This story didn’t make it to the Martin Kramer blog, which contains reflections on "Harvard and I": From the Harvard Crimson, letter from Beth Simmons, director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs:
The director observes of Mr. Kramer’s prose:
Thank you for publishing the op-ed by Johnny F. Bowman ’11, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, and Abdelnasser A. Rashid ’11 (“On Kramer’s Statements,” Mar. 11, 2010) that was addressed to me, Professors Jeffrey Frieden and James Robinson, and President Faust. I am replying on behalf of myself alone. Their letter gives voice to their sincere reactions to Mr. Kramer’s statements, reactions that many of us feel those positions deserve. Their words are statements of resistance to attitudes that can easily be taken as racist and inhumane.The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs cannot and will not take the specific actions that Mr. Bowman, Ms. Gharavi, and Mr. Rashid call for in their letter. This does not constitute support for Kramer’s positions—far from it. It constitutes an unswerving commitment to the principles of academic freedom and free speech, even when the content of that speech causes us institutional and personal embarrassment, which, I will be frank, it has done in this case.
And of his scholarship:
Mr. Kramer has a Princeton Ph.D. and a record of scholarly publication, but he has not published recently in peer reviewed journals, so one might decide he is not an “active scholar” and should not therefore be affiliated with Harvard at all. That is an appropriate question for vetting, and as Director of the Weatherhead Center (currently on sabbatical), I can assure you, I will redouble my efforts to make sure our visiting scholars really are scholarly.
