September 2011
Sept. 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 Sept. 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 Sept. 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 20th 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 officer training 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. 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.
Sept. 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.
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.
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.
New Republic, September 15, 2011.
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