and Americans.”

Summers was irritated with Yasin, but he was furious with the people who had chosen him. He thought that the members of the commencement committee were just the kind of aging radicals for whom he had no use—classics professor Richard Thomas, for example, was one of Harvard's most liberal faculty members—and Summers blamed the committee for provoking an unnecessary controversy. Rick Hunt, who organized the commencement ceremonies, bore the brunt of Summers' outrage. The president couldn't understand why Hunt could have permitted such apparent insensitivity. Summers felt blindsided. “My guess is, Larry didn't even know there was a committee on commencement,” Marty Peretz said. “Why would anyone care?”

Summers cared now. He wanted the university on message, just like the White House would be. Harvard staged a commencement to salute its graduates and advance its fundraising and public relations goals, not to ignite international controversy or celebrate freedom of speech. If he could have, Summers would have replaced Yasin as speaker, but he knew it was too late for that—if he ousted Yasin, he'd only provoke more publicity. To regain control, Summers forbade members of the administration from speaking out about Yasin. “Larry told all his top administrative people not to say anything in support of me,” Yasin said.

Privately, Harry Lewis and the members of the committee were appalled. To them, Summers was leaving a Harvard student in the lurch. The president had read the speech; he must have known that its intended message was one of healing and reconciliation. Yet Yasin, a twenty-two-year-old student, one of the best Harvard had to offer, was being ripped to shreds in the press. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews announced that Yasin was a supporter of terrorism who had once thrown a fundraiser for Hamas. People were calling him an anti-Semite. And Summers' official response was to say that no one could speak on his behalf?

“His attitude about Zayed Yasin was just about the most un-American thing any Harvard president had done in years,” said one faculty member involved in the controversy. Harry Lewis told colleagues that Summers had personally forbidden him to say anything in support of Yasin. Lewis obeyed that command, but he didn't feel right about it. Later, he would decide that in all his forty years at Harvard, that was the decision he most regretted. “I should have resigned right then,” he told one friend.

As commencement approached, Yasin was under mounting pressure. The debate on campus was only getting hotter. Jewish students were particularly upset, and the angriest among them announced that, to protest Yasin, they would hand out twenty thousand red-white-and-blue ribbons at commencement. That way, twenty thousand people could show Yasin that they were patriots and he was not. An e-mail chain letter was urging attendees to stand up and turn their backs on Yasin when he spoke. Another e-mail petition called on Yasin to publicly condemn “all organizations that directly or indirectly support terrorism anywhere in the world,” and urged his ouster as commencement speaker. Some five thousand students, faculty, parents, and alumni were reported to have signed the petition.

Someone sent Yasin a death threat in the form of a Blue Mountain Arts e-card. The card showed a cute bunny rabbit pulling itself out of a hat. “It seems that you want to die early by making such a sucked-up speech on jihad,” it said. “You can jolly well take you and your pig religion elsewhere. After september 11th—take this as a warning: Your life will be in danger if you choose to go ahead. You should really go back to whichever country you came from. America does not welcome Moslems. Eat pork and die sucker.”

It was signed, “One Shot One Kill.” The police traced it to a small town in Colorado, but couldn't identify the sender.

Another e-mail mentioned that “your University allowed Muslim groups to hold fund-raisers on your campus…linked to the support of terrorists. At the same time you do not allow ARMY ROTC classes on campus because you do not like their ‘don't ask don't tell' policy toward homosexuals. Sounds like your University is out of touch with the zeitgeist of America. Get with it. You are either fer' us or agin' us.”

Yasin, who was thin to start with, was losing weight. He wasn't sleeping. He kept misplacing his commencement cap and gown. His brother Tariq, a Harvard sophomore, had to keep finding them for him. The members of the committee told him that Summers was convinced that he planned to hijack commencement—that on that special and important day, Yasin was going to walk up to the podium in front of tens of thousands of listeners, throw away his speech, and deliver some fire-breathing pro-Palestinian, anti-American screed. That pissed Yasin off—he'd worked hard on his speech; he wasn't about to just discard what he'd written—but it also demoralized him a little. He'd never intended to provoke such bitter words.

So he compromised. He changed his title from “My American Jihad” to “Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad.” “I was naïve,” Yasin said. “There was more than I realized when we came up with the title—it was a little incendiary. At the same time, I couldn't just get rid of the word
jihad,
because that would have been backing down too much.” In a sense, though, the word was removed for him; the Harvard commencement program and every official Harvard publication would simply delete the subtitle.

On May 29, about a week before commencement, Summers released a statement about the controversy. It read as follows:

To Yasin's supporters, Summers' statement was far from a vigorous defense of the values of tolerance and civil discourse in a university setting—not to mention of a student who'd done nothing wrong. “It was basically like saying, ‘It would be good if you don't kill Zayed Yasin,'” said one faculty member. The first paragraph felt like an expression of sympathy toward those who were angry. And that line about Yasin being “chosen…by a duly appointed faculty committee” was clearly Summers' way of distancing himself from the brouhaha.

“The statement was weak,” Yasin said. “Especially when you consider that he's not the kind of guy to mince words. There was no reference in it to me, or to the content of the speech. There was only reference to ‘constructive conversation,' when there was no constructive conversation going on.” In fact, Summers hadn't even called Yasin. Throughout the entire controversy, the university president never said a word to the beleaguered undergraduate commencement speaker.

On June 5, the day before commencement, Summers gave a short address at the ROTC commissioning ceremony for Harvard students. “You know,” he said, “we venerate at this university—as we should—openness, debate, the free expression of ideas, as central to what we are all about and what we should be. But we must also respect and admire moral clarity when it is required….” Those words, too, seemed to indicate where Summers' sympathies lay.

The morning of June 6 dawned cold and gray, but there were still some thirty thousand people on hand for commencement. The ceremonies had traditionally begun with Harvard-themed music from the university's history. On this day, at Summers' instigation, “The Star Spangled Banner” would be played. “That is as it should be,” Summers had told the ROTC cadets, adding that it was always “a thrill” for him to hear the national anthem.

Security was tight. For the first time ever, visitors had to pass through metal detectors to get into the Yard. For Zayed Yasin, security was even tighter. He spent the morning shadowed by an officer from the Harvard University Police Department, just in case any of those threats were real. And when the time came for him to deliver his speech, he was so nervous his legs were shaking underneath his gown. But he was a little angry, too. Looking out over the crowd, he could see the protesters wearing their red-white-and-blue ribbons. In anticipation of that, he'd donned a red-white-and-blue ribbon of his own. No one was going to take his patriotism away from him. He remembered that Summers thought he was going to throw away his speech—the suggestion still insulted him. The whole experience, he said later, “pulled some of the veneer of civilization off of Harvard. I saw how thin that veneer was—and underneath it was raw power politics.”