From The Boston Globe and Alliance Defense Fund:
Harvard links ROTC return to end of ‘don’t ask’
By Tracy Jan
Globe Staff / September 23, 2010
Harvard University, which expelled ROTC four decades ago, will welcome the military training program back to campus only when the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members is repealed, the university’s president said yesterday.
.Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, speaking the day after the US Senate declined to take up a measure that would have repealed the “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy, said vestiges of antimilitarism on campus dating to the Vietnam War are largely gone and she would now welcome the opportunity to “regularize our relationship’’ with the armed forces.
“We are very much looking forward to the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ’’ Faust said. “It will be a very important moment to us when that happens.’’
Faust’s comments on the university’s relationship with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps came during a wide-ranging discussion with reporters and editors at the Globe, kicking off a day of events at which she sought to highlight the university’s contributions to the city of Boston.
During the interview, Faust reiterated Harvard’s commitment to developing a campus in Allston and said she expects her predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers, to prove to be an extraordinarily popular professor upon his return from the Obama administration to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in January.
She also addressed three recent controversies at Harvard, declaring that the university will more closely scrutinize undergraduate applications after a student was charged with faking his way in; saying the future of a prominent psychology professor cited for research misconduct remains uncertain; and defending Harvard’s decision to accept money for a research fund honoring a journalist criticized for an anti-Muslim blog post.
Harvard’s strained relationship with the military has been controversial for years, and came to the nation’s attention again in June, when the Senate grilled a former Harvard Law School dean, Elena Kagan, about a period when that school barred military recruiters. The Senate went on to confirm Kagan as a Supreme Court justice.
Harvard had expelled ROTC from campus in 1969, amid protests against the Vietnam War. Today, Faust said, there is only one reason ROTC is barred from campus: The issue is “entirely linked to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ’’ She said Harvard bars discrimination by all undergraduate groups.
But Harvard students do participate in ROTC, with the university’s blessing, by joining the program at MIT. And Faust, like Summers before her, has actively engaged Harvard’s military community, attending the commissioning ceremonies of ROTC graduates and publicly displaying support. Last night, Faust invited ROTC cadets to appear with her at Fenway Park when she threw out the first pitch at the Red Sox game.
During the interview yesterday, Faust also broke the university’s silence on whether undergraduate admissions policies would change in response to last spring’s discovery that a senior, Adam Wheeler, had doctored or falsified transcripts, College Board scores, and recommendations to gain entry into one of the nation’s most selective schools.
The case, she said, highlighted the challenges facing all colleges to recognize growing opportunities for dishonesty made possible by increasingly sophisticated technology. Harvard will respond by implementing its own technological measures, starting with the next round of applications, to help guard against such fraud, she said.
“We are going to be making appropriate adjustments, which we don’t describe because they’d be easier to undermine,’’ Faust said.
Faust also called into question the future of psychology professor Marc Hauser, whom the university has found responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct.
The university’s official stance has been that Hauser would return to teaching in July 2011 after being placed on a year’s leave. But yesterday Faust said there are “too many uncertainties of what the future is going to bring’’ for her to know whether Hauser will resume teaching.
“He may decide he may not wish to come back,’’ Faust said. She also said findings from an ongoing federal investigation could have a bearing on his return.
Addressing another controversy, Faust defended the university’s decision to accept more than $500,000 from alumni and others for an undergraduate research fund to honor former lecturer Martin Peretz, who will be recognized on Saturday, along with nine others, at the 50th anniversary celebration of Harvard’s social studies program. Peretz, the editor of The New Republic, sparked protests with a recent blog post, for which he has partially apologized, on the value of Muslim lives and whether Muslims were worthy of constitutional freedoms.
Faust has condemned Peretz’s comments, but said, “It’s a very complicated matter, to say this person is morally OK or this person is morally not OK.’’
Faust recommitted to Harvard’s long-planned, but recently delayed, expansion into Allston.
“Allston is, of course, central to Harvard’s future,’’ Faust said, though “that future will be longer in coming’’ because of the financial setbacks that have confronted the university in the last two years. Faust announced in December that the university was putting the brakes on building a much-touted $1 billion state-of-the-art science complex in Allston, after the university’s endowment plunged with the stock market.
Faust said she has appointed a team of faculty and administrators to examine how to enliven and beautify the Allston property in the short term, and what academic or arts facilities might be built there over the long term. The team, which includes professors from Harvard’s schools of business, design, and government, is expected to issue recommendations to Faust in the first half of 2011. Faust said the team will consider ideas such as forming partnerships with other universities, businesses, or foundations to develop space for science research.
“We are very committed to moving forward in the most efficient and timely way that we can,’’ she said. “There will be a substantial life sciences presence in Allston.’’
As for the return of her controversial predecessor, Summers, to campus, Faust predicted that there will be “long lines of people’’ eager to take his classes. Summers has been serving as the chief White House adviser on economic policy for nearly two years.
“He will bring his experience on the front lines of Washington right into the academy,’’ Faust said.
Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
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