In the Boston Globe, Linda Wertheimer follows up on Jonathan Glater's Times piece of a couple days ago, looking at the consequences of Harvard's recent decision to enlarge its financial aid policies for families making up to $180,000 a year.

Most of the colleges doing away with loans belong to an exclusive group of roughly three dozen schools with sizable endowments - $35 billion, in Harvard's case. Their shift is increasing pressure on less-affluent colleges to come up with new strategies to sweeten financial aid for a wider group of students, some of whose families have been calling admissions officers asking whether they would be offering no-loan aid deals, too.

...Yet, even if all colleges could afford to eliminate loans, several admissions and financial aid directors say they would be reluctant to change a long-held tradition of holding students and their families responsible for part of college costs if they can afford to contribute.

Is it possible that students who don't have to pay for college would feel less invested in the experience and value it less? Sure it is.

"Philosophically, one of the dangers is we've made debt a four-letter word," said Lee Coffin, the dean of admissions at Tufts, which this fall eliminated loans for students from families making less than $40,000 a year and will not extend the offer to higher-income families. "I wonder what it will do to a generation that will go to college without any personal sacrifice. You start taking loans away, and you start saying, 'Here's a free ride.' "

But it also seems possible that many students who got a free ride to Harvard would come out of those four years with a deep sense of gratitude to the institution, perhaps one that would result in financial contributions down the road—especially without those pesky loans to pay off.

It's fascinating to watch this debate that Harvard has sparked. This is a good conversation to be having, especially because we don't talk enough about higher education (and education generally) in this country. Drew Faust deserves some credit for helping to spark this debate—and not feeling that she has to dominate it.

Harvard's decision to extend financial aid to students from families earning up to $180,000 a year appears to have some unintended consequences (or were they intended?), according to an article in the New York Times. Jonathan Glater reports that the increased financial aid is putting pressure on smaller colleges to match Harvard, and, by creating greater competition for middle-class kids, may actually take aid money away from low-income students.

Officials at colleges without anything like Harvard’s $35 billion endowment say a rush to give tuition discounting to the middle and upper middle class at institutions like theirs could end up shifting financial aid from low-income students to wealthier, make pricing seem even more arbitrary and create pressure to raise full tuition to pay for all the assistance.

...Some administrators say there will now be pressure to provide more merit aid to relatively wealthy high achievers, reducing the amount available to poorer students.

“It could lead to schools’ doing this sort of thing because they want to be part of the top group,” David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in California, said of Harvard’s move. If that meant those colleges had to reduce the number of their low-income students, Dr. Oxtoby said, “that would be terrible, exactly the wrong outcome.”

In the piece, Harvard dean of admissions Bill Fitzsimmons admits that a significant motive for the university's decision was to compete for middle-class kids whom Harvard wanted but who weren't applying because they felt they couldn't afford to go.

“People were voting with their feet,” Dean Fitzsimmons said.

This is all very interesting. Presumably one of Harvard's motives was also to deflect attention away from the rising-much-faster-than-inflation tuition it charges, but the move seems to have done the reverse.

Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of Rochester, where costs are nearly $45,000, said: “Harvard has made it harder for everybody. They’ve given fuel to the argument that colleges are charging more than they should.”

Of course, parents and students are going to be grateful for Harvard's move, and they should be, not just because of how it helps them pay for Harvard, but because it suggests that there ought to be more pressure on colleges to lower tuition, or at least help families pay it, and creates something more of a free market in college tuition.

What is irrefutable, though, is that the race here goes to the wealthiest; Harvard is playing this game with vastly greater resources than any other university.

How long will it be before there are serious calls for income redistribution? Perhaps a luxury tax like baseball's?

In the Boston Globe's year-end "over" list, Amanda Palmer of the band Dresden Dolls says that several things are done, as in, stick a fork in them-done: movies filmed in Southie, the bowl haircut, and Harvard Square.

There are a few last shreds of boho and charm hanging on for dear life (see Cafe Pamplona, Cafe Algiers, Oona's, Cardullo's), but the corporate takeover is pretty much complete. When you start chatting with traveling street performers worldwide and they all tell you that Harvard Square is offically stricken off the list, you know it's so over.

There's no question that the bohemian element of Harvard Square is long gone. (Though I'd add Charlie's Kitchen to the list of good things that haven't yet vanished.) The question is whether that makes the place more or less appealing to today's students....

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Butto, a Harvard alum, has been assassinated by a gunman/suicide bomber as she was addressing a political rally.

The exact circumstances surrounding the assassination were still unclear. Senior officials in Ms. Bhutto’s party said she had finished addressing the rally and was sitting in a car waving at the crowd when she was hit in the head by a sniper in a nearby building. They said the car moved on for another 50 yards before a suicide attacker blew himself up.

Other witnesses described a single assassin opening fire on Ms. Bhutto and her entourage, hitting her at least once in the neck and once in the chest, before blowing himself up.

This is a terrible and ominous tragedy.

Butto was not the great democratic hope of Pakistan, true. She had an imperial vision for leadership in her country, and she and her husband were not exactly ideal reformers.

Nonetheless, she represented a threat to the entrenched and corrupt status quo, as well as a figure who seemed like a real friend to the United States, critical of the Al Qaeda-friendly Pakistani intelligence service and the lackluster efforts to track down Osama bin Laden in whatever Pakistani mountain range he has taken as his refuge.

This horrific act of violence will only beget more violence, and further imperil hopes for a credible election in Pakistan, where voting was supposed to take place in January.

As they would have said in an earlier, simpler time, this is FUBAR.

The implications and consequences will reveal themselves in the days, weeks, months and years to come. For now, let us take a minute to consider the sacrifice of a woman who loved her country and gave her life to try to save it from chaos, anarchy and violence. Would our president and vice-president take the same risks that Benazir Bhutto did?

...and we hope that you get straight As, great jobs, fantastic bonuses, and everything else that you wish for. And more importantly, good health and good love.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

In the Globe, Linda Wertheimer wishes Drew Faust happy holidays with the gift every Globe reporter gives a new Harvard president early in his/her tenure: a puff piece.

Nearly six months into her presidency, Faust is earning high marks on campus for her nonconfrontational, welcoming style and spirit of openness. She has brought stability to a campus rocked by the stormy five-year tenure of Lawrence Summers, according to more than a dozen faculty and students. Faust has been visible, chatting with professors at a dinner for new faculty, attending student theatrical performances, and having dinner or tea with students in informal gatherings at residence halls.

Wertheimer begins her article by telling the story of Faust kicking off her presidency by hosting an ice cream social, an event she considers of great import.

"It defined her presidency," said James Kloppenberg, chairman of the history department. "I wandered by where she was and thought this was unprecedented for a Harvard president to make him- or herself available to anybody who wanted to chat."

Oh, for God's sake. It defined her presidency? Larry Summers used to eat pizza with students, but he still wasn't a very good president. Drew Faust's presidency is, technically, about three months old. Isn't it a little early for such diagnoses? And isn't it, in fact, a little condescending to Faust to say that her hosting of an ice cream social defined her presidency?

And while Faust has not faced a major controversy, she showed signs of strong leadership this month when she announced a sweeping financial aid initiative, faculty and students said.

Let's be honest here: The aid plan is a great idea, but was probably promoted by people in the admissions/financial aid offices. Expanding financial aid is wonderful, but isn't this lowering the bar for leadership?

Wertheimer's argument is essentially that Drew Faust has helped heal a campus divided by Larry Summers, and I'm sure that's true. But again, that's lowering the bar—it doesn't take much to not piss people off as much as Larry Summers did.

Tellingly, Wertheimer doesn't mention one Faust misstep: In an earlier Globe article, Wertheimer reported that Faust was slowing down the plans for the Allston expansion, based on quotes from Faust. Later in the day, Faust denied any such thing, and her office claimed that she had been misquoted.

A relatively minor affair, but it looked unprofessional. Why doesn't Wertheimer mention it? Because it involved her reporting. But the omission of that anecdote makes the reader wonder whether this big wet kiss of an article is intended to make up for that mini-hullabaloo. After all, Wertheimer has to cover Faust for a long time....

Is Faust doing a good job? Well, how's the Allston planning going? How are the deans she's appointed? How are her relationships with alumni? How is fundraising going? What's her relationship with the Corporation like?

Relationships with the faculty are important, obviously. Critical, even. But in the long run, these questions may be better measures of how Drew Faust's presidency is coming along.

Boston Magazine has a nice piece this month on the big business that has developed around the college admissions essay.

It’s December, the height of college application season, and hundreds of anonymous Ivy League graduates are hunched over their desks, putting a shine on the personal statements of kids they’ve never met face-to-face, practicing their craft over the Internet, and for good money. Last year was the most competitive admissions season in history, and these freelance editors, and the multiplying number of firms they work for, are doing a booming business in this latest extension of what has come to be known as the “admissions industrial complex.” In an age in which SAT scores can be bumped up by buying a thousand-dollar test-prep course and parents will pay private academic counselors tens of thousands of dollars to help brand their kids for colleges, it should come as little surprise that there’s also a thriving trade in “perfect” application essays.

The college admissions frenzy is an issue that we've touched on in 02138 several times, most notably in Raising Harvard, which we (mostly) meant as satire but turned out to be more real than farce. (Which is itself sort of farcical, if you follow.) But it seems there's no end to which parents and young people won't go to get their children/themselves into Harvard and other fine schools. Wouldn't it be better if they put as much effort into thinking about why they want to go to college, and why they want to go to a specific college, as they did into thinking about how to get in?

It would be a fine thing to discourage these kids from relying upon ghostwriters to do their work for them. (How one could do that, I'm not sure.)

But it's a difficult message to send when so many Harvard professors do exactly the same thing.....

The Washington Post reports that Larry Summers is charging that the Bush administration is not doing enough to prevent a recession, and that the United States faces a truly grim economic prognosis.

Summers, who worked in the Clinton administration, said the risk of a prolonged recession is higher than most economists recognize. He said it is "distinctly possible" that the nation will experience its worst economic conditions since the stagflation of the 1970s and severe recessions of the early '80s.

Summers spoke at the Brookings Institution, home of his economic thinktank, the Hamilton Project, where he charged that the White House has consistently failed to see ominous economic warning signs.

"For the last year, the economic consensus, and the policy actions that have flowed from it, has been consistently behind the curve in recognizing the gravity of the problems in the housing and financial sectors and their consequences for the overall economy," Summers said.

His suggestions? A temporary tax cut across income levels, as well as increased unemployment insurance and food stamp benefits. The Federal Reserve, he argued, has been too focused on preventing inflation, and needs to loosen the money supply.

There is, of course, the possibility that Summers is speaking out because he wants to be a player in the next Democratic administration. I'm sure he does. At the same time, Summers is trying to fill the vacuum of intelligent economic planning within our government. Agree or disagree with his prescriptions, his voice on economic matters is a welcome one.

A fascinating piece by David Kirkpatrick in today's Times on Mitt Romney's relationship with his dad, George W. Romney. But as I read it, I couldn't help but feel that I'd read parts of it before.

Then I realized that the reason for that was because I'd written parts of it! In a handful of details, written in consecutive paragraphs in the article, the Times simply lifted my reporting.

Below, in Roman type, is what the Times writes today, and in italics, what I wrote in the spring 2007 issue of 02138:

At Harvard, Mitt Romney carried an old leather brief case bearing his father’s initials, GWR...

“He only had one thing that was even possibly an affectation,” says Phillips. “He carried his dad’s briefcase with him everywhere he went. It was brown leather, totally scratched and scuffed, the initials ‘GWR’ in gold in the middle. It looked like it had been through World War I and World War II and the Cold War. It was the only sign he gave of a link to being from a politically or economically privileged family....”

....and wrote a seminar paper on a car maker and its dealerships — an issue his father had faced.

As we spoke, [professor emeritus Detlev] Vagts walked over to a file cabinet and pulled out a 30-year-old folder—papers from the seminar Vagts taught, “Law and Business Problems.” Romney’s was still there. Titled “Dual-Distribution in the Automobile Industry,” the paper considered the practice by which manufacturers sell products through both company channels and independent distributors.

Later, Mr. Romney arranged a private meeting for his father with William Weld, then governor of Massachusetts.

George Romney talked about volunteerism — a personal passion — for an hour, but his son’s reaction is all Mr. Weld remembers. “He sat there hunched forward a bit with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands just beaming at his father from a distance of two or maybe three feet,” Mr. Weld recalled. “It was undiluted hero worship.”

“His father’s a complete lodestar for him,” says former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. In early 1995, Romney brought his father to visit then-Governor Weld; George Romney wanted to talk about volunteerism, a longtime cause. “I was sitting behind the desk that later became Mitt’s desk, and George talked for a solid hour,” Weld says. “Mitt was just sitting there looking at his father, just beaming the whole time. He didn’t say a word, he was so proud.”

Well, at least Kirkpatrick did enough work after reading my story to call up Bill Weld and get his own quote.

It's a small point, but this lack of credit-giving is typical of the arrogance of the Times: When you lift three consecutive, highly specific facts from another piece, facts that haven't been reported elsewhere, and then you write them in consecutive paragraphs, you really ought to say, according to a profile of Romney in the magazine 02138.

Why don't Times reporters follow that practice of acknowledging the work of others? Two reasons. One, they're arrogant and don't think they have to. And two, they want you to think that they found all this stuff out themselves.....

The Chronicle of Higher Education has ranked educational institutions by the percentage of their employees giving to presidential campaigns—and Harvard is on top by a lot, with more than double the #2 university.

1. Harvard U., $281,050 2. Stanford U., $135,850 3. Columbia U., $120,350 4. Georgetown U., $105,150 5. U. of Chicago, $92,902 6. Northwestern U., $78,450 7. New York U., $74,350 8. U. of California at Berkeley, $71,976 9. U. of California at Los Angeles, $65,980 10. U. of Southern California, $63,950

It's an intriguing list. Where are Yale and Princeton, for example? MIT?

What these schools appear to have in common, in this context, is that they're all in cities with a tradition of political involvement—Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, LA—where constituents are likely to be politically engaged and presidential campaigns are likely to engage in serious fundraising. Makes sense, right? If you're Barack Obama, you're more likely to hold a fundraiser in New York or Cambridge than New Haven or Princeton...

One wonders if, in the university context, significant presidential giving is a good or a bad thing. Is such engagement with the political world appropriate or excessive?

In U.S. News and World Report, Kim Clark (not the former HBS dean, so far as I can tell) takes a skeptical look at the real value of Harvard's newly expanded financial aid plan.

Harvard thrilled middle-class parents last week by capping its tuition for families with incomes of up to $180,000 at 10 percent of their earnings. ...But many point out that these gestures will affect only a few hundred lucky students. The outlays are so comparatively small that they are unlikely to divert pressure for reforms in the ways colleges spend their money—especially the estimated $380 billion of endowment funds stored in tax-free accounts.

Clark points out that Harvard has something like $1 million worth of endowment per student, while half of all colleges have only about $2,000 in endowment funds saved. Which means that Congressional critics such as Iowa senator Chuck Grassley will continue to push legislation that would force wealthy colleges to spend a certain amount of their endowments every year. (What sense this makes, only an elected official would know.)

Meanwhile, on the Huffington Post, Peter Sacks looks at Harvard's financial aid expansion from another critical perspective.

Colleges want these students so much that they're willing to pay for them -- bribe them, really, in order to entice them to enroll. Under the guise of "merit," colleges in recent years have drastically increased the amount of scholarship money they offer high-scoring students.

What's wrong with [Harvard's plan]? Nothing if your objective is to take limited scholarship funds from the truly needy students who wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid. And nothing's wrong with that if you're a policy maker who isn't concerned about raising the overall college-going rates in your state. That's because the "merit" scholarships go most often to relatively affluent students who would be going to college regardless of the scholarship money. Still, as a policy maker you'd be happy with the transfer of wealth from the needy to upper middle class because they vote more often than poor people.

Such articles suggest that, despite the substantive merits and the PR value of Harvard's latest move, the attention its vast wealth is attracting won't go away—and neither will the resentments and the concerns prompted by that wealth.

Linda Wertheimer, who is starting to break some real news in the Globe, reports that Drew Faust is reconsidering some of Larry Summers' plans for the Allston campus.

The president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, showing restraint on a major expansion that her predecessor relentlessly promoted, plans to reexamine proposals to move two graduate schools and other operations from Cambridge to a new campus across the Charles River in Allston.

A $1 billion science complex, which will house a stem cell institute, will stay on track for a ground-breaking early next year. But everything else, including plans for building four undergraduate dorms in the Boston neighborhood, will be reviewed, Faust said in a phone interview Monday.

Well. This is interesting. Reconsidering Allston would appear to be Faust's most independent action since taking over from Derek Bok"/ local:/people/8.html:"Larry Summers as president, and in Wertheimer's article, she suggests that she thinks the process by which Summers conducted Allston planning was fundamentally flawed.

She said the university will take pains to consult more widely and deliberately with faculty and community members and, if necessary, revise the plan before giving the final version to the city next fall. Several professors have expressed concerns that the current Allston plan could dilute the cohesive quality of student and academic life on the Cambridge side of the river.

"For the last several years, the university leadership has been in transition," Faust said. "I can own a project and look at it in a deliberative way. . . . We're looking at everything again."

A curious quote: First, Faust suggests that Harvard's leadership has been in transition for several years, rather than just one or two (which is true, by the way, and good for her for saying so).

But more interesting is the perhaps plaintive assertion, "I can own a project..." Did anyone doubt that? And if so, was it the audience or the speaker?

Here is perhaps the most important point: Faust's decision of what to move ahead with and what to put the brakes on may be exactly the wrong one. (And in framing the decision as a referendum on Larry Summers' decision-making process, she deftly changes the subject from what decision she made to why she made it.)

James Watson, who has been discredited on other fronts in recent weeks, wrote about the Allston expansion in the pages of 02138 some months back. Watson's argument: Building a massive science complex in Allston was the wrong way to go and could be a massive waste of money.

No one at Harvard, so far as I have seen, read, or heard, has rebutted that argument.

So while Wertheimer's article shows a president taking command, the reverse may really be true; Drew Faust may, in face, be caving in to entrenched bureaucracies which don't want to move to Allston, while plowing ahead with an expenditure of untold billions for a science effort whose merit has never been publicly debated......

The Crimson reports that the John F. Kennedy School of Government is changing its name to the Harvard Kennedy School (it's like two icons for the price of one!). It also has a new slogan: "Ask what you can do."

Schools have slogans?

I wonder what the biz school slogan would be? "Ka-ching!"

Or the college slogan: "Why stop now?"

I tease. But it's true that the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is a mouthful, and if a slogan helps the school define and market itself, well, so be it. The K-School has some of the most idealistic people at Harvard and a sense of community that's unusual for the university, and it's hard not to wish it well.

On the other hand, as I reported in a Boston magazine article a few years back, the K-School has more serious problems than name recognition.....

Drew Faust and FAS dean Michael Smith announced a substantial expansion of Harvard financial aid policies today, designed to lighten the burden of a Harvard education for middle-income families.

The new formula creates a sliding scale of payment by income level for families making less than $180,000. Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 and with assets typical for these income levels will be asked to pay 10 percent of their incomes. For those with incomes below $120,000, the family contribution percentage will decline steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below. For example, a typical family making $120,000 will be asked to pay approximately $12,000 for a child to attend Harvard College, compared with more than $19,000 under existing student aid policies. For a typical family with $180,000 of income, the payment would be approximately $18,000, compared with more than $30,000 today.

The new policies will also eliminate loans as a source of aid and eliminate the consideration of home equity in determining a family's ability to pay for college.

“We want all students who might dream of a Harvard education to know that it is a realistic and affordable option,” said Faust.

The Times approvingly writes up the announcement.

The initiative appears to make Harvard’s aid to students with household incomes of $120,000 to $180,000 the most generous to be offered by any of the country’s elite private universities.

But there seems little doubt that part of the reason behind this is outside pressure—whether it's a Business Week story on the growing wealth inequity between "Ivy-Plus" universities and state schools, or Congressional consideration of a law to mandate what percentage of a university's endowment must be spent on financial aid.

(The Globe, which seems to consider its website something to work on after the next day's paper is printed, has nothing.)

On a quick reading, this seems like an important move for Harvard, whatever the motivation, and terrific press for Drew Faust. Your thoughts?

In the Globe, columnist Sam Allis visits with Harvard minister Peter Gomes to talk about God.

[Gomes] is, on the subject of Christianity, a font of knowledge, humor, and edge.

A font of edge?

Well, never mind. Gomes has a new book called "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus"—not that Allis tells us anything about it—and he has recently been named preacher to the Henley Royal Regatta, though why a crew race needs a preacher, God only knows. Allis, however, has come to challenge him on matters of faith.

I recently stumbled on "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality" that buoyed my spirits no end. While this manifesto contains nothing particularly new, it stands as a refreshing breath of foul air against the irritating piety of religious tomes that blow onto the scene in droves.

A refreshing breath of foul air against the irritating piety of religious tomes that blow onto the scene in droves?

If Sam Allis is metaphorically challenged, Reverend Gomes is eloquent as always. But this is an odd column. Allis says that atheists are fine, Gomes says that there must be something more, and that about wraps up the column, the Boston Globe's idea of a learned disquisition. If the Globe is ever to become a major newspaper again,its editors are going to have to be a bit more vigorous.

Business Week has an important piece about the growing wealth of "Ivy Plus" (the Ivy League, plus Stanford and MIT) universities.

Called "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League," the article examines the growing wealth gap between Ivy Plus-schools and public universities, especially with states freezing or cutting their support of public higher education. More than before, impressionable students and ambitious parents have come to view college as a form of conspicuous consumption. ...The increasingly plush Ivy Plus model casts into sharp releif the travails of America's public instituions of higher learning, which educate 75% of the country's college students. While the Ivies, which account for less than 1% of the total, lift their spending into the stratosphere, many public colleges and universities are struggling to cope with rising enrollments in an era when most states are devoiting a dwindling public share of their budgets to higher ed.

...The wealth gap between the Ivies and everyone else has never been wider. The %5.7 billion in investment gains generated by Harvard's endowment for the year that ended June 30 exceeeded the total endowment assets of all but six U.S. universities, five of which were Ivy Plus....

One consequence of the wealth gap: Ivy Plus schools are increasingly able to raid public universities for their best and brightest scholars. Moreover, Ivy Plus schools are able to fund campus expansions and research ventures that public universities can't under the current budget climate.

When Business Week asked Drew Faust for her response to this phenomenon, she responded that non-Ivy Plus schools should "really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious" as those of Harvard and its peers.

Ouch. One knows what she means, but it's very hard to make such a remark without coming across as patronizing. Nice little public schools, you should build up your creative writing departments. And a pat on the head to go with it.

The question that Faust's response begs, I think, is—well, there are more than one. Do rich universities have any societal obligation to poorer ones? (Because after all, not everyone can go to Harvard.) Is it a good thing for scientific research to be so heavily concentrated on seven or eight campuses? Does such a concentration benefit the universities involved more than it benefits the average American, who is, after all, generally paying for this federally-funded research? And what happens to a place like Harvard when it becomes so heavily financially oriented toward big science? How does that focus change the university and turn it into something quasi-educational, quasi-corporate?

As so often seems to be the case, one gets the sense that none of these big questions are publicly discussed at Harvard....because to express any reservations in public might slow down the money train.

A Columbia historian stands up for himself against the Harvard law professor's charge that he is "against Israel."

In the Crimson, Columbia historian Eric Foner lays a smackdown on Alan Dershowitz, and in pretty convincing fashion.

Here's the back-story: In a November 20 Crimson editorial, Dershowitz lambasted "hard-left radicals "led by Professor J. Lorand Matory" as hypocrites who believe in free speech except when that speech is "pro-Israel."

Who, other than Matory, are these hard-left radicals and "political cronies" at Harvard? Dershowitz doesn't bother to say. Is there more than one? Wouldn't a fair-minded editorialist feel compelled to mention at least another of this band of free speech-hating anti-Israelites?

Apparently, they were easier to find at Columbia.

At Columbia University, on the other hand, a group of professors—who are generally in sync with their extremist colleagues at Harvard—are complaining that Columbia’s President, Lee C. Bollinger, has too much freedom of speech when it comes to the Middle East. A campaign is underway to rebuke Bollinger for expressing his personal views about the Iranian dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Led by well-known radicals such as Eric Foner—who complained that Bollinger’s harsh description of Ahmadinejad was “completely inaccurate”—these politically correct censors want to muzzle Bollinger. They also want to muzzle students, alumni, and other “outsiders,” who have legitimate complaints about the Middle East Studies Department, which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of radical Islam.

Strong stuff, albeit without any particular evidence to prove it—a fact that Foner points out in his response.

I don’t know what the standards of proof among law professors are, but among historians it is customary to present facts to bolster an argument. I defy Professor Dershowitz to cite any statement of mine that is “against Israel.” My criticism of President Bollinger revolved around the part of his speech that seemed to commit Columbia University to support of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, and to blame Iran for the violence there. When introducing a foreign head of state, the president of a university is not simply expressing his “personal views,” as Dershowitz claims, but speaking for the university.

Lest anyone actually believe Dershowitz’s misrepresentation, I am categorically in favor of the broadest possible freedom of speech for everyone, whether I agree with them or not.

I think Foner has a good point. Several of them, actually. Moreover, there's something odd and disturbing about the stigmatizing language Dershowitz uses in his op-ed—all this talk about "hard-left radicals," "political cronies," "extremist[s]" and "well-known radicals." It sounds like something you'd hear Joe McCarthy spew back in the 1950s. Both Matory and Foner are pretty liberal, but the way Dershowitz describes them, you'd think they were sitting in the back of a labor demonstration waiting to set off bombs, or setting fire to Henry Kissinger's office, or some such act of anarchism and violence. Dershowitz is smart enough to know exactly what he's doing, and smart enough to know better.

Judging from this contretemps, historians do appear to have higher standards of proof than lawyers.