CAMBRIDGE, MASS. The Junior Common Room at Winthrop House looks like something straight out of a Harvard admissions brochure. It's a dark room with crimson curtains, crimson carpeting, and old chairs upholstered in aging crimson leather. A portrait of Ronald M. Ferry, the first master of Winthrop House, and his dog hangs above a piano. It's here that Harvard senior Ari Waldman experienced something he didn't bargain on when he entered the college almost four years ago. Waldman, who grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, arrived at the Junior Common Room smartly dressed--jacket, tie, and yarmulke--to relax and mingle with his fellow graduates for the senior cocktail party several weeks ago. It was the night of the senior dinner. "It was a festive night, and the wine was flowing," Waldman recalls, noting that a few hours earlier he had learned of a petition being circulated among the faculty at Harvard and M.I.T., calling for the universities to divest themselves of funds invested in companies that do business in Israel--IBM and McDonald's, for example. As the call for divestment is modeled on the crusade against South African apartheid, the politics of the petition could not have been more obvious--the international left's Zionism-is-racism smear campaign had come to Cambridge. Among the signatories of the petition: Paul D. Hanson, the Winthrop House master. Under the house system--fashioned after the English model and established in the 1930s under President A. Lawrence Lowell--house masters act as a combination dormitory head, college president, and parental figure. Hanson, a 62-year-old divinity school professor who specializes in both the Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Languages, warmly greeted the students, comparing his joy in witnessing their achievements to the pleasure he took in watching his own children grow up. He had another message for Waldman, however, asking the student if he had seen the news about his signing the divestment petition in that day's Crimson, the Harvard student daily. "I said I didn't think it was a night for politics," remembers Waldman. But at Harvard in recent weeks, the actions of the faculty have helped to ensure that the senior year of Waldman and other soon-to-be Harvard graduates is all about politics. Several dozen high-profile Harvard academics put their names to the divestment petition, which amounts to a whitewash of Palestinian terrorism at the expense of Israel. Then, as if to prove that this was no isolated outbreak of Parisian amorality, a faculty committee selected as one of the three student speakers at the June 6 commencement senior Zayed Yasin, former president of the Harvard Islamic Society. The working title of his address: "American Jihad." Yasin's protests that he intended to distinguish his use of the word jihad from the terrorist use of the Islamic term for "struggle" might have met a friendlier hearing were it not for his history of defending the bona fides of a charity called the Holy Land Foundation, "whose money," President Bush declared in December, "is used to support the Hamas terror organization." All this is a far cry from how Harvard reacted the last time America fell victim to a surprise attack. During World War II, the university was fully supportive of the war effort, creating, for example, the V-12 program to train Naval officers for war. And the house system? In his "Robert Kennedy: A Life," Evan Thomas describes how Kennedy attended classes in his Navy uniform and considered Eliot House his "ship." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a vocal foe of the divestment petition, is less interested in the usual gang of left-leaning ideologues who signed it and more concerned about those members of the Harvard community with direct contact with students' daily lives--namely, the house masters. "Can you imagine a house master signing a petition against affirmative action?" asks Dershowitz. "He'd be fired instantaneously for creating tension in the house." Another Harvard house master, William Graham, first signed the divestment petition and later recanted. Graham says he did not feel pressure because of his role as a house master. Rather, he takes issue with the petition organizers' decision to put his name up on their website (harvardmitdivest.org/petition.html). "They put up a website, which I didn't know when I signed the petition, and there was one link that had nothing to do with Israel and Palestine and which I found offensive," says Graham. "Since they had a website and were putting things up beyond my control that I had nothing to do with, that led to the decision that I did not want to be a part of that." Hanson has no such regrets. Bothered by his encounter with Hanson at the Senior Dinner at Winthrop House, Waldman decided a house discussion of Hanson's decision to sign the divestment petition was in order. That way the house master could soothe the hard feelings created when he signed so one-sided a statement. Hanson agreed to do just that. Prior to the discussion, however, he notified an Arab student of the upcoming event and invited others to attend. Waldman contends this violated the spirit of the agreed-upon dialogue, which was supposed to be for the "Winthrop community." Waldman arrived to find the discussion "packed with at least 10 of Paul's divestment supporters." During the discussion the house master repeatedly diverted the conversation away from terrorism and divestment and onto Israel. "Ari, how do you justify settlements?" the professor asked. For his part, Hanson readily acknowledges that the discomfort of some of the Jewish students in the house "pains me greatly." But, he adds, "it cannot curtail my sense of duty to utilize free speech as part of the democratic process." Hanson likens his signing the divestment petition to his protests during "the Vietnamese period." He says "it simply is predicated on one fact that I have been very, very concerned about violence on both sides of the conflict in Palestine and Israel." Asked about the fact that the petition makes little mention of the Palestinian targeting of civilians (calling it "unacceptable and abhorrent" with no indication of what Israel should do to protect its citizens), Hanson says, "The problem with a petition is you're signing on to somebody else's words. It doesn't strike precisely the balance that I would have in a personal statement. That's the kind of thing that would be in a complete statement if I would have composed it." So why sign it? Because, says Hanson, it fosters a "Socratic pedagogy" between himself and residents of the house. Waldman, unmoved by Hanson's call for a Socratic dialogue, has asked that another Winthrop House official, not the house master as is Harvard practice, hand him his diploma on June 6. Perhaps there is something that connects the ancient (never mind modern) Athens of Socrates with being anti-Israel: Several of the most visible signers of the divestment petition are members of Harvard's prestigious classics department--including its charismatic star and Homer expert Gregory Nagy and its chairman and Rome specialist Richard Thomas. Nagy was in Paris and not available for an interview. He did send me a lengthy e-mail statement about his decision to sign the petition. "My stand on this particular issue has to do with my country's generally unconditional support of the state perpetrating the moral injustice to which I am objecting," wrote Nagy, arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself against other states, but not against stateless Palestinians. "I consider it wrong for any state to undertake and maintain an illegal occupation of a territory containing millions of people who are left without recourse to human rights." Why focus moral outrage on Israel and not, say, Saudi Arabia, from which 15 of 19 of the September 11 hijackers came and which continues to promote a hateful extremist religious ideology that preaches violence against Jews? "Concerns about other states are not pertinent to the concern I am addressing," Nagy responded. "For example, one cannot address the crimes of 9/11 by placing sanctions on Saudi Arabia, because it was not the Saudi government that perpetrated those crimes." Richard Thomas, Nagy's colleague in the classics department, can be considered something of a two-fer. He not only signed the divestment petition, he also sat on the six-member faculty committee that selected Yasin as the graduation speaker. Thomas bitterly opposes any attempt to link these two developments. He plays coy, saying that he may not even have voted for Yasin's speech, which he nonetheless terms "wonderful." Thomas says the speech--whose title was changed late last week from "American Jihad" to "Of Faith and Citizenship"--has nothing to do with terrorism, adding that it includes a discussion of the "misunderstanding and corruption of the word" jihad. Asked whether one might see a disturbing connection between an anti-Israel petition and the selection of a graduation speech on "jihad" for a year in which America was the victim of a major terrorist attack in the name of "jihad," Thomas replies, "I don't see a connection." A prominent teaching post at the nation's finest university evidently does not grant one the power to see what is in plain sight. Seth Gitell is the political writer of the Boston Phoenix.