Harvard University has voted to reinvite the Oxford poet, Tom Paulin, to read his work there, one week after it withdrew the invitation amid protests at his opinion that Jewish settlers in the West Bank should be "shot dead".

English department academics voted to overturn the decision, faculty chairman Lawrence Buell said, out of "widespread concern and regret for the fact that the decision not to hold the event could easily be seen, and indeed has been seen - both within Harvard and beyond - as an unjustified breach of the principle of free speech within the academy".

Students and tutors had protested after Mr Paulin, who is lecturing at Columbia University in New York but is based at Hertford College, Oxford, had been invited to give Harvard's Morris Gray poetry reading, scheduled for last week. It was cancelled, the English department said, by mutual consent.

In an interview with the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram in April, Mr Paulin said settlers in the occupied territories were "Nazis, racists" for whom he felt "nothing but hatred."

He added: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."

One Harvard protester, Professor Rita Goldberg, said his comments constituted incitement to violence.

Last year, Mr Paulin, a regular on the BBC discussion show Newsnight Review, caused controversy with a poem in the Observer referring to Israeli soldiers as "the Zionist SS".

Speaking about his Al-Ahram interview, he told the BBC: "My quoted remarks completely misrepresent my real views. For that, I apologise."

Max Davis, a member of a pro-Israel group at Harvard, told the university's Crimson newspaper that Mr Paulin's opponents "will be out there to give him the reception he deserves. If he comes back and has his free speech, I'm sure I'll have mine as well."

The decision may have implications for Vermont University which, it emerged yesterday, had cancelled an invitation to Mr Paulin shortly after Harvard's initial decision.

James Shapiro, a colleague of Mr Paulin's in the Columbia English faculty, said it had been an issue of free speech.

"Nobody was defending what Tom Paulin said - everyone was defending his right to say it, and I think it took a few days for Harvard's English faculty to come to that conclusion. But they did, they acted impressively, and this is past history now."