Dean Ware re permission to distribute leaflet

Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 14:53:13 -0500 (EST)
From: John Spritzler <spritz@sdac.harvard.edu>
To: jim ware <ware@biostat.harvard.edu>

Parts/Attachments:
1 Shown 12 lines Text
2 OK 33 KB Application, "text of leaflet"

Attached is the text of a leaflet I would like to pass out at the school. Please note that in this latest version I have deleted the paragraph near the end mentioning Professor Stephen Marks, which paragraph was included in the hard copy I believe you received this morning from security.

I look forward to hearing from you about this and thank you for your consideration of this matter.

We do not allow distribution of materials not directly related to school business within the School property. The public spaces are so small, and the traffic so high in them, that we simply don't have the room to accommodate this sort of activity. If we approve one such activity, we would set a precedent for allowing other such activities. There are a few places where material of general interest can be posted, but the main bulletin boards are also restricted to postings related to academic activities at the School.

If the smallness of public spaces is the problem, then I would like permission to place the leaflet in people's mailboxes at the school.

Also, please note that this leaflet is indeed related to academic activities at the school, specifically it relates to the mission of the school's Center for Health and Human Rights which reads in part:

"Center faculty work at international and national levels through collaboration and partnerships with health and human rights practitioners, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, and international agencies to do the following: ...

* develop domestic and international policy focusing on the relationship between health and human rights in a global perspective

* engage scholars, public health and human rights practitioners, public officials, donors, and activists in the health and human rights movement." [http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/fxbcenter/]

Clearly a discussion of what "domestic and international policy" should be in regards to the health of four million Palestinians and its relationship to their deprivation of human rights and their being victims of ethnic cleansing and a major crime against humanity is, or certainly should be, an academic activity of a Center with the stated "global perspective" mission of Harvard's Center for Health and Human Rights. If such a discussion is not related to the

I thought Jonathan Mann founded the Center precisely to study how human rights that, on the surface, may seem unrelated to public health are in fact intimately related to it; and to educate the academic community and general public about this fact. (Isn't that why the words engraved on the outside of the FXB building housing the Center are there?) Jonathan Mann devoted his life to developing this key insight about the importance of human rights to public health in the context of AIDS. Are you saying it is not also true in the case of public health for four million Palestinians in refugee camps? Why in the world does the Center distribute the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to all graduating students if these rights are unrelated to its academic mission?

Please explain how the principle of academic freedom does or does not apply to my request to distribute this leaflet on school property? Many of my colleagues have asked me about this question, and I would like to give them the official answer.

I assume you have no objection to the leaflet being distributed on public property, with a note explaining that you would not let it be distributed on school property, right?

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 08:37:05 -0500 (EST)
From: James H. Ware <ware@hsph.harvard.edu
To: John Spritzler <spritz@sdac.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: Academic freedom and leaflet re Human Rights

You may not distribute this material in school mailboxes. The purpose of the mailboxes is to conduct university business and this, though a legitimate expression of a political viewpoint, does not fall into the realm of university business. This is the same distinction I made when we met last year.

Jim Ware
James H. Ware
Dean for Academic Affairs
Frederick Mosteller Professor of Biostatistics
Harvard School of Public Health (617) 432-1026

[At this time it became news that a number of people were planning soon to stand on public property and distribute the leaflet (with the note at the bottom saying that the Dean had denied permission to the author to distribute it on Harvard University property) to people on their way into the Harvard School of Public Health .]

I agree that the School should provide opportunities for discussion of important public health and human rights issues. We have been thinking about how you can air the issues you have raised without disrupting the other business of the School. To that end, we would like to offer you the opportunity to "table" on the first floor of the Kresge Building, distribute your leaflets, and talk with other members of the community about these issues. Following the approach we take with other groups seeking to raise issues in the HSPH community, you can set up a table on the first floor, distribute materials, and talk with those who express interest in the issue.

Thank you for offering a table on the first floor of the Kresge Building to distribute my leaflets. I gladly accept this offer, and I will be contacting Paul Riccardi today to discuss the details.

The leaflets are dated November 11, 2004 and at the bottom there is a statement that I was denied permission to distribute them on Harvard University property. I will be happy to post your message below conspicuously at the table to explain that permission was subsequently given. The leaflets (3,000 of them) have already been printed at a cost of $262.50. If you wish, and are willing to pay for re-printing, I will be happy to destroy the current version and distribute a version without the note at the bottom about not having permission to distribute them on University property. Please let me know your pleasure regarding this question.

Thank you very much for allowing this important discussion to take place at the School.

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:00:05 -0500 (EST)
From: James H. Ware <ware@hsph.harvard.edu
To: John Spritzler <spritz@sdac.harvard.edu
Cc: priccard@hsph.harvard.edu, Robin Herman <rherman@hsph.harvard.edu

It is a problem that your leaflet says that you were not allowed to distribute these materials on Harvard property. I talked with Robin Herman in an effort to find a solution. Our thought is that you block out the two lines with a magic marker.

James H. Ware
Dean for Academic Affairs
Frederick Mosteller Professor of Biostatistics
Harvard School of Public Health (617) 432-1026

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:08:46 -0500 (EST)
From: James H. Ware <ware@hsph.harvard.edu
To: John Spritzler <spritz@sdac.harvard.edu
Cc: priccard@hsph.harvard.edu, Robin Herman <rherman@hsph.harvard.edu

James H. Ware
Dean for Academic Affairs
Frederick Mosteller Professor of Biostatistics
Harvard School of Public Health (617) 432-1026

[On January 31 and February 1, 2005, members of the HSPH community and others distributed 1800 copies of the leaflet to everybody entering the School. The response was generally very friendly. Although seven or eight individuals expressed strong disagreement and support for Israel, far more said they appreciated the leaflet and its informative value on a subject about which they admitted to not knowing very much. ]

Dear Dean Ware,

I am submitting a proposal (below) to you, as Dean of Academic Affairs of the Harvard School of Public Health, relating to the relationship between a publicly stated objective of the School and the moral question of whether there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. In your recent email in which you gave me permission to distribute a leaflet [ www.newdemocracyworld.org/israel.htm ] on this question, you said, "I agree that the School should provide opportunities for discussion of important public health and human rights issues. We have been thinking about how you can air the issues you have raised..." My proposal is a way to do just that.

One of the five (see http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/about.html ) central objectives of the School is to: "increase awareness of public health as a public good and fundamental right."

With respect to Palestine, the awareness of public health as a public good and fundamental right is sorely lacking in the United States. In fact, public opinion has been shaped, by powerful organizations and individuals like the ADL [see http://www.adl.org/education/holocaust/holocaust_history.asp] and President Summers, to believe that the objective of public health for Palestinians must unfortunately be sacrificed in order to ensure a supposedly more important public good and fundamental right in Palestine, namely the security of a Jewish state. The public is being told that this objective of a secure Jewish state trumps all others including the public health and human rights of Palestinians, and that those who disagree are anti-Semites.

As has been overwhelmingly shown, in part by the School's own Center for Health and Human Rights [see http://www.phrusa.org/healthrights/israeli-palestiniantour.html and http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/fxbcenter/seminarseries.htm] and by Physicians for Human Rights [see http://www.phrusa.org/publications/israel.html#3], the policies which Israel does (and must) carry out to protect its security are responsible for the denial of health and human rights to Palestinians.

There is no getting around it; the two objectives conflict with each other. (Which is not to say that the genuine needs and aspirations of ordinary Jewish and non-Jewish people, in Palestine or generally, conflict with each other: see for example Should People Opposed to Bigotry and Anti-Semitism Support Israel? at http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_15281.shtml .)

The question, therefore, is which objective should take precedence: ensuring the security of a Jewish state in Palestine, which means ensuring that Israel's population will always consist of a large majority of Jews and that only Jews will be the sovereign authority in Israel; or ensuring that Palestinians will enjoy good public health and their human rights?

It is instructive to compare Harvard University's response today with its response to a very similar issue in the past -- the apartheid state of South Africa.

South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, underscored the similarity of the two issues in remarks he made in Boston in April, 2002:

"I've been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa...

"I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about...I say why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?...

"You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal (in the US) and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if Palestinians were not Semitic...

"People are scared in this country (the US) to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what?...

"The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust...

"Injustice and oppression will never prevail."

[http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=qw1020058740124b253&set_id=1&click_id=2749&sf=2749]

In 1977, when students demanded that Harvard University divest from South African companies, the Corporation did not disagree that apartheid was wrong; it claimed to oppose divestment only because "it is an ineffective means of pursuing ethical ends." By 1985 the University was urging companies operating in South Africa to “take active steps to oppose apartheid.” [http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/mandela/20_conflicted_relationship.html]

But Harvard's President Summers, far from acknowledging the ethical wrongness of Israel's de jure and de facto discrimination against non-Jews both within Israel proper and in other territory of Palestine, accuses those who urge divestment from Israel of being "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent." [http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/126]

Thus there exists a fundamental moral disagreement which has enormous consequences for whether more than eight million Palestinians (especially the four million in refugee camps and the one million living inside Israel proper) will or will not enjoy what the School of Public Health is all about: "public health as a public good and fundamental right."

The School's Center for Health and Human Rights refuses to address this question, despite a formal request by other faculty members that it do so. [see http://newdemocracyworld.org/Marks.htm ]

Therefore, I propose that the School hold a public symposium to examine the question of whether the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine is or is not compatible with the fundamental moral and ethical value of the School that is expressed in its mission to: "increase awareness of public health as a public good and fundamental right." [http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/about.html]

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Sincerely,

John Spritzler, Sc.D.

John,

I discussed your proposal that the School "hold a public symposium to examine the question of whether the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine is or is not compatible with the fundamental moral and ethical values of the School" at a recent meeting of the dean's management group. We concluded that the School should not and will not hold such a Symposium. Though the issue may well be worthy of a public discussion, it is a political rather than a public health issue and the subject is not one in which our faculty can offer the best scholarship or expertise. This topic is more appropriate for discussion at an institution that is engaged in research and teaching on political science and public policy.

Sincerely,

Jim Ware

Clearly public health is not the only or even perhaps the most important aspect of the Palestine/Israel conflict, but it is an aspect because, as is well documented (see details in the exchange with Dean Ware), the policies which Israel carries out to ensure the security of a Jewish state in Palestine also directly prevent Palestinians from enjoying what the Mission Statement of the School of Public Health (and the engraving in stone on the outside of its Huntington Avenue FXB Building) declare to be a fundamental right of all human beings -- public health. If there is indeed, as Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes and other leading Jews believed, no valid moral claim for a Jewish state to exist in Palestine (by which I mean a state that does whatever it needs to do to prevent non-Jews from becoming a majority of its population, and a state which insists that its government is responsible not to all of its citizens but rather only to "the Jews"), and if a Jewish state is essentially an apartheid state with no more right to exist than the apartheid state of South Africa, then there is no justification for all of the Israeli policies that deny Palestinians good and proper public health. This is why the question I want Harvard to hold a symposium on is important to the School of Public Health as well as the other schools and centers.

A couple of weeks after sending this letter, I spoke with Dean Bloom (in the cafeteria lunch line) about it. He said, "I agree with Dean Ware," and that he felt no need to discuss it further.