POLITICS SEPTEMBER 15, 2011
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September 11, 2001, was the day before classes were to start at Harvard College during my first year as Harvard president. I first heard of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center as I left a routine breakfast at the Faculty Club. Neither I nor anyone around me had full confidence about how to respond to such an event, one without precedent in our life experience. But, by midday, we had decided to hold a kind of service late that afternoon to commemorate what had happened, to try to provide reassurance to a scared community of young people.
It naturally fell to me, as president of the university, to deliver remarks. Those I drafted expressed shock at the magnitude of the tragedy and sympathy for the victims and their families. I promised the support of our community for the victims and those assisting them, but my draft also stressed that the tragedy we’d witnessed was quite unlike an earthquake or tornado: The attacks of September 11 were acts of malignant agency that rightly called forth outrage against the perpetrators. I wrote, too, of the imperative that we be intolerant of intolerance, and I suggested that we would best prevail by simply carrying on the university’s everyday, yet vitally important, work.
My draft remarks seemed to me appropriate and, even, anodyne. I was therefore quite surprised when some whose advice I sought, and some who heard my remarks as delivered, took strong exception to my suggestion that outrage against the 9/11 perpetrators was appropriate. Others objected to my use of the word “prevail.”
It was not just Harvard where such sentiments were strong. A year after September 11, I attended a meeting of the Association of American Universities along with other presidents of the nation’s leading research schools. On that occasion, a hapless young Bush administration staffer had come to address the new national security threats raised by 9/11. The reverential way this young staffer invoked “the president” grated on our ears, but he also raised some concerns that seemed reasonable to me: whether, for instance, it was appropriate to offer the full nuclear-engineering curriculum to students from terrorist states; or whether, in certain circumstances, it might be necessary for universities to cooperate with search warrants served on those suspected of representing terrorist threats. I confess I was nonplussed by the reactions of some of my fellow presidents—some of whom delivered glib lectures on academic freedom without so much as acknowledging the new security threats the nation faced. Did not universities, I wondered, have obligations as institutional citizens, responsibilities as well as privileges?
These responses to 9/11, at Harvard and elsewhere, spoke to the ambivalence about national security that developed at U.S. universities over the last 35 years of the twentieth century. It had begun with Vietnam, reviled not just as a costly and imprudent application of American power, but also as a profoundly immoral enterprise. In the Vietnam years, some American government officials could not visit universities without making security precautions. Students participating in rotc at the time were wary of wearing their uniforms, lest they be assaulted verbally or even physically.
Even after the Vietnam war ended, ambivalence on campuses about American power and the use of force to defend it persisted. University communities were for the most part appalled when Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” They were excited by proposals that the West freeze its nuclear weapons and dubious about the first Iraq war. Much of the opposition to the United States and its military was rhetorical, but there were concrete ways, too, in which America’s universities withdrew from engagement with national security concerns. Many insisted, for instance, that rotc leave their campuses. Harvard refused to permit undergraduates doing their rotc training at MIT to note their service in the Harvard yearbook. While university presidents are routinely called upon to be on hand to cheer athletic triumphs and to lend their presence to student cultural performances, no Harvard president spoke at a rotc commissioning ceremony from 1969 until 2002. In the decade before 2001, the nation’s law schools had banded together to mandate severe restrictions for military recruiters on their campuses. The argument was that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy approved by multiple presidents and Congresses was as discriminatory as that upheld by all-white or all-male law firms and so warranted the same sanction against on-campus recruiting.
September 11 made such arguments seem less and less reasonable. Terrorists who killed American innocents in our most iconic city without provocation reintroduced the plausibility, the necessity, of greater moral clarity. In 2001, I argued that policy in every area must be debated vigorously, but respect for those who risk their lives for our freedom must be a basic value. Now, in 2011, we take such ideas for granted. Students urged that rotc return to the Harvard campus. Applications to programs in public service have risen sharply. Interest in issues of international relations in general, and the Middle East in particular, has soared. And the number of students answering the military’s call has risen in kind.
Where are we today? Relative to any expectation of ten years ago, the greatest surprise—and blessing—is that there has been no significant terrorist incident on U.S. soil since 9/11. As George Orwell allegedly put it, “Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night, because rough men are prepared to do violence on their behalf.” As the United States seeks to build good will with the world—rather than to impose its seigniorial will—and as “don’t ask, don’t tell” recedes into history, U.S. universities must remember an important lesson: that, just as we are strong because we are free, we are also free because we are strong.
Lawrence Summers is Charles W. Eliot university professor and president emeritus at Harvard University. This article originally appeared in the September 15, 2011, issue of the magazine.
26 comments
Strong voice here clearly and forcefully laying down some common sense.
- basman
August 30, 2011 at 12:44am
I second basman's clear comment. One of the central problems of human ethics and communication is how to oppose evil without becoming evil in the process. Trivial example: someone posts a comment I consider ignorant/stupid/offensive. How do I respond forcefully without becoming even more I/S/O myself? Harder to do than one might think. Even here, among a fairly intelligent/informed/decent group of people we see comment posters sometimes degrading into insults and flame wars. When we get to real war and real killers and real terrorists and real sociopaths, the stakes and the solutions get that much more difficult.
- skahn
August 30, 2011 at 1:09am
Good article, Mr. Summers. I, also, agree. But isn't the Orwell quote apocryphal? (I notice Summers qualified its provenance, so that's something)
- Curran1
August 30, 2011 at 5:18am
I usually don't quibble about headlines and titles and such but discomfort seems to be a bit generous. Perhaps hostility would be more apt. This article has me imagining many of the unwashed reading this article and marveling that an academic has encompassed the profoundly obvious. Sarcasms and derision informed with pleasant wonder.
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 7:34am
Um, allow me to sound a discordant note: this article is a joke. I express my lack of enthusiasm at greater length here: http://avanneman.blogspot.com/2011/08/larry-summers-still-perhaps-not.html
- AlanVann
August 30, 2011 at 7:51am
Nevertheless, the general topic of academia's relationship to government in the area of national security and foreign policy is an interesting one. This morning, NPR interviewed an anthropologist -- very much taking the opposite position from Summers -- about a campaign inside the profession to dissuade fellow anthropologists from being recruited by the military for counter-insurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- ironyroad
August 30, 2011 at 10:37am
AlanVann: One might be forgiven for wondering if the scales of your dissatisfactions are calibrated by something other than purposing to vouchsafe justice. Are the extents of your assigned culpability a fairly rendered echo or are they distorted by a political religion of your convenience?
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 11:15am
Irony. You're one of the fairest humanities kind of guy I know. What were the parameters of said anthropological protest and refusal? Further, what is your take on the whole shebang? Academically speaking?.... of course.
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 11:29am
jacko: One of the central principles of anthropology is that you don't do things that might harm the communities or individuals that you're working with. There are subsidiary issues that go along with that, like the necessity of getting informed consent for the use and dissemination of information. These are issues that would be difficult in any relationship between anthropologists and the military (how for example can anthropologists be sure that they data they gather is not being used in targetting?), but they've become especially important given the way that the Army's most important use of cultural anthropology, the Human Terrain Systems project, has been undertaken.
- SMacEachern2
August 30, 2011 at 11:56am
Is this article supposed to mean that academics should not question, or critique, actions taken by the military? And that Orwell quote is deployed by every fantasist wanker who secretly dreams of being one of the 'rough men' himself....
- SMacEachern2
August 30, 2011 at 11:58am
Hmm. Interesting. I rather suspect that any military interest in anthropological information is for the purpose of guide posts by which to avoid harm thus serving my purpose of alliance with potential friendlies. Manipulation? Of course. Liable to unintended consequence? Yep. There is virtue and vice in all such intercourse. Including and perhaps especially academic. Somewhere in there is a refusal to make a moral value judgement as if that were some sort of penultimate directive that supposedly confers a kind of absolution. I'm just riffing.
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 12:36pm
(Shrug) It depends on how seriously you take it. One wouldn't (presumably) ask a doctor to violate his/her Hippocratic Oath by, say, neglecting principles of triage in order to treat friendlies first. Equally, the role of particular psychologists in 'enhanced interrogation'/torture during the GWOT has been viewed as an ethical lapse by colleagues and professional organisations: it's not how you're supposed to use your knowledge. And your suspicion about the uses of this information is probably correct in the majority of cases. However, the history of anthropology (especially involving its role in counterinsurgency operations in Southeast Asia between the 1950s and 1970s) indicates that there are really issues here.
- SMacEachern2
August 30, 2011 at 12:54pm
Not a word here about the Islamic source of the terrorism. That is being whited out of history by so much of the commemoration of 9-11. American academia and most liberal media have failed to come to grips with Islam because of this oppressive smog of political correctness. Do we really understand who we're dealing with?
- amidut
August 30, 2011 at 1:41pm
amidut, Save it for Marty. Don't derail the dialogue here.
- RJSampson1
August 30, 2011 at 2:17pm
"there has been no significant terrorist incident on U.S. soil since 9/11." Anthrax?
- jaltcoh.blogspot.com
August 30, 2011 at 2:24pm
jacko, I tried to find the story on the NPR site so I could give you the link, but I couldn't locate it. In any case, the issues raised by the speaker of that group were partly as Smac2 suggests above. I recall four ethical "borders" that he felt anthropologists in the Human Terrain Teams or similar were in danger of breaching: 1) Anthropologists acting as military field researchers were endangering others who might be working in the same region but had no connection to any military organization; 2) anthropologists in uniform or protected by armed military were in danger of forcing people to speak to them who otherwise might not -- and field researchers should never coerce information from the people they are studying; 3) as scientists, anthropologists are committed to the free exchange of ideas, and an organization with secrecy laws such as the military operates on a very different principle; 4) anthropologists have an obligation to share the results of their research with the subjects of that research -- funneling all such knowledge to an outside body such as the Pentagon violates that principle. What do I think of this? I think that the military has always hired or used professional and academic skills -- doctors, engineers, political scientists, logistics experts, and so on. With medical professionals there is a long tradition of how to make their ethical framework accommodate the military system and conflict situations. I believe the primary consideration should be that the individual concerned is fully aware of what he or she is taking on when they join one of those operations. I think using one's intellectual training within military or diplomatic service in a democratic society is perfectly legitimate, as is also dissent from declared goals and refusal to get on board. I think some of the four points raised by the anthropologist on Morning Edition are a bit shaky upon closer inspection, but I do think 4) raises a very serious question.
- ironyroad
August 30, 2011 at 3:03pm
ironyroad: I've worked in various parts of Africa over the last 30 years, doing both archaeology and anthropology, and have had people enquire suspiciously about the US government organisation I was supposedly working for (usually the CIA) on a number of occasions. In the area I work now, the semi-covert role of Americans with brush-cuts, Oakleys and bad accents has been getting more obvious through the last decade. I don't want to be mistaken for them through a blurring of the roles of anthropology and the military/intelligence services, and that's outside a war zone. This stuff can get you killed. One of those projects involved work in an area where my employers insisted I work with bodyguards. It was impossible under those circumstances for me to collect useful ethnohistorical data to go along with the archaeology I was doing, simply because of the dynamic of interacting with folks when you have a bunch of guns backing you up. From my point of view, #1 and #2 are pretty significant issues.
- SMacEachern2
August 30, 2011 at 3:23pm
Irony. Thanks for your considerations. You said: I think using one's intellectual training within military or diplomatic service in a democratic society is perfectly legitimate, as is also dissent from declared goals and refusal to get on board. Couldn't agree with you more. It's a great country. Ain't it?
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 5:17pm
Sam. I'm pretty sure that we could flay that triage purity with a few hypotheticals and still be well within bounds, perhaps augment, the intended equity imperative. ( not based upon friendly, enemy status )
- jacko
August 30, 2011 at 5:26pm
This is a great headline for a TNR article.
- BlueCivic
August 30, 2011 at 9:44pm
I take a couple of exceptions to the article. One, it greatly exaggerates the overall influence of University Presidents in America. We would have had a Pres. Mondale, Dukakis, etc. if it were up to them. The second is that Summers is referring pretty much to the Ivys or major universities in his article. I seriously doubt the President of SMU made a speech there, nor even a Lehigh. In the 80's at my state college ROTC never left, neither did it at Lehigh or Lafayette, two local (for me) private Unis of some renown. Summers lives in a rarified world of elites, and he overvalues the people he comes into contact with. At my state college there were liberal professors and conservative ones, and yes liberal ones outnumbered the conservative ones but the students were not empty drones. It is kind of grating that the world that Summers inhabits he mistakes for as being the only world that matters, that what he saw represented the whole world when we all know damn well that at Texas Tech or SMU or North Carolina, etc. ROTC never left, and that, lets face it, these are the places where students were far more likely to join ROTC than at Harvard or Yale. As I mentioned at my own state college in Pa. ROTC never had a problem filling its ranks and this was back in the 80's. I guess this highlights that one of the problem with being an elite is that you live in a smaller bubble than normal people.
- blackton
August 31, 2011 at 5:29pm
Summers leaves out the context from which current adversaries to the U.S. have arisen. To argue that "we are free because we are strong" is to argue that current adversaries decide a priori to oppose the U.S., as if such a decision simply comes out of thin air. (Or, perhaps, one comes across arguments such as, "They hate us for our freedom," or "They want to impose their (backward) way of life upon us"). What about U.S. intervention in the Middle East dating back to World War II? What about U.S. complicity in overthrowing Mossadegh in 1953, setting up the Ba'ath Party in 1963 (and subsequently supporting that regime), not to mention the 300,000 to perhaps one million civilians killed by the U.S. in the Middle East since 1990? To ignore the role of the U.S. government in creating its own enemies is to reduce those enemies to irrational creatures with no backing for their political agenda. I do not wish for a single drop of blood to be dropped by citizens of the United States; hatred towards the government of the United States, however, is well-earned.
- whyamihere
September 1, 2011 at 11:36am
Do you have any link or other source that would support the claim of "300,000 to one million civilians killed by the U.S. in the Middle East since 1990"?
- ironyroad
September 2, 2011 at 12:39pm
48 hours later. Still waiting.
- ironyroad
September 4, 2011 at 2:23pm
There are several sources that tried to count the numbers. Seems to me that whyamihere chose to believe the higher estimates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
- noga1
September 4, 2011 at 4:00pm
What is confusing me is the 1990+ date, which presumably is designed to include either the first Gulf War, or the effects of the UN sanctions in Iraq, or both. If the former, it's curious because the majority of deaths in that conflict would be military, and if the latter (also or separately) then whyiamhere is declaring the sanctions regime, an operation validated several times by the UN Security Council and which Saddam Hussein manipulated to the severe disadvantage of the Iraqi people, to be a sort of murder spree by the U.S. If we restrict the frame to the Iraq War, the Guardian had a surprisingly effective and balanced article on the whole issue: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq and in all of these surveys the question of combatant vs. non-combatant deaths in Iraq remains extremely murky. In any case, I find it irritating that posters like him/her post dramatic claims and then retreat when asked to reveal to us upon what they are basing them.
- ironyroad
September 4, 2011 at 8:21pm