The statement from Summers and Kagan yesterday did not divulge whether Tribe would face any disciplinary action in connection with the incident. “In line with usual University practice, we intend no further comment on the matter,” Summers and Kagan said. But Tribe’s assistant said yesterday that “there was no sanction or reprimand beyond the [University] statement.”
Tribe, who traveled to New York Wednesday night to provide legal counsel to the owners of the Plaza Hotel, could not be reached for comment yesterday, according to his assistant.
Tribe, who holds the title of University professor—a prestigious honor bestowed on just 17 Harvard faculty members—is one of the nation’s most respected appellate attorneys and served as a legal adviser to Al Gore ’69 during the 2000 post-presidential election battle.
Hobbes Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner yesterday called for greater transparency from top Harvard officials, writing in an e-mail that the University statement on Tribe “leaves observers as well as those within the institution confused about what is and is not proper behavior, and what consequences follow from behavior deemed inappropriate.” In a brief phone conversation yesterday, Gardner declined to comment further.
The controversy over “God Save This Honorable Court” emerged from a Sept. 14 message that Tribe posted on the weblog of Massachusetts Law School Dean Lawrence R. Velvel, in which Tribe said the misattribution of sources by “writers, political office-seekers [and] judges” constituted “a phenomenon of some significance.”
That blog post prompted one reader to send an anonymous tip to the Standard drawing attention to the similarities between Tribe’s book and Abraham’s.
Velvel yesterday blasted Harvard’s response to the allegations against Tribe.
“I have enormous respect for [Tribe],” Velvel said in an interview yesterday. “I think he has done fine work for American society and I think he acted with great propriety in immediately fessing up to what happened instead of trying to dodge it.”
“Nonetheless, based on what I can gather from just hearing [the University’s statement] quickly once, I think Harvard’s action is shameful,” Velvel said.
“I think that both [Summers] and Kagan should be fired. To think that there is no punishment for an obvious serious admitted intellectual transgression is just terrible.”
He predicted that right-wing pundits “will have an absolute field day with this one.”
“The right wing’s attitude is not a reason to punish Tribe, however. The reason to punish Tribe is that what he did is horribly wrong,” Velvel said.
The number listed for Abraham in the University of Virginia Faculty Directory was not in service yesterday.
—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.