Huntington says his book “benefitted immensely from the comments and criticisms” of students in his fall course Government 1582, “Who Are We? Issues of American National Identity.”

In the class, Huntington engaged his students in a “healthy and contentious discussion” on immigration, says Angela A. Amos ’05, a social studies concentrator in Cabot House who took Government 1582 last semester.

“His speech often indicated a lack of political correctness, but I usually attributed that to his age,” Amos says. “When he phrased things forcefully, he encouraged people to speak up.”

But Maribel Hernandez ’04, a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House, says she was “really upset” by Huntington’s rhetoric in the course.

“It’s very hard to sit there in a class when you—not personally but you as a Hispanic—are being attacked,” Hernandez says.

Hernandez, who immigrated from Mexico at age 13, says she and three other Hispanic students in the class met with Huntington at the Faculty Club in December to discuss their concerns. “We never felt that he was receptive,” she says. “At this point, he has his views, and he’s not going to change them. It seemed like you were talking to the wall.”

But Malkin Professor of Public Policy Robert D. Putnam offers a starkly contrasting portrait of his longtime colleague.

“Sam is a man of strong, well-articulated and firmly-defended views...I have never had occasion to doubt his intellectual integrity and open-mindedness,” Putnam says.

A TRUSTED ADVISER

Huntington has been no stranger to controversy in his four decades at Harvard.

After traveling to Vietnam in 1967 as an adviser to the Johnson administration, “I came back and wrote a report that was one of the more devastating critiques of what we were doing at that point,” Huntington says.

But Huntington’s association with the war effort provoked the ire of more than a few activists.

In 1967, The Crimson printed an advertisement accusing Huntington of genocide.

Three years later, the Weather Underground, a militant group opposed to American involvement in Vietnam, bombed the Harvard Center for International Affairs, where Huntington still works.

Huntington initially garnered national attention in 1957, when his first book, The Soldier and the State, was branded by reviewers as a fascist diatribe. “The leading professor in the Harvard government department at the time, Carl Friedrich, was a refugee from the Nazis. And he very mistakenly thought I was making an argument for authoritarianism, which wasn’t true at all,” Huntington says.