Word: speer
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...column “Albert Speer at Harvard” was insulting and morally obscene. To compare the Cuban regime with that of the Nazis—or even with that of Stalin’s Soviet Union—is to show the worst kind of specious moral equivalence...
...Harvard colleagues didn’t understand why anyone was upset. “I have no problem bringing Albert Speer here,” said one academic, an expert on Germany. “It’s no different than hiring a good physicist who thinks Adolf Hitler is the best invention since sliced bread.” A professor of European history, meanwhile, said, “personally, I think it’s admirable that Speer has served for that government...
...this story sounds a trifle unbelievable—well, good. It is unbelievable; indeed, it never happened. Albert Speer never taught at Harvard, even in 1937, when the Nazi regime he represented was merely totalitarian, and not yet engaged in attempted genocide...
Apparently, no one at Harvard has any problem with this. Substitute Coyula-Cowley for Speer (and Castro for Hitler), and the quotes above represent the view of Jorge I. Dominguez, Clarence Dillon professor of international affairs, and Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack, respectively, on the advisability of appointing an apparatchik from a totalitarian state to the Harvard faculty. To them, you can add the names of Steve Reifenberg, director of the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, who is “enormously pleased to have him here,” and Professor of History...
...specifics of Coyula-Cowley’s politics matter less than the fact that he is a willing, life-long functionary of a totalitarian state, and is therefore complicit in its crimes. If he is not directly responsible for them—well, in 1937, an architect named Albert Speer was not directly responsible for Nazi atrocities; indeed, he would always claim ignorance of them. But no one offered him a position at Harvard...