The back-and-forth at Harvard is much-noticed news almost everywhere. In Israel, to be sure, as also in the Arab press. But also in Great Britain and France, where anti-Semitism is a way of life, however well-mannered. The issue is a poet, Tom Paulin, an Oxford don who teaches this season at Columbia and was invited to give the Morris Gray lecture at Harvard.

Well, when this happened, some spoilsport publicized a remark the poet had made to an Egyptian weekly, to wit, that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." That stretch of prosody is without discernible poetry, but this of course was not considered in ensuing events. The English Department at Harvard, on second thought, rescinded the invitation. President Lawrence Summers applauded this decision.

But what then happened was a firestorm of free-speech protest, in which three Harvard Law School luminaries figured, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz and Charles Fried. The English Department, on third thought, reinvited the poet to speak, and now it was news all over the country and indeed the world.

We are asked to consider what are the bounds, if any, on utterances of a particular nature if inconsistent with civil comity in a university. We are asked what hate speech should the colleges hate, and how exactly to give voice to that hate. And, inevitably, whether academic freedom is exercised, or is flouted, by speech of a particular character.

What then to do? The New York Observer, which usually flutters if there is the faintest liberal breeze in the air, is stentorian on the subject. In its editorial, it says, "Columbia should fire Mr. Paulin immediately, on the principle that having an anti-Semite on the payroll does a disservice to Columbia professors, students and alumni who don't subscribe to the view that calling for the murder of Jews is something an Ivy League professor should be doing in his off hours." The other view, that of the law professors cited above, is that freedom of speech is absolute, and nowhere more ideally protected than in universities.

Well, what concretely to do about the poet's forthcoming lecture? There will of course be some picketers outside, but doesn't something a little more resourceful come to mind?