This honor will come in the form of a $650,000 fund that the Department of Social Studies is creating in Peretz’s name — a nice celebration for a man with a sordid history of bigoted comments, mainly (though not entirely) against Arabs and Muslims.

A sizable group of students upset by Peretz’s writings over the years – most recently his assertion that Muslim life is cheap and that followers of Islam should not be protected by the First Amendment, for which he later partially apologized – was on hand to protest Peretz and the university.

Harvard academics and students are demanding that the university rescind a plan to honour the editor-in-chief of a leading Washington political magazine this week after he wrote that Muslims are unfit for the protections of the US constitution and said that “Muslim life is cheap”.

“[A]t some point,” Kristof added on his Times blog, “criticisms morph into racist stereotypes and slurs, and the suggestion that Muslims don’t value human life and maybe don’t deserve First Amendment protections is just that, a slur. It should be offensive to all of us.”

On Wednesday, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives refused to condemn the burning of Qurans by a deranged fanatic in Florida.