Harvard Rules (43 page)

Throughout the crowd, heads began to nod.

“Today we have walked out of classes, out of work, to show our opposition to the Bush administration's war on Iraq,” McCarthy continued. “We have decided to encourage our students to walk out with us, because we are not content to simply read and study American protest writings. We are not content with confining our work to classroom discussions…. We believe that education means nothing if we, your teachers, do not practice what we teach.

“We are at war,” McCarthy said. “We must articulate—as clearly and loudly as possible—our grievances with those currently in power. The Bush administration has made the case for war against Iraq….They would have us believe that there is a connection between the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the country of Iraq.

“
There is not.

“They would have us believe that there is a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

“
There is not.

“They would have us believe that Saddam Hussein poses a clear and present threat to the security of the United States.

“
He does not.
”

McCarthy knew what he was doing, appropriating the rhythm and repetition of orators such as Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the call and response of African American music and prayer. The crowd murmured its approval. McCarthy was so focused, his cheeks were turning red. His voice had increased in volume until he was almost shouting. He was connecting with this audience, firing them up, making them believe, at a moment when they felt demoralized and helpless, that they were neither.

“I can't help but think that God is not happy with the world right now,” McCarthy continued. “He cannot be pleased with our greed and arrogance and violent disregard for His children. But we can still save our world. As Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow countrymen to do during another time of great national crisis, we must embrace ‘the better angels of our nature.'

“We are at war, my brothers and sisters. This great crisis will be the first test of our generation. May we find the moral courage to resist this unjust war. May we find the strength to be prophets of peace. And may the God we all share bless those of us in America and across the globe who are engaged in the work of peace, so that we can save our souls before it's too late.”

McCarthy was done and the crowd cheered its appreciation, and then the demonstration shifted to march down Massachusetts Avenue, toward MIT and Boston. In front of Mass Hall, immobile and unresponsive, the police officer looked on, his hands clasped behind his back.

 

About a week after she met with Dean Graham, Rachel Fish sent her research on Sheik Zayed to Larry Summers' office. When she didn't hear from him after a few days, she called to confirm that he'd received it. Clayton Spencer, a presidential aide, assured Fish that he had and that she shouldn't “panic.” President Summers was well aware of the issue, but he expected Dean Graham to handle it.

In the meantime, Graham had hired a graduate student to look into Fish's accusations, saying he'd report back to her in four to six weeks. Fish was skeptical. “He was very polite,” she said. “I think he probably thought that I would go away.” After all, time was on Graham's side; Fish would graduate in early June, and after graduation, students tended to let such issues fall by the wayside. They moved away. They got jobs. Things that seemed important on campus were relegated to the back burner, then gradually abandoned.

Weeks passed, and Fish didn't hear anything, but she was far from idle. She was working with other Jewish students and Jewish organizations on campus to spread the word about the Zayed gift, so that they could bring pressure to bear if Harvard did not address the issue. At the same time, Bill Graham was doing his best to investigate her claims. He was in contact with the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and a former UAE ambassador to the United States. “We were all appalled when we heard about this center,” Graham said. “But it's very difficult to find out who's running what and who's paying attention to what in a situation like that. There are thousands of things named Zayed in the UAE. I mean, you can find Taco Bells with Sheik Zayed's name on them.” Graham certainly agreed with Fish's estimation of the Zayed Centre. “This was producing very ugly anti-Semitic stuff,” he said. “Stuff that we wanted to have no part of whatsoever.”

The situation was delicate not just for Harvard, but also for the United States government. Even considering the work of the Zayed Centre, the UAE is one of the most moderate, pro-Western countries in the Middle East, and it has made itself into a locus for international business. Companies such as CNN and Microsoft have regional headquarters there. And it is an important U.S. ally; the UAE is the only Middle Eastern country with a port large enough to dock an aircraft carrier, and it allows the United States to do so. For Harvard to return Sheik Zayed's money could spark an international incident that would damage U.S.-UAE relations at a time when the United States needed every Middle Eastern ally it could get.

Harvard was also building a relationship with the UAE, of which the divinity school gift was probably the least important part. In April, officials from that country attended a conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. GSD dean Peter Rowe lauded Dubai, one of the seven “micro-kingdoms” that constitute the UAE, as “a very important…connecting link between the East and the West.” Meanwhile, representatives from the Harvard Medical School were meeting with officials in Dubai to discuss a joint venture between the medical school and a UAE complex called Dubai Health Care City, in which Harvard would set up a medical education program. One Harvard medical conference there had expected 300 attendees and instead hosted 1,300.

A strong relationship between Harvard and the United Arab Emirates would further Larry Summers' goal of globalizing the university and could also prove immensely lucrative. If, on the other hand, Harvard returned Sheik Zayed's money, it could damage the university's relationship not only with Sheik Zayed, but any number of Arab leaders who might not appreciate the idea of an American university insulting an Arab head of state—thus alienating a pool of potential donors with almost infinite wealth.

After eight weeks with still no word from Dean Graham, on Friday, May 10, Fish got a phone call from a
Boston Globe
reporter who'd heard about the controversy. She e-mailed Graham that she wanted to meet again, but that she planned to talk to the reporter. The next day, an angry Graham wrote back. “Dear Rachel, I was about to write to you just now to set up a time [to meet] when I got a call [from the
Globe
] indicating that you have already been talking to the media,” Graham said. “If that is true, I don't think I can be of much help to you or meet with you…. This kind of irresponsibility and unwillingness on your part to act in good faith when that is how I have dealt with you does not make me feel able to take this matter up with you in the detail that I wanted to…. I expect to have a full report for the community before the end of May, and I think you might as well wait for that with everyone else. Sincerely, William Graham.”

Fish would not simply “wait for that.” The
Globe
ran its story on May 11; it prompted an explosion of media interest. NPR, the
CBS Evening News,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and other news organizations all ran features on the controversy. Convinced that working within the system was doing no good, Fish granted interviews, appeared on talk shows, and wrote an op-ed piece in the
Crimson.
“I honestly thought—and this may have been naïve—that once the issue was brought to [Dean Graham's] attention, he would contact the president of the UAE and say, ‘I disassociate myself with this,'” she said. “What made me question his intent was that he'd been dragging his feet, and that made me nervous.”

What Fish later found out was that, around mid-May, Larry Summers had taken the decision out of Bill Graham's hands. He had come to the conclusion that the matter was too sensitive, the stakes too high, for him not to take control. But Fish couldn't have known that from press accounts; Summers refused to speak about the issue, either not returning reporters' phone calls or letting spokeswoman Lucie McNeil proffer a vague comment. The stonewalling typified Summers' approach to the media: If something good happened, he wanted credit. If a controversy arose, he let an underling take the hit. In this case, he had no intention of being tarred by what seemed a no-win controversy over a gift made before he became president to a school that he didn't respect. That approach to press management was business as usual in Washington, but to the growing number of people around campus who noted their president's chronic invisibility on matters where his reputation might be even slightly nicked, it suggested that Summers was more concerned with his image than with Harvard's.

But Summers never made it clear that the Sheik Zayed matter was now in his hands and not Bill Graham's, which meant that Graham had no power to fix the problem even though he was the figure publicly associated with it. “Summers hung Graham out to dry,” said one professor familiar with the interaction between the dean and the president. “Like an officer letting his troops take the blame.”

Though she rightly suspected that the media attention was having an impact, Rachel Fish never heard back from Larry Summers' office and didn't know what was going on behind the scenes in Mass Hall, or at her own divinity school. She was growing disillusioned with the university she had selected because she believed in its motto—or rather, she believed that
Harvard
believed its motto. Even if the proper response to the gift was complicated, couldn't Harvard at least issue a statement deploring anti-Semitism? Wasn't that the kind of moral act a great university was supposed to do? How could Larry Summers hide behind surrogates when he'd given such a principled speech about anti-Semitism?

Fish was saddened by Harvard's moral obfuscation and disappointed by the president whose words had inspired her to action. Still, she was a stubborn woman when she had to be. At twenty-three years old, she hadn't given up on the idea that one person with idealism and persistence could change the world—or at least Harvard. With neither Bill Graham nor Larry Summers talking to her, and the sneaking suspicion that Harvard just wanted her to go away, she began to plan a commencement protest.

 

The last Protest Lit class of the semester, the last class of Tim McCarthy's Harvard career, was titled “The Costs of American Dreaming.” On May 1, John Stauffer began by talking about American wealth and globalization. Both subjects had been themes of the course—the students were now reading Barbara Ehrenreich's
Nickel and Dimed,
about the reality of minimum-wage jobs, and Kevin Bales'
Disposable People,
an investigation of modern-day slavery. As the class moved from the past to the present, the subjects of American economic inequity and globalization inevitably converged.

“One percent of the United States owns fifty percent of its wealth,” Stauffer announced, holding onto his podium. “The top five percent owns ninety percent of the country's wealth.” That consolidation of wealth had an impact beyond American borders. “United States' wealth leads to people in other parts of the world being poorer than ever,” Stauffer said, looking even more intense than usual.

McCarthy segued into his subject for the day: hip-hop music as protest literature. McCarthy and Stauffer each had areas where one or the other felt more comfortable, and this was McCarthy's turf. “We can't understand hip-hop without linking it to globalization, the increasingly rapid flow of money, culture, and information between countries,” he said. He talked for a few minutes about the female hip-hop group Salt 'n' Pepa, whose frankness about sex and AIDS during the 1980s promoted ties between gays, blacks, AIDS advocates, and the public health community. And McCarthy mentioned how, a decade before, Skip Gates had testified at the obscenity trial of rap group 2 Live Crew. Chuckling a little, McCarthy said, “We won't tell Larry Summers about that because we don't need any more people going to Princeton.”

In the back of the room, McCarthy's father, Tom, an older man with eagle-white hair, wearing slacks and a coat and tie, sat in a corner chair listening intently. Malcom was there, too. McCarthy's mother, Michelle, couldn't come because she had to work that day.

Before taking over, Stauffer said, he had to digress for a moment. “The problem of being a complete outsider is that you have no power,” he said. “But you have a certain sort of freedom as well…. Effective protest is not about being hip, cool, or trendy, but about principles, about action based in deep-seated belief. To quote James Baldwin, ‘I love America more than any other country in the world, and for this reason I reserve the right to criticize her perpetually.'”

He paused and cleared his throat and said, “No one I know embodies those ideals better than Tim McCarthy.”

The class, which knew the import of this occasion, jumped to its feet and applauded, while the course teaching fellows—a white English woman, a black woman, a black man, and an Asian man—approached the stage and hugged McCarthy, who looked a little overwhelmed. “Tim has been a beacon, a source of inspiration, a very close friend,” Stauffer said. “We are, in many respects, very different, but we usually end up at the same point. My Harvard is going to be different from now on. My Harvard has been enjoyable in large part owing to Tim McCarthy.”

Stauffer stepped back from his podium, looking like he didn't trust himself to keep talking.

McCarthy gathered his breath. In a few weeks, he would be heading to North Carolina to start writing his book on church burnings. Dressed in khaki pants, a blue shirt and brightly colored tie, and a seersucker jacket, he looked more suited for preppy Chapel Hill than he did for a class on protest literature.