Harvard dean opens faculty papers to rebuttal
Move in response to recent uproar
The dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government said yesterday that he has decided to open the working papers of the school's faculty to challenge and rebuttal by other Harvard professors. The move was prompted by the uproar over a recent paper that asserted that a pro-Israel lobby dominates US foreign policy to the detriment of US interests.
Dean David Ellwood said in a telephone interview yesterday that he formulated the new policy after Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz asked to post his rebuttal to the Israel lobby paper in the ''working papers" section of the Kennedy School website, alongside the original article by Kennedy School academic dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer.
Working papers are works in progress by members of the Kennedy School faculty on a broad range of subjects. Ellwood's decision would open those papers to all full-time Harvard faculty -- more than 1,000 people, according to university officials.
Ellwood was interviewed yesterday just after returning from a trip to India.
He said he had been in constant contact with other administrators and faculty about the controversy, which spread nationally and internationally.
In addition to requiring that authors be full-time Harvard faculty, the new policy would require that articles submitted be in academic format, with citations of sources, and that they be responsive to the intellectual ideas and evidence of the original paper and not contain attacks on the authors of the original paper.
He said that two respected members of the senior faculty would determine whether a submission for posting met these criteria.
Ellwood said no request like Dershowitz's has come up previously, and that after considering the matter he opted to set a general policy rather than decide on the single request.
''Throughout this whole episode, my abiding principle, the most abiding principle of the university, has been academic freedom," Ellwood said. ''In the give and take of the [intellectual] marketplace, good ideas remain and less good ideas fade away. I thought hard about [the new policy], about the implications, and we will go forward with it because academic freedom is what universities are all about."
He said that he already has determined which faculty members would decide whether the Dershowitz rebuttal met the criteria for posting, but declined to name them.
Dershowitz said that he expected to submit his rebuttal paper on Monday, and both he and Ellwood said they expected that it would be posted sometime early next week.
The Israel lobby paper asserts that the United States' close relationship with Israel has made it a target of terrorists. It questions whether the alliance with the Jewish state was ever strategically beneficial to the United States, and asserts that the moral basis for supporting Israel cited by pro-Israel organizations has never existed.
The authors specifically state that the Israel lobby is not a conspiracy, but that the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, functions as the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress.
Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com. 