Feltman agrees. "I get a razzing from everyone from my grandfather to my friends," he says. "I don't feel oppressed, but I feel that there's little understanding of liberalism and the capitalist state we live in."
Feltman might be referring to the views of people like G. Brent McGuire '95, a senior council member of the conservative magazine Peninsula. "Socialist ideas are very pervasive at Harvard, but they're not called that by the socialist," he says. "It's a play on words, but the ideas are as socialist as ever. [These ideas] are very dangerous because Harvard is so respected."
While Marxist ideas may raise a few eyebrows here and there, no one seems to care enough to actively or systematically purge Marxist thought.
"The University never suggested in any way that it cared what I thought politically," Womack says. "It's sort of a non-issue" among faculty.
"Frankly, no one's afraid of Marx now," Purdy says. "You could raise the red flag over Thayer and it wouldn't particularly ruffle any feathers."
Womack says he remembers incident "about 10 years ago, when William Buckley wrote an article saying that Harvard let very dangerous people on the faculty, namely me."
The article caused a stir, says Womack, when "people began to sell their 10 shares of IBM because IBM gave money to Harvard. [President] Bok got some mail about it, but he wrote me a nice note."
"As far as I can tell, I don't think I've caused very much of a problem," he adds.
One hundred forty six years after the publishing of The Communist Manifesto, Marxism doesn't seem about to sweep the world like it did earlier this century. At the same time, it's not about to go away.
"At some levels, Marxism is embedded in the way we talk about things," Womack says. "At other levels, it's about as respectable as astrology."