Swamy publicly responded to the vote last Thursday, condemning Harvard’s decision as a “dangerous one.”

“The article was written for a Mumbai newspaper, and I teach economics in Harvard. I would assume that they would have sent their petition to me asking for my comments, which is a normal procedure. But they have not done that,” Swamy was quoted as saying in the Indian press.

Days after the Faculty meeting, professors are still discussing not whether they should have contacted Swamy but what their decision says about tolerance for opinionated speech at Harvard.

“If there were any form of speech that might provide a rationale for this kind of exclusion, it should not be political speech,” said Harry R. Lewis ’68, a computer science professor and Faculty Council member. “Political speech should be the most protected.”

He added, “It’s lawful to make a general urging that at some point people should go do something illegal and violent.”

Lewis said he was concerned about the precedent the Faculty vote might establish, saying that he feared that tenured professors might feel the need to watch their tongues to retain the right to teach their courses.

“If you can make an eloquent argument to persuade more than half of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, or to be precise, more than half of the faculty who show up to the meeting at which the catalog is approved, you can not only silence [any professor], you can take their whole academic agenda out of the catalog,” Lewis said.

He called the Faculty’s vote an “ad hominem” amendment directed against an individual instructor and said that he found the Faculty meeting a regrettable forum for the decision.

“I wish that the onus had fallen on the Economics Department, whichever way it came out, and less on FAS or Harvard as a whole,” Lewis said.

But Eck emphasized that although individual departments are responsible for proposing and vetting the courses in the Summer School Catalog, FAS is ultimately responsible for overseeing the entire catalog.

In particular, she expressed concern over Swamy because of the implications of his comments given India’s history of religious tension.

“This falls in a context of religiously inflamed politics in India,” Eck said. “To deliberately call for the removal ofthe mosque adjacent to Kashi Vishvanath temple in Varanasi and 300 other mosques built at temple sites in India is an incendiary statement in the Indian context and constitutes what many faculty members saw as an incitement to violence.”

Philosophy Department Chair Sean D. Kelly, who serves as vice chair of the Faculty Docket Committee, initially defended the Faculty Council’s unanimous vote to approve the catalog, with Swamy’s courses in it. But he switched his opinion at the Faculty meeting, writing in an email to The Crimson last week that he had been persuaded that Swamy’s op-ed “amounted to incitement of violence,” thus meriting its writer’s exclusion from the Summer School teaching staff.

Eck drew a distinction between Swamy’s affiliation to the University and that of a tenured professor. “If he were already a professor here and had gone through the promotion and tenure process of being vetted by a department, there would be a faculty process for review,” she said to The Crimson.

Lewis agreed, “He’s not a Harvard professor—he was here last summer, but it’s not like Harvard owes him a position from which to speak.”

Regardless, he wrote on his blog that had he been at the meeting, “I would have voted against the amendment.”

More Faculty members agreed with Eck: “I don’t think it is appropriate for an employee of the University, charged with teaching our students, to openly advocate the suspension of the human rights of millions of Indian citizens,” she said.

—Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.