Professor Boyle Schools Harvard President Faust About Prejudice
By Francis A. Boyle
29 December, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Dec. 27, 2013
Dear President Faust:
I notice your condemnation of the ASA Boycott against Israel in today's New York Times. I note for the record that Harvard has never once apologized to those of us Harvard Alums who participated in good faith in the Harvard Divestment/Disinvestment Campaign against Israel when your predecessor Larry Summers accused us of being anti-Semitic-- a charge which he refused to defend against me as related below. As a matter of fact, Harvard is so notoriously anti-Palestinian that the late, great Edward Said refused to accept Harvard's top chair in Comparative Literature when Harvard offered it to him. As a loyal Harvard alum I spent an entire evening with Edward at a Chinese Restaurant in Manhattan trying to convince Edward to take this Chair. I thought it would be good for Harvard to have Edward teaching there. As a lawyer and a law professor, I can be quite persuasive. But Edward would have none of my arguments. As Edward saw it, Harvard was so anti-Palestinian that Harvard would have thwarted his intellectual creativity to move there. So Edward stayed at Columbia. Of course Edward was right. And the anti-Palestinian tenor and orientation of Harvard has certainly gotten far worse since when Edward and I were both students at Harvard. Harvard should be doing something about its own longstanding bigotry and racism against the Palestinians. Not criticizing those of us trying to help the Palestinians suffering from Israeli persecution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide.
Yours very truly,
Francis A. Boyle
Professor of Law
Harvard: JDMCL, AM, PHD, CFIA, Teaching Fellow
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