Millionaire in Harvard Square -- Ikeda's "Harvard" Connection, by Laurence O. McKinney
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"And yet Harvard itself is not invulnerable to the ambitions and strategies of those who wish to associate themselves with the world's most legitimizing authority.....With each college and university department and graduate schools operating with varying degrees of autonomy, it is not that difficult to create the suggestion of acknowledgment or affiliation which may in fact not exist...."
...."It would take a five year strategy, the assistance of a few well meaning academics, and million of Japanese dollars, to try to convince the world that Daisaku Ikeda, recently excommunicated civilian leader of the massive Japanese based Soka Gakkai was in fact a legitimate spokesman for world Buddhism and respected at major world academic centers, chiefly among them Harvard University itself."
..."Harvard Professor Christopher Queen, lecturer in Buddhism and Dean of the Extension School at Harvard, mentioned that the Soka Gakkai were doing some interesting things in Cambridge and had high praise for the Executive Director, Virginia Strauss. Following his lead, I called and spoke with her about an interview for CyberSangha.
The Boston Research Center for the 21st Century was not Boston SGI she explained, but an international research center dealing with broad based social issues.""In a paper published last year by Ms. Straus herself in the scholarly journal Buddhist Christian Studies. At the end of the article, which extolled the work of President Ikeda throughout, was a sentence or two which immediately caught my eye.
"In September 1993, Ikeda founded the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century. His lecture, 'Mahayana Buddhism and 21st Century Civilization', delivered at Harvard University just prior to the Center's opening, became the founding spirit."I was there when that 1993 talk occurred, and remembered it well.
Faced with increasing controversy in Japan, Ikeda was not on anybody's welcome mat, and certainly not Harvard's. The talk was given at a small auditorium in the basement of the Department of Asian Studies which had been privately reserved by a member of the faculty sympathetic to his teachings. No Harvard official invited him or greeted him, there was no scholarly interchange, few if any members of the Boston SGI could get in to see their beloved sensei, and fewer Harvard students.
There was no departmental invitation, the Harvard Press Office knew nothing about it, and it was reported nowhere. One Buddhist senior faculty member grumped for years afterward that he hadn't even known that Ikeda had shaken his hand until he saw it printed in various international SGI publications all that year describing Ikeda's triumph at Harvard.
Nobody else even knew about it, except now in a scholarly journal where it was being portrayed as Ikeda's invitation to Harvard and Harvard's respect for his scholarship.Daisaku Ikeda invited to Harvard? Ikeda lectured at Harvard? That would have been a stretch.
By 1992 it was becoming clear that getting a Harvard endorsement had become ichiban number one priority. He could have chanted for it but it was faster to erect a huge communications center and scholarly sound stage to create and distribute so much Ikeda and Harvard material worldwide that by the time any Harvard cat-herders realized what was up and asked him politely not to use Harvard's name quite so freely, or at least pay the trademark fee, both the SGI and every NGO they were connected with in every country would have already been saturated with so many Harvard Coxes, Galbraiths, Carnesdales, Thurmans and Thiemanns that the only audience he needed to impress would believe his name was Daisaku Harvard Ikeda, Harvard respected world Buddhist spokesman and leader.
It was a simple strategy, a scholarly 'Field of Dreams'. Just find a convenient location less than two blocks from the Harvard faculty club, get a Harvardy-like Georgian building, spend big dollars fixing and furnishing so it looks like the Harvard Overseers Library, and invite them. They will come. Let them speak on whatever they choose, pay a good honorarium, tape it, edit it, print it, and promote it worldwide.
Last fall the Center gave a $20,000.00 grant to a Harvard professor at the Kennedy school. They have a lot more where that came from and a yen to spend it.-----------------------End of Quote----------------------------------------------
#1: The Boston Research Center -- now renamed as the Daisaku Ikeda Center -- is very close to the Harvard campus, and the building is in the style of other buildings on Harvard's campus. It gives the impression that the center is a part of the Harvard Campus. It's not.
#2: Ikeda was NOT invited to lecture at Harvard. He spoke at a small auditorium in the basement of a building on the campus. An SGI member who worked on campus reserved the room for him, not an uncommon practice. In my area, we have had SGI members who have taught at area colleges. They'd often get their department's permission to use classrooms for SGI meetings. The university did not care as long as the room wasn't needed for a class, and members didn't trash the room. However, these meetings were NOT official college functions -- the SGI group was just using an empty room. The college didn't necessarily even know that it was SGI using the room, just some group of Professor Smith's.
#3: Virginia Strauss, the Boston Research Center's director, first says that the BRC is "an international research center." SGI? No, no, not us! Well, of course that was a lie, the center always was Ikeda's baby, funded with SGI money, to advance SGIkeda.
It just shows that SGIkeda will do, spend, say
anything to increase Ikeda's prestige, his reputation as scholar, world leader and great visionary.