Word: safran
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...Nadav Safran, director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, announced he would resign his post at the end of the academic year following a three month investigation into his handling of two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) grants totalling more than...
...page report issued in January by Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences A. Michael Spence dealt specifically with Safran's handling of a 45,700 CIA grant for an October 1985 conference on Islam politics at the Harvard Faculty Club and his acceptance of a $107,430 CIA research contract in 1982 that granted the agency censorship rights over a book and compelled him to keep the fact of agency sponsorship secret...
Spence's report reserved its harshest criticism for members of the now-disbanded committee governing the Center, which attacked Safran's handling of the grants. The report was generally conciliatory in tone, faulting Harvard as much as Safran. It did little to diffuse the national controversy...
...good example of the report's weakness comes from its most galling passage, in which three professors are attacked who had the courage to publicly call for Safran to step down from his post. Did Spence seriously expect scholars deeply involved in this mess to keep quiet while he dragged his heels on the issue...
...left with the sour feeling that Harvard was much more concerned with finding an easy way out of a sticky controversy than it was with tackling the real problems raised by Safran's actions...