Members of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences are scheduled to gather today in an “emergency” meeting in respect of the university’s president, Lawrence Summers. Some have gone so far as to discuss a no-confidence vote in Mr. Summers, ostensibly over his suggestion, at a January 14 conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, that there might be some inherent biological differences between men and women. But there can be no mistake that this fight is about way more than gender differences. The issues swirling around Mr. Summers include the current war against Islamic terror and the struggle for a Jewish state in Israel, and it has become a fight for the soul of America’s oldest and greatest university.

Today’s meeting will take place at Lowell Lecture Hall, which was booked to accommodate a larger crowd. The meeting had originally been slated for University Hall, which, in April of 1969, was seized by members of the Marxist group Students for a Democratic Society. They demanded that the Harvard administration create a black studies department and abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Harvard’s president at the time, Nathan Pusey, one of the great principled presidents of the university, sent in the Cambridge police to break up the student sit-in and arrest the protesters. Quoth he to the student daily, the Crimson: “When I was against McCarthy and I was out in Wisconsin fighting against his election and when I was calling in the police at Harvard, I was fighting for the same principles.” Pusey left the Harvard presidency two years after the showdown at University Hall.

The issues are almost the same today. Mr. Summers’s foes are annoyed with him for his treatment of an Afro-American studies professor, Cornel West, who decamped to Princeton from Harvard shortly after Mr. Summers arrived as president and suggested that Mr. West spend more time writing and teaching and less time recording hip-hop compact discs and organizing leftist political campaigns. Mr. Summers had made it a point to be what the Crimson says was the first Harvard president in decades to address the ROTC commissioning ceremony; the program was more or less thrown off campus after the events of 1969.

Yet those who see Harvard’s troubles as a kind of autophagy of the left have it wrong. Since 1969, Harvard has taken important strides to recenter itself. Unlike, say, Columbia or Berkeley, whose academic standing was lost to the hard left in the 1960s and early 1970s in an almost irretrievable way, Harvard climbed back into a kind of respectable liberal mainstream. Two of its most popular recent courses for undergraduates have been a yearlong introduction to economics by a top Reagan administration economist, Martin Feldstein, and a course on the Hebrew Bible taught by an Orthodox Jew, James Kugel. Harvard’s faculty, in Ruth Wisse, Jon Levenson, and Jay Harris, boasts more regular contributors to Commentary magazine than that of any other university we can think of. Its Paul Peterson has done some of the most important research in support of school vouchers.

It’s hard to escape the impression that Israel is at the center of the current imbroglio, no doubt stemming from the fact that one of the things Mr. Summers did, shortly after acceding, was confront the haters of Israel on campus. In a speech delivered in 2002 at Memorial Church, he at tacked the movement to get Harvard’s endowment to divest from Israel. He noted that the petition would “single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested, “and he said the signers were” anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

One persistent critic of Mr. Summers, Everett Mendelsohn, is the author of a 1982 report for the American Friends Service Committee that called on America to reduce aid to Israel and open negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a terrorist group pledged to Israel’s destruction. Back in 1970, he was one of five Harvard faculty members who announced their plans to withhold payment of their taxes in protest of the Vietnam War, according to the Crimson’s archives, which say he also proposed that Harvard cancel classes for 11 days prior to congressional elections to allow students to work for anti-war candidates. The motion was rejected by the faculty in the face of opposition from giants like Bernard Bailyn and Isadore Twersky. Other Summers critics frequently quoted in the press, professors Ken Nakayama and J. Lorand Matory, were among the signers of a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel.

It is not a coincidence that in the remarks on innate gender differences that were so eczematous to the radical professors at Harvard, Mr. Summers spoke of his recent visit to Israel. “There is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization,” Mr. Summers said, according to a transcript of his remarks posted on his Harvard Web site. “I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn’t encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs.”

The Harvard president went on, “Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction. So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, ‘look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck,’ tells me something.”

The point here is not to attribute anti-Semitism to all of Mr. Summers’s critics, or to claim he is the most tactful president in the Ivy League but to illuminate what’s at stake. It may be that the current Harvard faculty can’t tolerate a president who backs Israel and the American military in the face of an onslaught by Islamist terrorists or who questions the politically correct doctrine on gender differences. But at least the nation, the university’s alumni, and its tuition-paying students and parents can be grateful for the fact that the key Harvard governing board, the Harvard corporation, appears solidly behind Mr. Summers. If the corporation gets rid of Lawrence Summers after losing President Pusey, the chances that Harvard will make a similarly healthy recovery this time around are slim indeed.