University President Lawrence H. Summers said Harvard has a responsibility to defend the intellectual freedom of its scholars from potential infringement by government agencies under the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and related legislation at a Faculty meeting yesterday.

Spurred by faculty members’ concerns over the possibility of such restrictions, Summers’ statement concurred with other faculty members’ assertions that the University ought to take a position on political issues directly influencing the academic community.

But he said the Faculty should refrain from taking a stance on those matters which are not of direct concern to the academic community.

Describing the University’s resistance to McCarthy-era investigations of its faculty members as “one of its proudest moments,” Summers said that while Harvard will not disobey any government mandates, it will do everything possible to ensure that its scholars’ intellectual liberties are not violated.

“The University will uphold commitment to academic freedom with all the vigor it can,” Summers told the Faculty at the meeting’s close.

Concerns about intellectual freedom were first brought to the Faculty docket by Professor of Greek and Latin Richard F. Thomas, who said that the measures of the PATRIOT Act and yet-to-be-passed PATRIOT Act II, threaten to affront the University’s values of intellectual openness.

He read a statement at the meeting by two non-citizen, junior members of his department, who did not wish to be identified. Its authors said they did not feel welcome to contribute to debates about their statement because they feared formal or informal “recrimination” within the University.

While commending the University’s attention to this issue thus far, Thomas suggested that the Faculty explore the concerns that heightened governmental surveillance raises for the University’s responsibilities to its scholars and students.

He said his concern about the academic implications of post-Sept. 11 legislation arose independent of U.S. military intervention in Iraq—a distinction that became important early in the discussion when Summers mistakenly bundled Thomas’s planned discussion of academic freedom with a plea for debate on divestment from U.S. government defense contractors signed by 26 faculty members.

Responding to the divestment question, which Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art Yve Alain-Bois raised during a question period, Summers said that the Faculty as a whole ought not to take a position on political issues.

“The understanding we have with the community depends on the fact that we do not seek to pressure society on matters of communal importance,” he said.

But some members of the Faculty took issue with Summers’ statement, remarking that Harvard has a history of assuming political stances on issues relevant to University life.

Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba noted that Summers recently issued a public statement endorsing affirmative action on behalf of the University.

Verba said the Faculty ought to distinguish between policies relevant and irrelevant to academic life in determining which debates to bring to the Faculty forum. While Faculty members should be free to address questions of divestment individually, he said, the Faculty should debate and be allowed to take a stance on an issue as close to the interests of the University as academic freedom.

Summers later concurred with Verba’s distinction. The University, he said, will guard against infringements to its intellectual freedom. Harvard pledges its support to such interests—and will facilitate faculty debate—because possible restrictions of academic freedom directly threaten the University’s most fundamental goals, he said.