Word: buell
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English department chair Lawrence Buell said the department’s faculty met last night for two and a half hours and voted to re-invite Paulin. The vote, which was unanimous apart from two abstentions, marks a reversal of an earlier decision by a smaller group of English professors to cancel the speech...
...main factor in the decision, Buell wrote in an e-mail, was the “widespread concern and regret for the fact that the decision not to hold the event could easily be seen, and indeed has been seen—both within Harvard and beyond—as an unjustified breach of the principle of free speech within the academy...
Just to scratch the surface, Cavanagh calls the poet’s cancellation an example of Summers’ bigotry. But Lawrence Buell, the chair of the English Department, says the decision was mostly his own. Is Cavanagh accusing Buell—equally tenured—of somehow being more receptive to whatever evil vapors he believes Summers expels? Is Cavanagh questioning Buell’s judgment? If Summers’ “bigotry is showing” by opposing a poet who appears to sanction homicide, then what does that presume about Cavanagh’s position...
...Lawrence Buell...
What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation because a speaker would cause, in the words of English department chair Lawrence Buell, “consternation and divisiveness.” We are justly proud that our legal system insisted that the American Nazi Party be allowed to march through the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. If Paulin had spoken, we are sure we would have found ways to tell him and each other what we think of him. Now he will be able to lurk smugly in his Oxford lair and sneer at America?...