For the record, a compendium of reactions and events at this weekend's 50th Anniversary of the Social Studies program at Harvard:
1) As mentioned before, a dramatic video has been posted of Martin Peretz (accompanied by, among others, an understandably stricken-looking Michael Walzer) walking through chanting protesters on his way from Harvard's Science Center to Adams House, where a celebratory lunch for tutors in the program, including him, was being held.
2) Robert Paul Wolff, the first head tutor of the Social Studies program, was the main speaker at that lunch. He is not at all a fan of Peretz's and has a very tough post-event report on his site, here. For example:
Let me back up a bit and try to get some perspective. This was a gathering of more than four hundred former and present Social Studies majors -- possibly the largest assemblage of sophisticated social theorists since the last garden party of the Frankfort School for Social Research. These are people who think nothing of discerning the deeper ideological meaning in Afghan popular music or Tibetan architecture, or teasing out the epistemological filiations between Foucault and Montesquieu. And yet, confronted at their own conference by a massive protest, the best they could come up with was "Marty is a nice guy."
That's not even the tough part.