U.F.O.s and Ph.D.s

Had a tenured English professor produced a work of non-fiction about humans who are abducted by extra-terrestrials, the Harvard community would probably have nothing to say. The deconstructionists who people the academic, literary establishment have given us learned tomes about transvestistism--why not UFO's?

But when Dr. John Mack, a tenured professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, published his best selling Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Dean of the Medical School Daniel Tosteson promptly established a committee to investigate the matter.

The book represents the culmination of a series of interviews Mack conducted with people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, taken aboard space-ships, and forced to engage in sexual activity with their captors. A farout delusion, right? No, says Mack. He argues that the abduction experience cannot be captured by our limited imagination that sees objective and subjective, or real and unreal as eternally opposite categories.

Beginning with this notion of the limits of our scientific nomenclature, Mack goes on to explain that the abduction experiences which he describes in his book are neither real nor imagined. Instead, they belong to another realm altogether, one that does not admit of a tidy distinction between reality and fantasy.

It may not come as a great surprise to some that the Medical School decided to conduct a peer review of Mack's work. Mack is quite proud of his Harvard affiliation. Harvard Medical School is, in all likelihood, a bit less enthusiastic. Presumably because Mack was besmirching the good name of Harvard (on the talk-show circuit, among other places) and because Mack's scholarly rigor was questionable, the peer review was put in place.

According to the New York Times, the report filed by the committee (which has yet to be presented) is sharply critical of Mack's scholarly methods even as it defends his right to think and write about any subject that interests him. What will become of the report is itself uncertain. Again according to the Times, Dean Tosteson could do anything from recommending that Mack's tenure be rescinded to congratulating him for his intellectual honesty.

It is more likely that something along the lines of the former option will transpire. Perhaps because he feared the committee's report would be very negative and that his job would be in jeopardy, Mack retained the services of two lawyers. Mack and Harvard may be in for a full-blown war over alien abductions.

Bizarre though some of his opinions may seem, it is absolutely critical that Mack's academic freedom be defended and that his tenure be preserved. Academic freedom would be a hollow and meaningless construct if it were employed to guarantee only those opinions which are commonly considered valid. The possibility of alien abduction may be hard to fathom, but it is precisely in this extreme case that Harvard's commitment to freedom of thought needs to be staunchest.

The case of Mack's Abduction is not quite so simple as, let's say, an idiosyncratic work of literary criticism. As a physician, Mack is charged with healing the ill and must not indulge his own particular whims and caprices at the expense of his patients' health.

Yet there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that Mack's intellectual idiosyncrasies have cost his patients good treatment. In the end, what seems to be at stake is the simple fact that Mack's radically un-orthodox views are an embarrassment to fair Harvard. Dean Tosteson and the Harvard Medical School should feel free to take issue with Mack's findings. His job, however, must not be threatened.

The institution of tenure is premised on the notion that scholars ought to be able to think their thoughts without fearing for their careers. In the case of Mack, Harvard must redouble its commitment to academic freedom.

There is no telling how the aliens will react if it does not.

Samuel J. Rascoff's column appears on alternate Fridays.