Fall 2014

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

A SEMESTER WITH DIVEST

SAVING SAN FRANCISCO

INTERVIEW: REV. AL SHARPTON

VOLUME XLI NO. 3, FALL 2014 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

CITY LIMITS LOCAL POLITICS IN AN URBANIZING WORLD

THE HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW PRESENTS

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SPRING 2014 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/LIT-SUPPLEMENT

CITY LIMITS

11 The Urban Battlefield Wright Smith

18 On Conflict’s Border Gal Koplewitz

14 Saving San Francisco Emily Wang

20 Parking Policy in the Smartphone City Connor Harris

FUNNY PAGES

WORLD

3 Rob Robertson Won’t Hold Office Joel Kwartler

32 Kurdistandoff Perry Abdulkadir

CAMPUS 23 Losing Cantor Matthew Disler

4 A Semester with Divest Harvard Gram Slattery

UNITED STATES 26 The Promise of the Harlem Children’s Zone John Gabrieli

36 Gaza in Paris Nancy Ko

29 Marketing the Moon Jay Alver

ENDPAPER 48 Rage against the Shepherd Gram Slattery

34 On the Horizon Joe Choe 38 An Endemic, an Enigma Natasha Sarna

BOOKS & ARTS 40 In Sight, in Mind Yacoub Kureh and Giacomo Bagarella

INTERVIEWS 44 Rev. Al Sharpton Tim Devine 46 Martha Coakley John Pulice 47 Charlie Baker Jay Alver

42 Tour My Squalor Jenny Choi Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Copyright 2014 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Flickr: 1- Vxla, Gage Skidmore, Frog and Onion, Jörg Dietze; 20- Dan DeLuca; 27- Jules Antonio; 34- Francisco Osorio; 36-Frog and Onion; 37- Connie Ma, Frog and Onion, 42- Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung; 48- Visha Angelova. Photographer: 4, 6, 9- Divest Harvard. Wikimedia: 25- The White House; 30- NASA/David Scott; 40- Lance Cheung.

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

Knowing the City

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLI, No. 3

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Daniel Backman PUBLISHER: Olivia Zhu MANAGING EDITOR: Matt Shuham ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Daniel Lynch ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Gram Slattery STAFF DIRECTOR: Holly Flynn CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Jenny Choi CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Taonga Leslie COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Priyanka Menon COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Brooke Kantor U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Colin Diersing U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Harry Hild U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Wang WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Matthew Disler WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Rachael Hanna WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Pooja Podugu B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Rachel Wong B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Samir Durrani B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Nancy Ko INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gavin Sullivan HUMOR EDITOR: Jay Alver BUSINESS MANAGER: John Acton CIRCULATION MANAGER: Colin Criss DESIGN EDITOR: Ashley Chen MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Johanna Lee ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Joe Choe ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Avika Dua WEBMASTER: Tom Silver WEBMASTER: Kim Soffen

SENIOR WRITERS Sam Finegold, Zeenia Framroze, Krister Koskelo, Paul Lisker, Zak Lutz, Ben Shyrock, Ross Svenson

STAFF Nicholas Bonstow, Olivia Campbell, Jaime Cobham, Hana Connelly, Sarah Coughlon, Tim Devine, Kate Donahue, Jacob Drucker, David Freed, Pietro Galeone, Jenny Gao, Jonah Hahn, Richard He, Aliya Itzkowitz, Sarani Jayawardena, Jonathan Jeffrey, Kaitlyn Jeong, Arjun Kapur, Shahrukh Khan, Andrew Ma, Blake McGhghy, Clara McNulty-Finn, Jacob Meisel, Osaremen Okolo, Andrea Ortiz, Meg Panetta, Valentina Perez, Neil Purdy, John Pulice, Ellen Robo, Nicolas Rossenblum, Zack Royle, Herny Shah, Aizhan Shorman, Erin Shortell, Advik Shreekumar, Wright Smith, Austin Tymins, Alec Villalpando, Celena Wang, Selina Wang, Carlos Xu, Carolyn Ye, Amy Zhan, Danny Zhuang

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

2 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2014

Growing up in Glenview, a leafy northern suburb of Chicago, I rarely had to think much about the big city next door. In my first 18 years, I visited the Loop for dinners and shows, saw Cubs games on the North Side, and caught countless striking views of the skyline on drives down I-94. I had seen Chicago, sure, but I knew nothing of it.

Chicago is the third largest city in the United States, in a country where 82 percent of people and growing live in urban areas. Chicago is also a global city, with multinational corporations and a constant influx of immigrants and tourists. While Detroit and other so-called “Rust Belt” cities in the Midwest face stagnation and depopulation as manufacturing moves to other countries, Chicago is in many ways a growing and thriving city. And its suburbs make up many of the wealthiest zip codes in the wealthiest nation on Earth. But behind the skyscrapers and McMansions lies an expanse of neighborhoods and suburbs that face poverty, crime, and death rates many times those of Chicago’s wealthier areas.

Chicago is a notoriously segregated metropolis: its poorer minority communities are still mostly confined to the South and West sides and neighboring suburbs, and its white population dominates the much wealthier North Side and northern suburbs.

This racial segregation, closely linked to poverty concentration, maps onto drastically higher rates of crime, murder, disease, and infant mortality, and lower rates of high school graduation, community resources, and job opportunity. In numerical terms, 76.4 percent of the Chicago area’s black population would have to move from their neighborhood to a whiter neighborhood to achieve racial integration across the metropolitan area—making it the country’s most segregated urban area.

Unfortunately, that was no accident.

Instead, Chicago’s history is one of intentional segregation of African Americans into poor neighborhoods isolated from the resources that most Chicagoans enjoy.

The abolition of slavery in 1865 was, of course, not the end of anti-black racism in America. Though citizens of the Confederate states could no longer own slaves, they maintained their agricultural economy by employing black workers for extremely low wages and sharply limiting their opportunity to save money, get an

education, or vote. So when the Southern agricultural economy began shedding jobs just as the Northern industrial economy boomed, African Americans moved by the millions to Northern cities, especially Chicago.

Chicago did not have a formal Jim Crow system in place, but this unprecedented influx of African Americans led the wary white population to limit blacks to a small set of neighborhoods on the South Side.

White homeowners throughout the city signed agreements to only sell their houses to other whites. Banks refused loans to black families looking to buy a home, or charged them exorbitant interest rates. Mayors built highways between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods to prevent mixture.

And on hundreds of occasions, white residents threatened, attacked, or bombed the homes of the black families that did manage to move into white neighborhoods.

By the 1960s, like many Northern cities, Chicago was almost completely segregated.

And its so-called Black Belt, where more than 500,000 African Americans settled after their journeys from the Jim Crow South, remains to this day the largest bloc of poverty and segregation in the Chicago area.

In a cruel, pivotal twist of history, then, millions of black families left the brutal racism of the South for the much less racist North, only to find racism built up around them through segregation when they arrived. It happened throughout the cities of the North. But it happened most profoundly right in leafy Glenview’s backyard. And the consequences—for racial equality, for social mobility, for America’s future as a land of opportunity—endure to this day.

This issue of the Harvard Political Review, like my academic and personal explorations of Chicago, reads today’s politics off the walls of our world’s cities.

From East Jerusalem to San Francisco, Karachi to Boston, cities lie at the center of pressing social questions, and rapid global urbanization suggests this trend will only continue. “City Limits” tries to make sense of this reality.

Daniel Backman President

FUNNY PAGES

ROB ROBERTSON WON’T HOLD OFFICE

by Joel Kwartler

ABOUT THIS PROJECT Rob Robertson's political career started with a Senate internship in D.C., during which he drafted the 1997 federal budget, unassisted, in one night, on three hundred and forty-eight cocktail napkins, while periodically (and nonviolently) breaking up bar fights using his left ear.

After college, from 1998 to 2002, he served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Clark County Sheriff's Office Cupcake Shop—simultaneously—due to a clerical error. He was awarded an honorary Girl Scout Gold award, despite being neither a girl nor a scout, for his gluten-free cupcakes found to have both anti-carcinogenic and resurrective properties.

In 2012, he received 8,051,074 write-in votes—becoming the first person to have won at least one vote for every local, state, and national position in every district since King George III—despite spending the election cycle in Alaska repairing melting glaciers with a portable snow-cone machine and recycled water.

Rob Robertson wants you to know that he sincerely stands with you.

He stands for you. If you want, he'll stand on you. Rob Robertson: A humble, honest, real-life down-to-earther.

FAQ Where can I find your stance on the issues?

Rob’s stance on most issues is the “Tennis Ready Position,” a low-center-of-gravity crouch. As for divisive issues like guns or abortion, Rob will get back to you when he has finished polling the most popular positions in key districts.

Is this some kind of joke?

Rob takes your contributions quite seriously, though some say his sense of humor “will make you tear up, and not because you are laughing” (WSJ) and “will leave you longing for Richard Nixon” (NYT).

Why are you running for office?

Rob sincerely wants to sincerely help you, the people, help him. Rob also has a few minor debts to repay and sincerely does not want to awaken next to a decapitated horse head anytime soon.

RISKS AND CHALLENGES When it comes to someone like Rob, there's always a risk that the voters might not realize that he is quite literally the only candidate worth his weight in rare, environmentally-damaging, incredibly expensive, illegal-in-32-states caviar. (Of course Rob doesn't mean to imply that's because Rob's stomach is full of such food, of course. Ha ha!).

The only challenge the campaign faces is working around a slight legal issue that forbids felons from holding public office. Nevertheless, Rob is confident that he can convince a jury that he wouldn't actually hold public office in his hands or anything, but just sort of cradle it instead.

2

backers

2

days to go

$200 pledged of $10,000,000,000 goal

Back This Project Pledge $15 or more: A limited-edition photocopy of a hand-written thank you note*!

Pledge $25 or more: A hand-signed limited-edition photocopy of a hand-written thank you note**!

Pledge $50 or more: A one-of-a-kind, original hand-written thank you note***! *Due to unanticipated demand, Rob's limited-edition thank you note photocopies may vary from thanking his cousin for the graduation socks to thanking his job interviewers! **Due to short supply, thank you notes may be handsigned by staff members, inmates of county correctional facilities, or people who are both! ***Due to the fact that Rob is illiterate, custom hand-written thank you notes will be stolen from poorly guarded USPS depots!

Pledge $100 or more: Rob will allow you to follow him on Twitter!

Pledge $1,000 or more: You can draft a minor piece of legislation for Rob to submit!

Pledge $5,000 or more: Rob will re-roof your house using sustainable composite tiles!

Pledge $10,000,000 or more: You choose how Rob votes!

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 3

CAMPUS

A Semester with Divest Gram Slattery

4 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2014

CAMPUS

B

y March 24, 2014, I had been embedded in the organization Divest Harvard for five weeks, and there was little sign the group was about to grow.

Its members told me they’d congregated every Monday for a year in this sterile, broad-windowed room in Quincy House.

Since mid-February, when I started attending, I’d seen no more than nine or 10 members show up any given night. Of those, only six or seven were regular attendees.

This came as a surprise to me, as it would to many people who have followed campus politics over the past two years. The organization, which is calling on Harvard to divest its $32.7 billion endowment from the fossil fuels industry, is at the center of a lively, at times polarizing political debate that stretches far beyond the borders of Cambridge. Well-known commentators from Chris Hayes to Walter Russell Mead have spilt gallons of ink debating the strategy everywhere from The National Review to The Nation. The group’s organizers have fielded long interviews with NPR and Rolling Stone, snagged endorsements from the Cambridge City Council, and met behind closed doors with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Even President Obama has implicitly endorsed the group’s methods. “Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution,” he said at Georgetown University last year. “Convince your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Divest.”

On campus, opinion is split, but among politically active liberals—a significant chunk of Harvard’s student body—the general sentiment is aligned heavily in favor of Divest and against Harvard President Drew Faust, who has maintained a staunch, unmoving anti-divestment position over the past year and a half.

During the only Undergraduate Council referendum on the matter, 72 percent voted in favor of the group’s goals. And though less than 40 percent of students voted—as many are quick to point out—that still comes out to about 2,000 undergraduates, many of whom are among the school’s most politically passionate.

But here, at this diminutive meeting in Quincy, one feels far from the epicenter of a major student movement—much less one with thousands of students, politicians, and activists behind it.

On the agenda are a potential co-sponsorship for an event with other activist groups on campus, including the Student Labor Action Movement and Perspective, an all-but-defunct leftist paper. The measure comes to a vote. The Divesters raise their fists toward the center of the table and, once instructed to by the meeting’s leader, Canyon Woodward ’15, give either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. The measure passes easily, and a moment of silence follows. But these administrative votes among a handful of students rarely seem like a substantive step toward goading Harvard to reallocate the $35 million it has tied up in the fossil fuels industry, and I’m not the only one getting this impression.

“I’m worried that we’re having these conversations with just a small number of Divesters,” says Henney Sullivan ’15, a longhaired, flannel-wearing junior from the mountains of northern New Hampshire. “I definitely think about how I spend my time in this room occasionally. I mean, this is a stretch to determine whether or not this group even exists next year.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this sentiment—in fact, it had become something of a theme, if only by implication. Just two weeks prior, Alli Welton ’15, who once infamously chained

herself to an exurban office building in central Massachusetts in protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline, expressed unease about a ‘teach-in’ outside Massachusetts Hall in the middle of March. “If we only have five or six people there, which is a real possibility, we’re going to look really weak,” she warned.

The teach-in, to be sure, was small—just a few students gathered around an empty chair symbolizing the administration. It wasn’t an embarrassment or anything partially because so few students knew about it. That gathering, in other words—like so many gatherings by Divest as of late—flew far under the student body’s radar. *** But none of this is to say that Divest Harvard had been a failure so far—far from it.

It’s true that in terms of real impact on the university’s policies, the organization hadn’t yet been effective. It was also true that the movement was growing tired outside its central core after about a year and a half of roughly the same tactical schtick.

But the group had and continued to spark a tremendous amount of dialogue. As of this writing, both The Atlantic and Commonwealth Magazine—popular among Bay State political junkies—had opined on the strategy in the past day alone. And, in concrete terms, several towns in Massachusetts—including Cambridge, Northampton, and Provincetown—had at least partially divested from the fossil fuels industry. Nationally, several major cities, from San Francisco to Portland, Ore., had also jumped on the divestment bandwagon.

So the sparking of conversation in a way that provokes concrete change—at least outside the Harvard bubble—had been one of the group’s practical strengths. Divest supporter and English professor Jim Engell said this to me in May, citing an Oxford study on the long-term effects of dialogue on actual regulations.

But it seemed that in the more limited context of dealing with the Harvard administration, this activism-through-dialogue method had also been one of the group’s weaknesses.

For the past two semesters, the group had hosted a number of forums, lectures, panels, and teach-ins—about one for every month of the school year—but these gatherings were not gaining steam, and the administration, or at least Faust, wasn’t about to budge.

The group had also engaged with the administration more directly, meeting multiple times with members of the Harvard Corporation on and off the record, as well as other administrators with some nominal control over the endowment. Among these was the Harvard Management Company official in charge of “sustainable investment”—as well as Faust herself. But all these interactions had eventually led to frustration among the Divesters, who felt that the higher-ups weren’t taking them at all seriously.

“The attitude of the administration has been, ‘Go ahead, run along little children,’” Divest supporter Dr. Jim Recht told me at his soboxin clinic in North Cambridge.

Perhaps a representative interaction occurred between student Divesters and Robert Reischauer and Nannerl Keohane, two of four members of the Corporation’s Corporate Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, or CCSR. At the second of

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

CAMPUS

Members of Divest Harvard blockade Massachusetts Hall.

three meetings, this March, Reischauer noted that he had been personally affected by climate change, as he was forced to build a $50,000 bulwark for his vacation home in Canada. But—First World problem aside—both he and Keohane reiterated their belief that aligning against fossil fuel companies was a foolish strategy. “You should thank BP,” said Keohane, disaffectionately referred to as “Nanners” by the Divesters.

In this context of starkly worded rebuffs behind closed doors, the Divesters felt that “dialogue” wasn’t a sufficient standalone tactic, especially because the group was growing no stronger on campus.

A change of strategy was in order. And so Divest, an organization of conciliation and conversation, would add another tactic to its repertoire: confrontation. *** The first sign of this shift occurred that March, when, on a frosty, hard morning with the Yard still covered in a skift of snow, several members of Divest followed Faust to Massachusetts Hall, making their case for divestment and fielding a couple of constrained responses from the president.

During the back-and-forth, Faust made a tactical error, claiming that the fossil fuels industry did not hinder the practical application of green research. Divest had been filming, and from the clip of Faust’s claim, the group launched a small media campaign to expose the perceived holes in her logic. Faust was pissed, and she wrote an open letter to Divest calling the group out for its lack of “civility and fairness.”

But “civility” was no longer a priority for Divest, at least until “civil” interactions reaped results. That film clip—which, for one

6 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2014

of the first times publicly and properly situated Faust and the Divesters as foes rather than partners—was just the harbinger of a larger tactical change within Divest, one which certain group members had begun to murmur about months earlier.

Since at least February, the group had talked of an “action”— activist speak for a protest or a creative, conspicuous gathering that challenges the administration. This was nothing new in and of itself, but this action would take a far more aggressive approach. It would be a capstone to the group’s activities this semester and a launching point for the its activities come autumn—perhaps even a defibrillatory shock to the sleepy atmosphere those Divest meetings had come to assume. And at the end of March, after the release of the Faust video, I first got word of the specifics.

Basically, the action would be a human blockade of Mass Hall, which Chloe Maxmin ’15, a razor-sharp, salt-of-theEarth Mainer with bylines in Dissent and The Nation, dubbed a “symbol of the administration.” A group of Divesters would physically surround the building and demand a conference with Faust that the public could also attend—called an “open meeting” by Divest. Hopefully, the action would end with Faust giving in to the group’s demands, or in a round of arrests by the Harvard University Police Department. In the former case, the Divesters hoped an open meeting would expose the flawed logic that they had reportedly been fed during closed-door meetings with administrators. And in the latter case, the group hoped to demonstrate the intransigence and stubbornness of Faust and the Corporation.

Over the month of April, those once-snoozy meetings in Quincy took on a headier tone. The number of attendees grew into the mid- and upper-teens, and the concrete details of

CAMPUS

A change of strategy was in order. And so Divest, an organization of conciliation and conversation, would add another tactic to its repertoire: confrontation.

the blockade were slowly, but steadily fleshed out. Members reported back from their talks with legal counsel regarding the possible arrests. Code names were developed. A documentary film crew consisting of two bearded gentlemen with hanging microphones and video cameras even began to attend the meetings.

One felt the group had, for an evening here and there, miraculously turned the clock back from 2014 to the late ’60s. Divest, in other words, had begun to escape the small-ball, meetings-onmeetings cycle that wastes many modern activist causes on campus. A few months later in Dissent, Maxmin would sufficiently summarize the group’s new, confrontational attitude, writing that “Harvard’s representatives are so saturated in industry PR that they have been blinded to the facts.”

Those risking arrest, placing themselves directly in front of the doors of Mass Hall, were dubbed “doughnuts.” Those merely lending support from a few meters away were dubbed “coffee.”

Physical metal chains—once thrown around by the Divesters as a potential accessory in the blockade—were decided against, but only on tactical grounds. Orange divest shirts were ordered, and an aggressive schedule of speakers was put in place. Finally, a few Divesters ran three reconnaissance missions toward the end of April, in which they discerned the morning schedule of Faust’s zany personal assistant, Lars Madsen, so as to determine when the blockaders would need to show up in the morning to effectively seal off the building.

“This is going to be so cool,” said Welton at the end of one planning session in late April. *** One of the more common criticisms of student activism that one hears on campus is that agitation is often performed for the sake of agitation—that is, students like to raise the stakes without sufficient reason, often to draw attention to themselves rather than their cause. Because of this ingrained, sometimes valid suspicion, it may be necessary to clarify that it wasn’t only a series of unproductive meetings with Nanners and the CCSR that had originally pushed the movement in this more confrontational direction. Every other avenue for dialogue with admininistrators was looping into a cul-de-sac, a reality that was becoming clearer over time.

Among the other key figures with whom the group had met more than once was Jameela Pedicini, who was hired a year and a half ago as the Harvard Corporation’s vice president for sustainable investing. Though her position would seem to foster interaction with Divest, the student group complained that she’d been inaccessible.

“In October, she said, ‘I’d love to meet with you soon to continue talking about these issues,’ but she didn’t respond to us again for months,” said Maxmin.

On top of her perceived inaccessibility, the group had also come to doubt the effectiveness of her position. “Powerless” was how one Divest member described her.

“She’s the VP of sustainable investment, but that’s a f***ing choice word,” said one Divester after a meeting. “All they mean by ‘sustainable’ is consistently high returns forever and ever.”

Though the meetings were conducted off the record—the contents being secret—it’s hard to know what, if anything, resulted from the congregations.

At the top of the administrative chain and removed from the day-to-day workings of the endowment, Faust was of no use to the organization, which was to be expected. What wasn’t expected were the reactionary stances she would adopt, even in relation to her own advisors. More than one high-ranking faculty member has suggested she divest from coal, sources say. Among them was Earth and Planetary Sciences professor Daniel Schrag, a formal advisor to President Obama and an informal advisor to Faust.

Of course, Faust wouldn’t move on this suggestion—even as other several other universities, including Stanford, would in the months that followed. And it wasn’t as if a majority, or even a large fraction, of professors were pushing her all that hard to do so—a tepidity that Divesters have attributed partially to the internal politics of Harvard’s faculty.

To elaborate, multiple Divesters had told me that junior faculty said to the group that they supported the movement, but would not do so openly for fear of reducing their chances at tenure. I might’ve dismissed this as activist propaganda had more than one junior faculty member not told me this directly—or if I hadn’t had a fruitful conservation with Timothy McCarthy, a pro-Divest literature professor, in the Barker Center one May afternoon.

“I’ve had many, many, many conversations with junior faculty [who] refuse to speak because they’re concerned for their careers,” he told me. “Perhaps it’s my own obsession with mortality—being Irish, being gay, being a lefty—but I never wanted to die with my head buried in the sand. And there are faculty here with their heads buried in the sand.”

Is this just a problem for those without tenure? Maybe, maybe not. But for McCarthy, at least, the answer was a definitive no.

“There’s a whole system of rewards, privileges, chairmanships, et cetera,” he said. “If the faculty stood up and spoke, Harvard would divest tomorrow.”

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 7

CAMPUS

*** As the Divest crowd began to surreptitiously swell, Faust, as if on cue, threw a curve ball the group’s way. Acting under the informal counsel of Schrag, she announced that the university would adhere to the U.N. Principles for Responsible Investment, or PRI. Under these guidelines, which the United Nations describes as “voluntary and aspirational,” the university would conform its new investments to PRI’s “ESG” credo—ESG standing for “environmental, sustainable, and governmental.”

For the Divesters, this was little more than a shrewd, tactical move, meant first and foremost to erode Divest’s base of support; for them, it could be roughly analogized to Faust’s appointment of the “powerless” Pedicini.

“Faust’s a wiley one,” said Sullivan at the time, half-jokingly.

Materially, while PRI might have been a step in the right direction in their eyes, both Divest and its supporters treated the measure with the cynicism that voluntary “guidelines” typically engender. “What we’ve seen with other signatories is that some have developed robust programs, and some have not,” Daniel Wood, director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the Kennedy School, told The Harvard Crimson.

Perhaps students saw Faust’s move as a false olive branch— perhaps this was only true of Harvard’s environmental vanguard—but despite the temporary anxiety of Divest’s leaders, the group’s meetings only grew after the PRI declaration in midApril. On Monday, April 28—two days before the blockade—this growth reached its crescendo.

The venue, far from the pallid sterility of that room in Quincy, had been changed to the Democracy Center, a charming, if shabby clapboard colonial on Mt. Auburn Street with peeling eggshell blue paint. When I arrived, 27 people were stuffed into a 15’ by 15’ room, which was adjacent to a temporary nude portraiture gallery and a tango studio.

“It’s unlikely that we’d get into legal trouble,” said Kelsey Skaggs, a doughnut and a Law School student, about those blockading Mass Hall in two days’ time. “But academic punishments are possible. The first level is a reprimand, but it could lead to an expulsion.”

“Will anyone go to bat for us if it comes to that?” asked a new face in the crowd.

“Yes,” replied Woodward, listing a number of high-level faculty members who had pledged to defend the Divesters should they be referred to the Administrative Board. Among them was Sharon Howell, then the College’s senior resident dean. “She said she’s absolutely willing to defend us.”

The group then designated a police liaison—someone who would communicate with HUPD during the action—and formulated a strategy for communicating between the coffee and the doughnuts should the police separate the two.

Whereas some evenings in the past, the meetings ended early and lacked a driving focus, this time there was hardly any pausing as, at any given time, several Divesters had their hands raised to speak. The meeting ran over—well over—but no one left, and the pace of speech never slowed. The physical atmosphere framed this heady brand of activism well: the dimly lit room was illuminated only by a small porcelain chandelier with mismatched lightbulbs and the backlight of the documentary film crew. The walls, made of knotty, diagonally paneled wood, were covered by posters that read, “Occupy Sisterhood,” and “Central

8 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2014

America: Reagan Wages War. Let’s Wage Peace.” The bookshelves held volumes ranging from left-centrist policy works to tomes defending Lenin.

At the end of the meeting, when the loose ends were seemingly tied up, there was a ra-ra group hug, but no one left. Instead, the group hung around, talking excitedly, drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and stenciling in orange and black posters to hold up at the blockade. Eventually, at 10 p.m., I left, having no idea when the last Divesters would drift out that evening. *** Whereas the Divesters stayed late on Monday, they exhibited an ungodly, though necessary, earliness on Wednesday, congregating in Grays Hall at 5:50 a.m. From there, they migrated 150 yards across the Old Yard donning bright orange Divest shirts—about 35 of them—to the main entrance of Mass Hall, the entrance which faces southeast and is framed by short hedges.

Once there, the group’s six doughnuts—meaning those risking arrest—stood directly in front of the forest green door, and the coffee—those not risking arrest, but making their voices heard nonetheless—ringed the central group.

Slightly before 7 a.m., a short woman with frumpy blonde hair and a black raincoat who works daily in Mass Hall, escorted by three gruff HUPD officers, approached the main entrance.

The coffee moved out of the way, but six doughnuts linked arms in response, obstructing their path.

“I’m sorry, but we’re blockading the building,” said Skaggs in a timid way, as if acknowledging the awkwardness of the encounter.

“Are you shuh?” asked the first policeman, in a dry Boston accent.

The doughnuts nodded.

He looked back toward his mustachioed captain. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you want.”

The captain, in turn, addressed the group. “We’re trying to get this woman into her office, so …”

After three or four seconds of silence, Ted, a thick-bearded and crunchy Divinity School student, responded, “We’re looking for an open and transparent dialogue with the Harvard Corporation about divestment, so we can only speak with someone with the power to negotiate on behalf of the Corporation.”

The policemen then escorted the woman back from whence they came, and, once the trio was out of range, the blockaders let out of very audible, collective sigh of relief. The blockaders smiled, then laughed, as did some of the surrounding coffee.

“Good job, guys,” said Skaggs with a grin.

After more than a month of organization, this new tactic was going according to plan; after more than a year of being swept aside by the administration, it was finally, if only briefly, the Divesters sweeping aside the administrators. And based on the atmosphere of those early morning hours this reversal of roles was, for the time being, a damn good feeling. *** Over the next few hours, the Divesters set up camp. Banners were strung across the main façade of Mass Hall, a food table was established and, eventually, a small tent was erected above

CAMPUS

Students from around Boston show their support for the divestment movement.

the building’s entrance where the doughnuts lingered. Leland Cheung, a Democratic Cambridge City Councilor and candidate for lieutenant governor, and environmental activist Bob Massie, among others, spoke at a rally at 10 a.m. Another assemblage, featuring The Nation writer Wen Stephenson, followed at noon.

But despite the fact that the Divesters had programmed the day heavily—there were other rallies at 3 and 6 p.m.—morale began to sink precipitously toward mid-morning for reasons that were partially bad luck, and partially bad tactics.

The spring of 2014 in Cambridge, to clarify, had been cold, and though the coffee and doughnuts bundled up heavily, puffing outward like Michelin men under their orange shirts, no degree of layering could fully counter the 24 hours of torrential rain that began around 9 a.m. The tents the group had purchased were flimsy and insufficient, and the coffee numbers dwindled as a result. This problem would have been a mere inconvenience for the core doughnuts, if it weren’t for the fact that they somewhat puzzlingly decided to leave two of Mass Hall’s three doors unguarded. As each entrance accesses the entirety of the building, administrators, by midday, simply started walking into the building via the alternate entrances. The police decided to leave the scene of the protest, and the Divesters—via their surprisingly robust web of informants—got word that the administration planned to simply wait the protestors out.

The doughnuts hadn’t envisioned playing this game, nor was it clear that the game was winnable. This protest, in other words, was in grave danger of fizzling out into obscurity, as had many other Divest actions in the past, and the Divesters were acutely aware of this reality. So at 2 p.m., they held a meeting to re-strategize.

One of the first speakers, a visibly shivering doughnut, suggested they call the blockade off, and settle for the media buzz that they’d already created. “The administration already looks bad, so I say we end it now, and put our energy into the next ac-

tion in the fall,” she said.

None of the other Divesters present, however, were willing to pull the plug. “We’ve been organizing for months, and we’re still doing essentially the same thing,” said Maxmin. “I don’t want to let everyone supporting us down.”

Welton seconded Maxmin, as did Sullivan, Woodward and many others. To pull the plug on this, the group agreed, would be to fall back into the organizational and tactical stagnation that had begun to rear its ugly head that spring.

“I think our best option would be to move to block the doors tonight, and either get an open meeting or get arrested tomorrow,” said Ted. The group agreed and soon, it was decided: the now partial blockade would, by tomorrow morning, be airtight. *** HUPD, it turns out, had other plans. When I arrived at Mass Hall early the next morning, the police—a cordial bunch the day before—were yanking the doughnuts out of doorways. The Divesters were shouting their demands for an open meeting, and when the opportunity opened up, they’d re-occupy key passages only to be removed again when an administrator approached.

One doughnut proved a bit more difficult to yank away than the others, however, and it was not one whom I’d have originally suspected. Named Brett Roche, he was a full head shorter than me—I’m about 5’ 11”—and skinny, too. His smile was constant, his personality warm, and yesterday, he’d spent hours petting and feeding a baby gray squirrel. But when the cops approached, he clawed on to the knob of one of Mass Hall’s side doors and refused to let go. After a few unfruitful tugs, they communicated to him that he’d be arrested if he refused to move. Roche acknowledged, and with that, he was cuffed, stuffed, and sent in a HUPD squad car to the Middlesex County Jail.

The blockade ended within two hours, and the university had

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“There’s a whole system of rewards, privileges, chairmanships, et cetera,” [McCarthy] said. “If the faculty stood up and spoke, Harvard would divest tomorrow.”

dropped all charges against Roche within four, but a number of narratives had already accrued around the action—some organically, some with the help Divest’s modest media machine. “What we saw was pretty disappointing,” said Tim DeChristopher, a vocal Divinity School student and well-known affiliate of the group, at a well-attended rally the next day. “We saw this university respond to a request for open dialogue with repression and bullying, and it needs to be known that that kind of action is unacceptable for this institution.”

It wasn’t just core Divesters who expressed this sentiment— celebrities and many students did as well. “Any society where arrest is preferable to open dialogue is a scary place,” said author Margaret Atwood, after accepting an Arts First medal at the College the following day. Among Harvard students themselves, many—in fact most that I talked to after the action—were put off

by Faust and the Corporation’s seemingly fervid determination to avoid an open meeting with the Divesters.

“I don’t really have an opinion about Divest. I don’t pay attention,” a junior neurobiology concentrator in Pforzheimer House told me. “But when I see Faust refusing to grant a pretty reasonable request like that, it makes me sympathetic to the Divesters.

I don’t know why Faust is so stubborn about this.”

If the student body’s view of Faust is any indication, this stubborn image of the president has proliferated beyond my unscientific sample: according to a late May survey of the senior class conducted by The Crimson, only 47 percent of the class approved of Faust’s performance, far worse than in years past, and her handling of the Divesters is almost unanimously cited as the reason for this discontent.

To be sure, not all of Divest’s media buzz was positive, as some viewed the blockade as overly confrontational. “Turning from reason and persuasion to confrontation weakens the group’s arguments,” read a piece by The Crimson’s much-maligned editorial board the following week.

The Divesters, however, who had been involved in unfruitful and by then broken dialogue with the administration for over a year, didn’t see the action as a source of weakness at all, but rather as a source of strength. A plateauing movement had

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finally stood up to those in the Corporation, the college administration, and HMC, who’d deftly kicked the divestment can down the road, while the student group drifted into organizational apathy. Thanks to the blockade, this was no longer the case.

Now, the Divesters had an acute sense of their capacity to work not only within the confines of the institution, but in opposition to it. They had an acute sense of themselves as practitioners of civil disobedience—effective ones, who could force the administration into tactical fumbling, even when their demands were technically unmet. In other words, they had a sense of their own strength as student activists representing the campus’s environmental vanguard.

“It felt amazing,” said Sullivan the following week of the action. “The 2:00 to 4:00 period was an altered state of being. I’ve come down a bit since then, but not all the way.” *** A few days after the blockade, Divest held a debriefing in Adams’ festively trimmed Coolidge Room. Like the meetings leading up to the action, the room was packed—and the tone was ebullient. According to Maxmin, the administration was likely to offer measures short of divestment in the near future as a means of appeasement. “But we’re not going to stop,” she said. “We’re only growing stronger.”

Had I heard these words a month before—in that pallid, sterile room in Quincy—I’d have thought them ridiculous. But now, with Divest’s core recharged and its tactics revamped, it’d be hard to claim the group lacks energy.

This was true when the Divesters stood up to the first Mass Hall worker and her HUPD protectors early on a cold April morning. It was true when Roche clawed onto that doorknob 26 hours later. It was also true when the group held a raucous kegger the night after at an off-campus place near the Law School.

Then, as the group celebrated their victory, noise complaints caused the police to again come and confront the student group.

And come they did—twice.

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THE URBAN BATTLEFIELD INSURGENCY’S RISE IN DEVELOPING CITIES Wright Smith

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arlier this summer, a force of approximately ten militants attacked Pakistan’s Jinnah International Airport in Karachi. The death toll from the attack, including the ten attackers, was around 38. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, stating it was a response to the death of one of their leaders during an American drone strike last year. While the attack did not succeed in hijacking a civilian airliner, it highlights an ominous drift for Pakistan and for the world more generally. For Pakistan, it marked a renewed belligerence by the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, which has been met by the government with a major offensive in the Northwestern tribal areas. For the world, it demonstrates a disturbing trend: the shift of extremist violence from tribal villages and regions to the megacities of the developing world. Coupled with the governance problems that already exist in major cities, this trend could create significant problems for nations facing rapid urbanization in coming years.

THE ETERNAL CITY Urban centers have long played a role in the history of war, often providing fertile ground for insurgencies and lowintensity conflicts. During insurgencies of the 20th century, urban violence and terrorism in places like Algeria, Malaysia, South Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and Afghanistan were a key feature of the conflicts.

In these earlier insurgencies and lowintensity struggles, the militarily more advanced and better-equipped forces of modernized countries like the United States, France, the United Kingdom, or the Soviet Union were able to maintain significant control over the urban centers of a country. In the case of South Vietnam, the United States was able to easily hold major cities like Saigon and Da Nang against insurgent attacks, even during major assaults such as the Tet Offensive. The strength of the guerillas, in Vietnam and numerous other low-intensity conflicts, was in the countryside.

Dr. David Kilcullen, a retired officer in the Australian Armed Forces and an expert on counterinsurgency, explained this trend in an interview with the HPR, saying “for most of history, cities were much more legible than the countryside, in the sense that the government could understand what was going on. If you go up into the mountains and into the jungle, it’s harder to find you. The cover is in the countryside, and so insurgents go there.”

This was certainly true in South Vietnam, where American forces were unable to pacify the rural areas of the country.

The Vietnamese communist insurgents recruited additional cadres and smuggled supplies through the more porous rural areas for attacks against concentrations of foreign troops in the cities.

This pattern, of counterinsurgent control over cities and insurgent domination in the countryside, emerged in insurgency conflicts in places like Algeria and Afghanistan as well. Violence and fighting still reached urban areas under counterinsurgent control. However, these incidents were generally smaller-scale terrorist

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attacks, not larger hybrid or near-conventional fights between security forces and large groups of insurgents.

THE RISE OF THE MEGACITY The past several decades have marked a significant change in the old paradigm of violent insurgencies. Steadily, urbanization has concentrated more and more people in massive global cities, often in the developing world. Pakistan, for example, is currently experiencing an urbanization rate of 3 percent. While a third of Pakistani citizens today live in massive cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, that number will reach approximately 50 percent of the entire Pakistani population by 2025. “There are major demographic changes that are pushing a lot of populations into urban spaces underway in Latin American and Africa and happening in Asia. Part of this is simply the result of demographic changes, and part of the focus is due to the ineptitude of governments in handling the influx of people. This is especially true in multi-million resident cities,” Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained to the HPR. The majority of the largest cities in the next ten years are projected to be in developing nations. Many of these developing cities, such as Lagos, Cairo, and Karachi, are growing in nations that are also undergoing significant insurgencies or civil unrest: the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, the ongoing instability and struggle with Islamists in Egypt, and the conflict with the TTP in Pakistan.

Urban areas pose many significant problems for governments to contend with. As more individuals move to cities, many are only able to find housing in slum conditions on the outskirts of the city, often with substandard sewer and water treatment systems. The concentration of people without sufficient sanitation also generally leads to increased water and air pollution, which further degrades the health of city inhabitants. The significant lack of economic opportunity also generates increased crime and corruption, which further hampers government efforts to alleviate the conditions in megacities.

The primary challenge for governments of megacities is a lack of sufficient means to deal with the major challenges of urbanization. “In the developing world, where urbanization is particularly pronounced, governments often lack the resources—financial, technical, and vocational—to deliver food, water, energy, housing, education, and healthcare to so many people,” Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Center wrote in an email to the HPR. “Another basic service that municipal governments in growing cities often struggle to provide is security. Finally, employment is another huge challenge for urbanizing cities.”

Governments that are able to meet only one of these needs, such as providing security, still face a restive population that desires other basic services such as health, water, and energy. The combination of a lack of basic services, employment, and security control in urban centers creates a dangerous, lawless concentration of individuals that criminals, terrorists, and insurgents can take advantage of.

THE MILITANT METROPOLIS The major urbanization underway globally, with the incumbent challenges it brings, has been a significant contributor to growing conflicts in cities. Kilcullen, who also recently authored

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Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla, highlighted Pakistan, India, Nigeria, and Brazil as nations with a high risk of urban conflict in the near future. Regarding Pakistan, Kilcullen emphasized the movement of fighting and of the Pakistani Taliban into major cities such as Karachi and Quetta. In the case of India, he pointed to the threat of the Maoist Naxalite insurgency, which has started to gain supporters in urban megacities like Mumbai, and highlighted growing urban conflicts in slums in Nigeria and the exacerbation of long-standing urban difficulties in Brazil.

In rapidly growing cities, large numbers of people living in slums become populations that more easily turn toward violence. “Many people join militant outfits for micro-reasons that have little to do with the large macro-justification and causes of the militancy. These micro-reasons might include personal grievances or network connections. Some of the reasons might be making money,” explained Felbab-Brown. “For the poor who have no jobs and no educational or social opportunities, the militancy might be a way to do something; they might as well fight.” With a highly dense population lacking in significant social mobility or basic government services, armed groups have a large recruiting pool to draw from, resulting in violence spreading from the countryside more directly into urban areas.

Crime and lawlessness is another major factor that gives rise to armed groups. In places where governments have a difficult time providing security, residents may turn to their own armed groups for defense. “There aren’t a lot of Sunday school choirs running slums in the Third World, so almost certainly if you’re going to survive for any length of time in control of an area like a slum, you probably are an armed group,” Kilcullen explained.

It is also very easy for criminal networks and insurgencies to blend together in their tactics and actions. “Criminal activities can have some of the same adverse effects on security [as insurgencies],” Felbab-Brown noted. “While drug smugglers in Mexico do not necessarily amount to a criminal insurgency, they have very significant influence and control of the state functions in their areas.” Insurgent groups also sustain themselves off of criminality, as evidenced by the FARC in Columbia. According to Kilcullen, “All insurgencies carry out illicit acts, like bank robberies or kidnappings, to sustain themselves, but really until the end of the Cold War, a lot of developing world insurgencies were sponsored by the Soviet Union or China. Once the Soviet Union fell in 1991, that source of foreign assistance dried up for a lot of these groups, so they had to look for other sources of funding.

And in some cases, that was crime.”

THE PAKISTANI PROBLEM While many nations are facing the specter of significant urban violence, Pakistan—with its unstable government, nuclear arsenal, extremist insurgency, and interests in regional terrorist activity—is an epicenter of urban conflict. Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by many of the same factors as in other nations, with the added impact of localized conflicts.

“Conflict is also a huge driver of urbanization in Pakistan,” Kugelman explained. “Ever since its founding, war and conflict have helped fuel the growth of Pakistan’s cities. This is because when there have been wars in rural areas of Pakistan, and in the broader region, people have been displaced and ended up in cities.

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In rapidly growing cities, large numbers of people living in slums become populations that more easily turn towards violence.

Kugelman went on, “What’s particularly troubling is that in recent years, militants have mixed in with these civilian refugee migrations into cities—and this is why the number of Pakistani Taliban fighters in Karachi has grown so much in recent years.”

The movement of Pakistani Taliban into major cities, such as Karachi, where they effectively control multiple neighborhoods, is key in allowing the terrorist group to carry out major attacks in these cities, such as the Karachi Airport raid.

In Pakistan’s case, ideology, along with inequality, has become a major driver of radicalism and terrorist recruitment. Kugelman emphasized that ideology in Pakistan is very significant in increasing the ranks of extremists. “This ideological environment in Pakistani cities may help explain why it’s not just the urban poor that are targeted for recruitment to radical causes. Essentially, anyone who succumbs to hard-line ideologies is a logical candidate for recruitment.”

In Pakistan, local media, which often carries a harsh antiWestern line, is very influential, helping drive radicalization.

Private TV channels are especially popular in cities and often promote hard-line ideologies. “Influential urbanites—from religious leaders to hard-line politicians—are happy to propagate such messages even further,” Kugelman added. The combination of growing middle-class radicalism, urban poverty, and sensationalist and ideologically polarized media, has made Pakistan’s cities an unstable cauldron, which threatens to produce more violence.

THE RIGHT ANSWER The trends of urbanization are not showing any signs of slowing down. However, governments are already considering potential remedies to alleviate these problematic conditions and gain greater control over their urban areas. Many times, these policies need to bring some form of government presence to the lives of citizens who may have never had a governmental presence in their communities. In the words of Felbab-Brown, “In large parts of cities like Karachi or Lagos, there was never really any official state governance or presence to begin with. If only the new project for the state were regaining control and regaining footing, it would be less of a challenge. Instead, the state needs to establish itself in communities and areas that have never had state governance, or have only experienced it in a negative way.”

Kilcullen described a process he and his colleagues use to provide solutions to distressed urban communities, which involves close collaboration between local community leaders and outside policy and development experts. “What you are looking for from the local community is leadership and ownership and local knowledge, and what you bring from the outside is the technical, functional knowledge, but it has to happen in a safe

environment so that people feel confident to put the weapon down and engage in a constructive discussion,” he said.

An example of this process, carried out by Kilcullen and his team, involved community safety in Benin City, Nigeria. In working with both national police and local leaders, they identified several modifications to the city. These included wider streets and better lighting, as well as clearly defining which parts of the community the police would cover and which the community would police itself. Through this process, the community hoped to cut down its crime rates and promote greater stability.

Measures such as these, upgrades to the urban infrastructure along with discussions between government and community representatives, offer a path for stressed administrations to build trust with citizens and improve the governance of an urban community.

As for Pakistan, the government may be beginning to take measures to provide security in the cities. In early August, Pakistani authorities deployed additional paramilitary Rangers to cities to heighten security and also banned large-scale gatherings in Islamabad. However, these measures remain incomplete, and it is unclear whether they will really increase security in Pakistani cities or will instead further alienate residents. What Pakistan really needs, according to Felbab-Brown, is to prioritize. “They have limited resources and an extraordinary amount of space and population that does not live under government control.

They need to break the linkages between organized crime and political parties. The state needs to be willing to dispense with their use of criminal actors, then they need to launch a more robust police action ... as well as socio-economic programs to create bonds between the state and the residents.”

In recent months, Pakistan has made strides to improve its law enforcement and security capacities in cities, a program which the United States has provided expert advisers and capacity builders to support. However, as the recent fighting in North Waziristan shows, the government still is highly focused on pushing insurgents out of the tribal belt areas, rather than the cities, and still is unable to provide the prerequisite security for urban residents.

Fortunately for governments facing these challenges, there are myriad ideas for addressing the issues of mass urbanization.

Unfortunately, the ability to enact these ideas remains mired in bureaucracy, weak state power, and corruption, even as the inexorable tide of the urbanizing world continues. Without significant changes soon, nations that have devoted the past decade to “The War on Terror,” especially the United States, may soon find their enemy is no longer in the Pakistani tribal belt or the West African Sahel. The next challenge to global security lies, rather, in the heart of the world’s biggest cities.

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SAVING SAN FRANCISCO

Emily Wang

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irst came the gold-seeking 49ers, and then came the newly-minted computer science college grads.

“We’ve been a city of innovation ever since the Gold Rush,” David Chiu, supervisor of San Francisco’s board of directors, declared at the Share conference in May 2014. Share, hosted in San Francisco, convened for two days to talk about the most recent developments in “the sharing economy,” an industry newly thrust onto the startup scene by heavyweights like Uber and Airbnb. But the conference was also a glimpse into what the future of “sharing” may look like: share your parking spot, your household appliances, your personal belongings, all with a click or a swipe on your smartphone.

From its inception, Silicon Valley has enjoyed its longstanding reputation as a home—the home—of rapid growth and development. And although the South Bay, just a few Caltrain stops away from San Francisco, geographically dominated tech culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, demographics have finally shifted northward. Now, San Francisco’s name has become synonymous with its inhabitants: the young, male, college-educated hackers. The city itself has transformed into a hotbed for tech startups, of which the sharing startups comprise a substantial subset. Tech companies are moving into the SoMa neighborhood. Their workers are moving into Mission, the adjacent neighborhood. And longtime residents are moving out, into cheaper districts or across the bay into neighboring Oakland.

Much ink has been spilled over San Francisco’s recent and dramatic transformation. The city’s rapid (and accelerating) process of gentrification has accumulated its share of both vocal critics and champions. Headlines about protesters picketing outside the windows of Google buses appear alongside announcements of multimillion—or billion—dollar valuations.

Allegations of rising evictions in apartments later transformed into Airbnb getaways coexist in the same city as Airbnb’s headquarters.

Gentrification isn’t a new phenomenon. Brooklyn has undergone a similar process: new residents and new industry moved in, displacing existing residents as rent and the prices of consumer goods rose. Other urban pockets across the nation are currently gentrifying. And the process itself is not unilaterally negative: oftentimes, rises in cost-of-living expenses are coupled with decreases in neighborhood crime rates.

Yet San Francisco somehow feels like a special case. With an industry that associates itself with an anti-establishment

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spirit of “disruption” and a communalistic spirit of mutually-beneficial sharing, the exclusivity of the Google buses and the rising numbers of evictions in the Mission District clash with the narrative that the industry prides itself on.

DISRUPTING TRUST In the Bay Area, the product isn’t just software or hardware; it’s the philosophy behind it. Jason Tanz’s recent Wired article on trust in the sharing economy claims that the success of sharing services—ranging from loaning out power tools to crashing for a night in somebody’s spare room—hinges on a level of trust that has otherwise become defunct in our modern lives. Tanz presents a vision of the sharing economy that positions algorithms as intermediaries to human interaction, a world where technology and commerce facilitate small interconnections between strangers.

And here, “small” is the operative word. In Tanz’s world, riding an Uber to the airport isn’t merely a convenient and inexpensive alternative to a taxi, it’s also a blow—however slight—against the institutions (like taxicabs, presumably) that have created what he refers to as a “centralized trust infrastructure.” This structure, he claims, has served as a poor substitute for the real person-to-person trust that sharing services are finally resurrecting. Small-scale, personalized interactions that comprise the heart of sharing services provide an alternative structure to the centralized institution: a benevolent anarchy operating on the Google Maps API. The rhetoric Tanz uses to describe the sharing economy mirrors the rhetoric of Silicon Valley startups in the aggregate.

“Disruption” pits the scrappy, enterprising startup against industry giants, suggesting that the very nature of progress rests in the complete uprooting of pre-established, woefully ineffective systems. The idea has become something of a call-toarms in tech: disrupt public transportation. Disrupt the hotel industry. Disrupt restaurants, parking spots, hardware stores.

No industry is safe. And now, following Tanz’s argument, neither is something as vacuous as “trust.”

Jill Lepore’s bruising critique of the economic underpinnings of “disruption” exposed the critical flaw of disruptive innovation: it is an economic theory that only works when applied retroactively. It holds no predictive power. However, when exclaimed earnestly, a call to “disrupt!” serves less as a guiding economic principle and more as an ideological vision

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for what Silicon Valley, at its best, must strive to do.

While Airbnb provides a powerful alternative to the hotel industry, “Bélo,” Airbnb’s new logo, eschews the practical in favor of the ideological. The upside-down looped heart, with its charm and simplicity, invites users to reinvent and reinterpret the logo. The Bélo is “homemade” and “unique,” expressing the company’s commitment to individualism and to the desire to find a common core—belonging—within diversity. Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb, blogged that “people thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we’re about home.

You see, a house is just a space, but a home is where you belong.

And what makes this global community so special is that for the very first time, you can belong anywhere. That is the idea at the core of our company: belonging.”

The idea of disruption pairs powerful dogma with what appears to be the perfect vehicle for it: the hungry startup staffed by college-educated computer science students. This seems, in part, inevitable. It’s hard to idealize the machinations of some international conglomerate, but we can still spin Cinderella stories of dorm-room startups. And when it comes to realizing a vision as grandiose as belonging in a global community, speed matters. Startups can achieve a breakneck pace of development that city councils cannot hope to match. No wonder even the most idealistic of college undergraduates seem to gravitate towards this fix-it-yourself ethos.

“You can live off the energy [at Airbnb]—the place is electric,” a recent undergraduate intern explained to the HPR. “[Startups] are the modern day gold rush. I met a lot of kids [in San Francisco] who were interested in getting rich quick, but there’s a strain of idealism in that, too.”

The former intern elaborated that Airbnb’s emphasis on “belonging anywhere” is not just a clever marketing ploy, and that “culture fit” played an important role in the hiring process.

“The values were as important as my skill set. … They prioritized personality and goals. ... I know the people there, and the [employees] were generally there because they wanted to make the world a better place through opening up people’s homes.

Whether or not they are … is yet to be determined.”

The San Francisco Bay area runs not on algorithms but on idealism. And as hackneyed as phrases like “disrupt” and “revolutionize” may seem, the talent flowing into Silicon Valley, and the pace of development that the private sector can offer, positions startups to actually fulfill their creative visions. So what’s missing?

THE IMPERFECTIONS OF THE ALGORITHM Despite all of Airbnb’s talk of “belonging to a global community,” the end result is less utopic than the slogan suggests.

The Mission district of San Francisco, known for its colorfully graffitied walls and proximity to SoMa, has been propelled to local stardom as the nucleus of the gentrification debate unfolding in San Francisco. And recently, reports surfaced indicating that landlords in the Mission district had forced out tenants in order to convert the properties to Airbnb rentals, much to the chagrin of proponents of the sharing economy. Aside from the alreadyrising rent prices in San Francisco, the rise of homesharing provides another powerful incentive for homeowners to break lease contracts, evict tenants, and opt for more lucrative ways of

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utilizing extra space. Paradoxically, the company that believes that “[one] can belong anywhere” has actually stripped individuals of their own homes. And yet, in spite of this, Airbnb has continued to release advertisements promoting its logo redesign and the company’s role in creating a culture of belonging.

From where, or what, does this stunning disconnect emerge?

“We have unprecedented access to information … and this is largely a function of technological change,” Tressie Cottom, sociologist and research fellow at Microsoft Research Network’s Social Media Collective, stated in a recent talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “But we are also living in an ideological moment—in this idea of meritocracy—that is all too happy to assume what I call ‘technocratic solutionism,’ the belief that [technological innovation] will magically erase persistent inequalities.”

In a conversation with the HPR, Cottom suggested that algorithms and software are being developed absent a broader awareness of inequalities—of access, of experience, and of external perception—among user bases. Empirically, the very algorithms that Tanz envisioned as facilitating a utopian view of human interconnection seem to actually reinforce existing socioeconomic inequalities. At a roundtable at Share, Nikki Silvestri, executive director at Green For All, revealed that performance ratings of Airbnb owners, all else equal, are stratified across racial and gender boundaries, with white females performing the best and black males performing the worst. “There are issues of perception. There are issues of class and race, stereotypes and prejudice. All of the things we all carry. And when you talk about stranger to stranger systems, these behaviors will replicate,” Silvestri explained during the roundtable.

Cottom noted in an interview with the HPR that “algorithms, as they are being designed, are not at all interested with helping people make better choices. They’re interested in learning about what decisions people are inclined to make and how to leverage that information for profit or attention.” Profit influences product. And counter to claims of trust and community, these algorithms are leveraging existing systemic biases and perpetuating them.

As the sharing economy—like so many similar subsets of the tech industry—attempts to capitalize on its ideals of “trust” and “community,” the natural tendency to quantify may further exacerbate existing inequalities in its user base. Susie Cagle, a Bay Area journalist and author of “The Case Against Sharing,” argued that “there are still all types of good that can come out of the sharing economy … [but] now it’s going to come with the problematic aspect of a ‘trust score.’” The trust score that Cagle refers to captures the idea of the aggregation of all the information collected on a participant in the sharing economy. Cagle’s wariness over the quantification of something abstract like “trust” comes from the ease with which subtle biases can influence an individual’s rating for any single transaction. “The issue with the Uber rating system for drivers and passengers is that it’s ripe for abuse and discrimination,” Cagle argued. “That’s not discussed enough. You can rate your driver based on whatever standards you think you should, and Uber doesn’t tell you what to take into account, and they don’t tell you that any driver with below a four-and-a-half star rating is automatically deactivated.”

It seems, however, that implementing some sort of control for race or gender could offer a possible solution. But, as Cagle

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Paradoxically, the company that believes that “[one] can belong anywhere” has actually stripped individuals of their own homes.

noted, “While there’s potential there, I don’t see it happening.

Because I don’t see these tech workers feeling concerned about it.”

The unwillingness to alter algorithms in order to correct for systemic biases does not signal an inherent failure of technology.

Rather, the act of championing purely quantitative approaches embodies a certain strain of selective blindness. Such myopia seems inevitable given the demographics of the region. Recent diversity reports released by Twitter, Facebook, and Google revealed (to little surprise) that the modal tech worker is white, male, and college-educated. “[T]he problem with algorithms is that people are still behind them … and we know that these tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, and the like—are heavily dominated by white men,” Cottom continued.

“Software engineers at Airbnb are predominantly white or Asian males,” the former intern confirmed. “The demographics aren’t necessarily related to [issues like the Mission evictions or the biases in Airbnb user performance], but they affect it.”

Moreover, from above, demographic homogeneity in firms that finance startups may also contribute to a lack of awareness of sociocultural problems. Cagle noted in an interview with the HPR that “if you look at pictures of boards of venture capital firms, they’re predominantly white men.”

And in the city of San Francisco itself, the socioeconomic, gender, and racial dynamics are just as salient. According to the Brookings Institution, the city has the fastest growing income gap in the nation. And the process of gentrification has worsened gaps between socioeconomic and racial groups, disproportionately affecting San Francisco’s black population. Demographic data suggest that the tech industry is largely insulated from issues surrounding race and class, and this insulation has appeared to perpetuate the region’s brand of “technocratic solutionism.”

Nellie Bowles of Re/code recently published a collection of quotes on figures in tech from the Code Conference in May. They seem to reflect the disconnected naïveté that Cagle and Cottom criticize. “You’re qualified to drive a car, but not professionally doing it. Congratulations, boom, you’re making [a] $90,000-a-year average Uber salary,” Mike Jones, former CEO of Myspace, is quoted as saying at Code. He makes it sound so simple. Never mind the optimism built into the $90,000 approximation.

This idealistic treatment of the products of the tech industry ultimately prevents companies and their workers from approaching the tough conversation of correcting for entrenched

inequalities that their software does little to correct for. The ideology of “disruption” perpetuates a fiction of equality and impartiality, and as long as Silicon Valley continues to subscribe to it, the utopian goals of startups like Airbnb will inevitably remain elusive.

SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS However, to view San Francisco’s “technocratic solutionism” as a fundamentally broken ideal critically underestimates the dynamic and rapid progress the tech industry is capable of achieving. Both Cottom and Cagle suggest that continuing to invest in tech education for groups currently underrepresented in STEM could provide the kind of enhanced social awareness necessary to reconcile tech’s ideals with its reality. Increase the numbers of women and minorities in the field, and the kind of products pitched will shift to reflect the wealth of additional perspectives.

But perhaps a more fundamental realignment is warranted here. If the industry’s approach to software is to optimize the product based on existing circumstances—prejudices, inequalities, and systemic biases included—then tech companies lack the philosophical motivation to act as intermediaries. If the industry views technology in a sociopolitical vacuum, then the industry will continue to create platforms where individuals who have traditionally benefited from political and economic structures will continue to benefit from these “disruptive” technologies.

Technocratic solutionism, as a driving force for innovation, needs to be retooled to position the algorithm as a new kind of intermediary. Technology must be made a critical tool to account for inequalities in a manner that mitigates, rather than exacerbates, persistent inequalities within a given platform. Whether this involves altering the driver rating system in Uber or encouraging more discerning reviews on Airbnb, a greater potential for nuance in the evaluation of stranger-to-stranger interactions could be a crucial first step.

Increasing representation (both in the workforce and among customers) may provide motivation from the roots. And support from above, in the form of similar actions from industry giants, could further catalyze this change of mindset. However achieved, devising tech platforms that structure interactions between individuals in a way that promotes empathy and corrects for systemic bias will empower the industry to finally approach some of its loftier ideals. Only then can San Francisco truly reclaim its reputation as “the city of innovation.”

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ON CONFLICT’S BORDER PRAGMATISM OVER POLITICS IN EAST JERUSALEM Gal Koplewitz

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hen Qusay Muzassar was a teenager in East Jerusalem, growing up in the tense climate of the Second Intifada, he was regularly exposed to demonstrations and riots.

Though he tried to avoid them himself, expressions of hatred and frustration by both Arabs and Jews were hard to escape.

A few years ago, however, things changed.

Tired of the hateful atmosphere in the city and of being constantly labeled, he applied for and received Israeli citizenship.

He moved to Tel Aviv and started working for a tech company, while studying for a degree in software engineering. And he has no regrets. Qusay is not alone—in recent years, more and more Arab residents of East Jerusalem, tired of the poor living conditions and the obstacles they face daily, look to improve their lives by integrating into Israeli society.

East Jerusalem, along with the Old City, was conquered by the state of Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, 19 years after the city was divided in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. After almost two decades un-

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der Jordanian rule, the city was declared

by Israeli authorities to have been unified, and the Arab neighborhoods, along with several of the surrounding villages, were later incorporated into the municipality of Jerusalem. After a census was held, the Arabs living in the incorporated areas were given the choice of either applying for Israeli citizenship or accepting the status of permanent residence. The large majority, not wishing to recognize Israeli sovereignty in what they believed to be their lands, chose the latter.

Today, there are roughly 284,000 Arabs living in East Jerusalem, and over 90 percent of them are permanent residents.

While residents have many rights—they can participate in the municipal elections, they receive health care and social security services, and have freedom of movement in Israel and the Palestinian territories—they are severely limited in certain ways. If they leave their homes for a period of over seven years, for example, their right to return to Jerusalem may be denied and their residency status

revoked—even if their families have lived in the city for generations. Since 1967, more than 13,000 residents have lost their status this way. While the crowded living conditions lead some to take the risk and move to the West Bank, where there are fewer restrictions on building and more land available, others build and expand their houses in Jerusalem without official building permits (which are almost never granted). This leads to even greater crowding and is a source of conflict between the residents and the municipal authorities, who claim the culture of building without permits has become an epidemic.

But while there is no doubt that the disregard for urban planning has negatively affected East Jerusalem, the run-down living conditions are mostly the fault of the municipality, which has neglected the needs of the Arab population in the city for years. Despite making up more than a third of the city’s inhabitants, they are allocated only 10 percent of the city’s budget and resources—a gap

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that has had severe implications. Much of the infrastructure has not been developed since Jordanian rule (pre-1967), resulting in unreliable and faulty sewage and water systems. Education is severely underfunded, with over 1,000 classrooms missing in schools, and a very high dropout rate. Similarly, healthcare has also suffered. And although almost 80 percent of the residents of East Jerusalem live under the poverty line, even the welfare budget is relatively small. This is particularly evident when compared with some of the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, which are similarly poor but receive substantial welfare benefits due to strong representation both in the municipality and in the government.

Interestingly, however, even though permanent residents are granted the right to vote in the municipal elections, they rarely do. In the last round of elections in Jerusalem, held in 2013, there were hopes that Arab voter turnout would be somewhat higher, says Dr. Laura Wharton, a city council member from the left-wing Meretz party. However, when the ballots closed, numbers were even lower than those in previous years—only 1 to 2 percent of the Arab population had shown up to vote (many of them municipal employees). While it is understandable that voting can be seen as legitimizing the Israeli rule (a view reinforced by the Palestinian authorities), there is no doubt that it would also mean gaining a great deal of influence on municipal decision making.

IDEALISM ASIDE, INTEGRATION IS PRACTICAL Despite voter turnout remaining low, there has been an undeniable trend in recent years towards greater integration into Israeli society. In what some say is a generational gap, more and more young Arabs are deciding to take the “Bagrut,” the high school matriculation tests required to attend Israeli universities.

Similarly, deciding to apply for Israeli citizenship is no longer the taboo it used to be. While most applicants are still apprehensive about the process, it is commonly seen as an act of pragmatism, rather than ideological betrayal. “Everyone understands that it is the reasonable thing to do, considering the shut doors you face in Jerusalem with resident status,” said Ahmad Husseini, a student at the Hebrew University.

This trend may also be due in part to geographic changes— the separation barrier constructed during the Second Intifada cut off Jerusalem from the West Bank, forcing many to search for work inside the city, rather than in the Palestinian territories.

Similarly, the recently completed Jerusalem light rail has played a role in connecting the Arab neighborhoods to the centers of work and commerce located in West Jerusalem.

What is especially interesting is that, even given a future permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement, more and more Palestinians say they would prefer to live under Israeli sovereignty. A survey conducted in 2011 by Pechter Middle East Polls in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations showed that when asked about a potential agreement in which Jerusalem is divided, the majority of the Arab residents of the city responded that they would prefer living on the Israeli side of the border. While some have questioned the reliability of the survey, specifically, the ways the questions were phrased, it seems to reflect the growing Palestinian sentiment of pragmatism over

politics. Council member Wharton reinforced that impression in an interview with HPR, explaining that “while [Arab residents] are still opposed to legitimizing Israeli rule … what would you choose: a modern country with socialized healthcare and functioning government bodies, or a new, fledgling nation, with administrative bodies likely to be both corrupt and dysfunctional for many years to come?”

The current mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, is a right wing politician who holds strong views of a unified, Jewish Jerusalem. Still, he recently announced a plan to invest 300 million Shekels (roughly $90 million) in East Jerusalem. The money is to be invested over a period of five years and divided between developing infrastructure, building classrooms, and improving the personal security of the city’s residents. However, current estimates are that the infrastructure alone requires a twobillion-Shekel overhaul—so while the plan is a step in the right direction, the resources that it has allocated are only a fraction of what is required to significantly affect life in East Jerusalem for the better.

INVESTING FOR THE FUTURE When I first decided to write this piece, I set up a meeting with Palestinian family friends who live in Shuafat, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. They have lived in the city for decades, through periods of war and calm, under both Jordanian and Israeli rule, and could thus provide an important perspective on the issue. The interview, however, never took place. On the morning I was supposed to drive to their house, the police had blocked all access to East Jerusalem in response to the violent outbreak that followed the kidnap and murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu-Khdeir. The murder, allegedly a hate crime committed by right-wing Jewish extremists as revenge for the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinian terrorists, again set riots blazing in Jerusalem after a significant period of relative calm.

Just two months after Secretary Kerry’s peace initiative broke down in late April, tensions again rose, and the violence in the region quickly escalated into yet another exchange between Hamas’s rockets and Israel’s air strikes. Muhammed Aweide, a social activist and resident of the city, says it is no coincidence that the turmoil began in Jerusalem rather than in the West Bank or the Gaza strip. The growing unrest in the city, he feels, is due more to social and economic inequality than to the onceagain dashed hopes for Palestinian independence: “We are just tired of feeling like second rate citizens,” he said. The plans to invest in East Jerusalem, he thinks, are not rooted in kindness, but are instead strategic solutions. They show that Israeli decision makers have finally caught on to what experts have been saying for years: that the greatest driver of terrorism is urban poverty.

Greater integration into Israeli society may be the only practical course for Arab families looking to live a reasonable life.

But with mutual suspicions and distrust again on the rise, both Palestinians and Israelis have a long way to go before they can truly live side-by-side. In the meantime, financing infrastructure, education and healthcare in Jerusalem more equally is not only the humane thing to do; it may also prove to be an effective investment in the battle against terrorism, hatred and violence.

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PARKING POLICY IN THE SMARTPHONE CITY Connor Harris

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riving in large cities is rarely pleasant. Roads can be so congested that traveling a single block takes several minutes, and after enduring all the other difficulties, finding a convenient parking spot is tough.

In the past few months, two teams of entrepreneurs have released smartphone apps that they claim will make this process easier, at least for those who are willing to pay. These apps allow, in essence, an auction for parking spots. Drivers can sell the use of spots they currently occupy but are about to leave to the highest bidder. The first such app was MonkeyParking, founded by a team from the notoriously chaotic city of Rome, which expanded into San Francisco in May 2014. A copycat app, Haystack, founded by a team from Baltimore, soon followed with a controversial expansion into Boston.

Reactions were ferocious. City officials and newspaper columnists condemned the apps as a privatization of public space.

Twitter users labeled them #JerkTech and wrote them off as another example of rich techies’ insensitivity to common society.

San Francisco and Boston even hastily passed ordinances banning them. Critics argued that parking is a public resource, not a profit opportunity for a few private companies.

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Largely overlooked in the popular media discussion, however, are the reasons why Haystack and MonkeyParking were able to make a profit in the first place. Unlike in the private sector, where prices typically settle at the market-clearing price, parking has been deliberately kept under the market-clearing price, even free, on political grounds. The results—the perceived impossibility of finding a free space in a convenient location, added congestion as drivers circle blocks finding places to park (some surveys in New York City, in which researchers approached cars at stoplights, suggest that 30 percent of city traffic comes from parking searches), and the growth of a black market to accomplish what the controlled market can’t—are all what anyone with a basic grounding in economics would expect from a price ceiling that encourages demand far in excess of supply.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHEAP PARKING Broadly speaking, the notion that cities should be accessible to drivers, providing ample parking and wide, fast roads, came about after World War II. Postwar urban renewal imposed suburban forms on dense cities, often with immensely destructive

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methods. In Boston, this manifested itself in the 1958 demolition of the West End, an immigrant neighborhood whose densely packed buildings were condemned and replaced by luxury condos, widely spaced in a manicured suburban-like lawn, and the development of the Central Artery, an elevated highway dividing the North End from downtown.

These notions also brought about the policy of parking minimums. To lessen the demand for on-street parking, cities amended their zoning codes to require every new building—whether a restaurant, a retail store, or an apartment house—to provide some number of parking spaces off the street. Such policies apply today to even the densest parts of cities, and quite frequently require far more parking than already exists. In Boston’s North End, for example, two-thirds of residents do not own a car, but the zoning code requires new apartment buildings to include one parking space per apartment. If the North End were demolished and rebuilt under the zoning code that currently governs it, in fact, parking lots would cover at least a fifth of it.

Most parking is free, or at least, drastically underpriced. The root cause of this is a cultural attitude routed in an accident of history. Drivers had 20 years after the invention of the Model T to become accustomed to free parking. When the first parking meters were installed in 1928, some even sued city governments to get rid of them. This attitude has not gone away. “There is an enormous amount of political pressure to keep parking free,” said Jessica Robertson, a transportation coordinator in Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council, in an interview with the HPR. “People really consider it a basic human right.”

UNINTENDED ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES The negative effects of parking minimums and free parking are well-established. They drive up housing costs, as every buyer or renter of an apartment, with or without a car, must pay for a parking spot as well. They require developers either to use expensive urban land on surface parking lots or to build structured garages. One contractor estimates that elevated parking garages cost $17,500 per space, and underground structures are far costlier. Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority built a garage at the rail station in Beverly, Massachusetts at $68,000 per space for 500 cars; if each space is used once per day, the cost per daily vehicle rivals that of the Big Dig, the notoriously over-budget and inefficient Boston tunnel project. Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and widely regarded as the world’s expert on parking policy, estimated that in 2002, free off-street parking cost $386 billion.

Beyond purely financial costs, parking minimums make urban environments worse for pedestrians, who must to walk farther between buildings separated by parking lots and who must endure noisier, more dangerous, and more polluting traffic.

But people faced with proposals to eliminate these policies— to eliminate parking minimums, or to raise parking prices—typically worry that travel in most areas in a private car is so difficult that without copious cheap parking, residents, shoppers, and tax revenue will move away. Boston Globe columnist Tom Keane, writing against a proposal for a new apartment building with few parking spaces, summarized part of this view concisely.

After noting that households with children in Boston have markedly higher car ownership rates than those without, he claims,

“Cars are a necessity. By making it a hassle to own one, we push families out to the suburbs.”

But these concerns are misplaced. The current system of below-market pricing already drives shoppers out of retail districts—in particular, the shoppers who would have paid market rate for a vacant parking spot but could not find one.

More subtly, retailers make their money off of fast customer turnover. When customers can park quickly, buy what they need, and then leave, they provide more revenue per hour than those who dawdle and window-shop. A study of eighty large shopping centers in the Netherlands found that raising parking prices both increased turnover in parking spots and raised revenue for the nearby stores.

As for the claim that family life in Boston (or several other large cities) requires a car: two-thirds of households in the North End, not to mention three-fifths in Beacon Hill, and threefourths in Chinatown, already manage well without one. The reason that so many people with political power believe this misconception also underlies a good portion of the rest of discourse about urban planning: most people without cars are politically invisible.

THE SILENT MAJORITY? Car ownership is not cheap. The personal-finance website Bankrate lists the annual cost for owning a car in Massachusetts as $2,169, including repairs, gasoline, and insurance but not depreciation; the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that in 2012, the average American household spent $51,442 of which $8,998, about 17.5 percent, were spent on transportation. For most households, this is mostly the cost of car ownership and occasional air travel. The financial burden proves too heavy for many poor households. “Especially in cities like Boston and Cambridge, there’s a much, much lower rate of car ownership among lower-income people, and the cost of car ownership and car use is pretty high,” Jessica Robertson said.

Yet despite this, advocates of superficially car-friendly policies often use populist rhetoric. Consider, for example, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2008 initiative to impose an $8 congestion charge on cars entering Manhattan south of 86th Street. The state government blocked it due to opposition from what the New York Times described as “a broad array of politicians from Queens, Brooklyn and New York’s suburbs, who viewed the proposed congestion fee as overwhelmingly beneficial to affluent Manhattanites.” The Times further quoted an opposed Democratic state legislator from Queens, who remarked that “the word ‘elitist’ came up a number of times” when he discussed the policy with his colleagues.

This perception, one must admit, has some truth: the wealthy residents of the Upper East Side would certainly benefit from less congested streets in their neighborhoods. But so would New York’s lower- and working-class bus riders, whose buses carrying 40 people each would no longer be tied up in traffic full of cars carrying one or two people.

This adoption of the rhetoric of populism by advocates of policies whose effects are quite un-populist, however, persists because the lower-income people—who have less money and fewer connections to political leaders and the media—are politically neutralized. Daniel Kay Hertz, a master’s student in

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The current system of below-market pricing already drives shoppers out of retail districts—in particular, the shoppers who would have paid market rate for a vacant parking spot but could not find one.

urban planning at the University of Chicago, said in an interview that the debate over the Ashland Bus Rapid Transit project in Chicago, which would designate two lanes of a 16-mile stretch of major avenue as only for buses, exemplifies this dynamic.

Hertz noted that a 2014 Atlantic Cities article about the project remarked that “just ten years ago, living in Chicago without an automobile was considered eccentric behavior,” even though one in four Chicago households lacked a car in 2004, implying that these households were located in or very near to the city. Other newspapers often quote motorists worried about the loss of car lanes but very rarely quote bus riders. This, he says, gives the impression of “a debate between, on the one hand, neighborhood residents who drive, and on the other, government transportation planners and their transit-nerd friends.” He claims that the root of the problem is that journalists for major news outlets rarely know people who rely on the bus.

NETWORKING ASPHALT Bearing all this in mind, what can be done to fix parking shortages? We can begin by recognizing that often, the “shortage” is entirely spurious, or could be fixed with better management of existing parking. “Parking studies in towns in the Boston area tend to find a pretty consistent pattern that in a lot of places there’s a perception of a parking problem,” Robertson noted, “but really there’s available parking, it’s just a little bit further away.”

Similar patterns appear in San Francisco, which since April 2011 has rolled out an innovative market-based pricing system called SFPark, in which parking meters track how long each parking spot in San Francisco is occupied. Every month, this data is used to adjust parking prices, which vary by day of the week and by time of day, to keep each block about 85 percent full. Overused blocks at a particular time of day one month see their prices nudged upward by 25 cents per hour for the next month; underused blocks see their prices nudged downward,

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encouraging drivers to save money by parking slightly farther away from their destination. The SFPark pilot covered only 8,200 parking spots in nine districts, but it reduced congestion by cutting the time drivers spend looking for parking by 50 percent. And concerns that market pricing is inequitable have proved largely misplaced. SFPark raised prices significantly in only a few high-demand blocks, while in large tracts elsewhere, including very close to downtown, prices actually fell.

Smartphone apps themselves may even be able to help. MonkeyParking and Haystack have framed themselves not merely as auction sites for parking, but also as information services that provide data about when parking spots will most likely be vacated. Paolo Dobrowolny, the founder and CEO of MonkeyParking, characterized his app as a “bottom-up,” user-driven market for parking; he also claimed that with precise information about when occupants of parking spaces plan to leave, his approach could use parking spaces even more efficiently than the 85 percent for which “top-down” SFPark aims, and praised San Francisco’s planning office for their interest in collaboration with parking apps.

But whether smartphone apps can lead the way to better parking policy or not, their existence shows that the current system can change, and moreover that it ought to. Banning them, as Boston has done, does not address the core issue: the standard American approach to parking policy is broken, creating false perceptions of shortages, unnecessary traffic problems, and vast amounts of economic waste. A serious political effort to address this must recognize that supply and demand applies to parking just as surely as it applies to everything else, and fix the broken rhetoric around urban policy that ignores the needs and even existence of the car-less urban class. Such a political program will be challenging, as the benefits of the status quo are obvious every time someone parks without needing to pay, whereas the manifold costs—in inflated housing prices, pollution, and congestion—are hidden. But it can, and must, be done.

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LOSING CANTOR INSIDE THE GOP’S REVOLT IN VIRGINIA Matthew Disler

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D

uring their June 30 meeting to elect new board positions, the members of the Henrico County Republican Committee fill less than a third of the cavernous Deep Run High School auditorium. It’s late on a Monday evening, and as the chairman drawls off the list of member names for a roll call vote, it becomes clear that several people failed to make the trip into this corner of the suburban labyrinth north of Richmond. However, one absence is much more prominent than the rest. Representative Eric Cantor is not present.

Cantor’s astonishing primary defeat on June 10 hangs over the entire meeting, along with a broader concern about the cohesiveness of the local GOP. Fred Gruber, the chairman of the entire 7th District’s Republican Party, talks about the need to unify the party. Gruber defeated the incumbent chairman— a Cantor favorite—in May, at a convention in which Tea Party activists booed the majority leader during his speech. The two candidates for vice-chair of programs echo the unification message. Even Dave Brat, the economics professor who beat Cantor in the primary, says, “I’m working to unify every facet of the Republican Party: independents, libertarians, grass-roots, Tea Party folks … anyone who believes in those principles that I believe are American principles.”

But these calls for unity reveal an underlying anxiety brought about by Cantor’s defeat. Throughout the GOP, there seems to be a sense of disquiet about the future of the country, fueled by disillusionment and anger at the perceived failures of the federal government. In Virginia and elsewhere, the Republican Party is divided over how to alleviate this apprehension. The 7th District primary embodies the crux of the rift, with the pragmatic Cantor, on the one hand, and the fiercely principled Brat, on the other.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM For many years, Cantor’s seat was safe. Apart from his first House race in 2000, in which he beat a primary opponent by only 264 votes, he faced weak local opposition. In 2010, for instance, he beat his Democratic opponent by more than 25 percent. In 2012, even in a strong year for Democrats nationally and in statewide Virginia races, he won by 17 points—aided in part by GOP-friendly redistricting that was approved by the Department of Justice in 2012. As House majority leader, he wielded huge political influence, and many expected him to become the next speaker of the House after the anticipated retirement of John Boehner (R-Ohio).

However, the experience in House leadership, particularly following the rise of the Tea Party, changed Cantor. As David Wasserman, House editor at the Cook Political Report, notes in an interview with the HPR, “Cantor used to be known as the conservative rival to John Boehner. And in the past two years, increasingly Cantor has had to take on the burden of putting down the [Republican Party’s] Tea Party rebellion.” Despite his statements against the Obama administration’s position in the government shutdown talks and on a host of other issues, he found himself, as Wasserman puts it, “trying to convince colleagues not to shut down the government, trying to convince colleagues to raise the debt ceiling, even flirting with immigration reform. And that really came back to haunt him.”

Moreover, the challenges of House leadership pitted Cantor

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against the Tea Party wing in his own district. “I just don’t think people in the Seventh District appreciated that sometimes he was not representing [them] only, but the Republican Caucus.

And they just didn’t like that,” says Nancy Russell, the chairwoman of the Hanover County GOP, in an interview with the HPR. (Hanover reported among the highest returns for Brat—in most of the county’s precincts, his votes more than doubled Cantor’s.) The majority leader’s tepid support for immigration reform, an issue on which Brat attacked him, became representative of what was seen as his larger divergence from conservative principles during his time in office. Apart from losing touch with conservative ideology, Cantor was thought to have lost touch with his district—which, in the primary, meant the same thing.

Of course, other members of the Republican leadership had to face primary challengers this year, including Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. Cantor was the only one who lost. Cantor’s wildly inaccurate internal poll predicted at 34-point victory; on June 10, he lost to Brat by 10 percent. His vast expenditures on campaign mailers and yard signs ($133,000—more than half of Brat’s fundraising total leading up to June) failed to compensate for the crowds Brat was drawing at Republican meetings across the district. For example, Brat packed the room at a Hanover Republican Committee meeting that Russell was chairing. “There were so many people there that I got in trouble with the Bass Pro Shops, where we have our meetings. We exceeded our capacity!” she laughs.

Most importantly, Wasserman adds, “Cantor took the wrong tactical fork in the road … [because he] was perhaps too aggressive.” His campaign ran ads that falsely labeled Brat a liberal college professor, raising his cash-strapped opponent’s profile and drawing further media, Tea Party, and voter attention toward Brat. From one perspective, then, the primary result is a cautionary tale about campaign strategy. If Cantor had ignored Brat, and if he had spent more time making appearances in his district rather than on Capitol Hill, his primary challenge might simply have fizzled out.

MOURNING IN AMERICA David Brat is engaging and energetic, if a little bit tired, as he delivers his stump speech to the Henrico Republican Committee. “The currents are not moving in a good direction right now, culturally,” he says to the auditorium. “And our culture is going to be our economy.” His address sounds profoundly pessimistic: the nation is on the brink of crises from all sides—economically, socially, militarily, and ethically—and in the absence of conservative principles, Americans are going to fall off the edge.

If the immediate blame for Cantor’s defeat lay in campaign missteps and a strategy that simultaneously underestimated and overcompensated for the Tea Party threat, then the underlying source may be the deep anxiety and discontent felt throughout the Republican Party. Much of this disquiet is centered on the United States’ economic woes, such as the federal budget, the national debt, and the costs of entitlement programs.

These worries are creating a divide within the party that endangers incumbents while opening the way to political newcomers like Brat. As Jimmie Massie, a Republican member of

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The challenges of House leadership pitted Cantor against the Tea Party.

the state House of Delegates who represents part of Henrico, explains in an interview with the HPR, “Within the Republican Party, you have those people who are just absolutely incensed [with Washington], and they’re just of the mentality: ‘Let’s start fresh. Let’s throw them all out.’ But the other part of the party says, ‘Hey, Eric Cantor is not the problem. It’s the secular, social welfare state Democrats that are the problem. So instead of throwing out good Republicans, let’s focus our time and our energy on defeating liberal Democrats.’”

Pervasive anti-Washington sentiment has existed for years: since at least 2011, national congressional approval ratings have consistently fallen below 20 percent. But this election cycle’s spat of GOP primary challengers also appear to demonstrate a widespread and robust movement against congressional leadership. In these cases, it’s not just freshman lawmakers or representatives forced into an early battle by redistricting who have to fight for their lives: instead, it’s Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, and Thad Cochran who have to spend seemingly unprecedented energy just to retain their party’s nomination.

In many ways, it was this sort of discontent that projected Eric Cantor onto the national stage. Together with then-Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—the so-called “Young Guns” who had helped the Republican Party take back the House in 2010—he capitalized on the wave of Tea Party-backed discontent and worked to corral new members behind an agenda that prioritized fiscal conservatism. However, in light of the new standards that he himself had set forth, Cantor appeared unsatisfactory. For one, he had overseen a series of failed political maneuvers on Capitol Hill surrounding Obamacare, the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, and the government shutdown. On the policy side, he seemed insufficiently dedicated to the free market, advocating for institutions like the ExportImport Bank—which uses Treasury funding to provide loans to foreign purchasers of American products. Thus, even though he helped craft the narrative that America had gone fiscally awry, he was eventually viewed as part of the problem: he became the boogeyman in his own ghost story.

Cantor’s defeat could also have more concrete consequences for the region. Massie notes that, because Virginia relies heavily on federal funding, the loss of the House majority leader will compound the retirements of Representatives Jim Moran (a Democrat) and Frank Wolf (a Republican), both of whom serve on the House Appropriations Committee. “Virginia is going to be having a very difficult time,” Massie observes. In addition, Cantor had been a successful fundraiser for the Republican Party, and he had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to local and statewide campaigns and Republican committees.

Now, state Republicans may have to search for new avenues for fundraising, at a time when the party is both internally divided and losing—since 2012, all statewide races have been won by Democrats.

A RED HERRING? Nearly a month after the primary results came in, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an editorial by Bill Bolling, a former lieutenant governor and Republican, who cited an unusually high incidence of independents and Democrats voting against Cantor on June 10 (Virginia has an open primary system). The solution to similar upsets, he argued, was to close the primary to non-party members. This proposal seems to skirt the larger issues at play in the race.

Assuming that the exit polls were accurate—they were conducted by the same firm that predicted Cantor to win by 34 points—the fact remains that many of the independents were likely conservative, first-time primary voters who would have voted Republican in the general election. The real problem at the heart of Cantor’s defeat was a combination of tactical errors and conservative discontent. And it’s the latter that spells trouble for incumbent candidates who feel forced to comply with demands of ideological purity. Bolling should have learned this lesson: after all, in the most recent gubernatorial race, he dropped out after lagging behind a conservative firebrand in the polls.

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THE PROMISE OF THE HARLEM CHILDREN’S ZONE CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IN AMERICA’S CITIES John Gabrieli

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n February 10, 2014, media outlets across the country broke the news that Geoffrey Canada would be stepping down from his post as CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, ending his more than two-decade run as head of the nationally recognized nonprofit. Though the HCZ’s work will continue, Canada’s resignation serves as an opportunity to reflect on the work that he and his organization have accomplished over the past 25 years. During Canada’s tenure as CEO, what started out as a small anti-poverty pilot project covering a single block in Harlem has become arguably the single most important social policy experiment in America.

Today, the Harlem Children’s Zone provides comprehensive “cradle-to-career” services to more than 8,000 children and 6,000 adults across nearly 100 blocks in Harlem. According to a recent paper published by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, students at the HCZ’s Promise Academy middle school have erased the racial achievement gap that has persisted in every urban school district in America as far back as data have been collected.

Canada’s success has drawn national attention. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama announced his plan to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the United States. As of the 2010 fiscal year, the Obama administration had allocated over $60 million to programs modeled on Canada’s work in cities including Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington as a part of the newly created Promise Neighborhoods initiative. As Promise Neighborhoods gets underway, important questions remain.

How did the Harlem Children’s Zone succeed? And how can we replicate that success in other cities?

CANADA’S APPROACH Traditionally, most nonprofit organizations have focused on only one aspect of poverty at a time—working to improve educational opportunities, expand access to affordable housing, or provide better health care services. However, through his work with the HCZ’s precursor, the Rheedlen Centers for Children

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and Families, Canada came to believe that all of these issues were deeply intertwined, and that addressing only one issue at a time was not enough to win the war on poverty. Moreover, Canada was convinced that anti-poverty efforts had to be not just comprehensive but also widely accessible, engaging a large enough segment of the community to reach a “tipping point” that would produce real social change. In order to have options in life, Canada believed, his kids would need access to a good education. His mission was simple: every kid in the Children’s Zone would graduate from college.

When Canada founded the Harlem Children’s Zone in 1994, his goals seemed decidedly unrealistic. The kids that Canada was seeking to help lived in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in America: more than 60 percent of students came from families below the poverty line, and more than three quarters scored below grade level on state reading and math tests. Famously, a 1990 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the life expectancy for a young man growing up in Harlem was shorter than for one in povertystricken Bangladesh.

But Canada would not be deterred. Launching what the New York Times Magazine has called “one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time,” he constructed a pipeline to opportunity for children in the Zone, including free parenting workshops, fitness and nutrition classes, early education, afterschool enrichment, tutoring services, college prep, job training programs, access to health care, and two new charter schools.

Canada’s results speak for themselves. Last year, 99.5 percent of four-year-olds attending the “Harlem Gems” pre-school program attained a school readiness classification of average or above. One hundred percent of third-graders at the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I and II tested at or above grade level on the state math exam. One hundred percent of participants in high school after-school programs stayed in school. And 90 percent of the HCZ’s high school graduates were accepted into college.

Because the HCZ took such a comprehensive approach,

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The Harlem Children’s Zone’s newest Promise Academy opened in 2012.

however, it remains unclear which particular programs were most important to the Zone’s success. Was it the early education programs? The parenting classes? The high-achieving charter schools? These questions are particularly important to other organizations seeking to replicate the HCZ’s work, and they speak to a question at the heart of the education reform conversation in America: What does it take to close the achievement gap?

ARE SCHOOLS ENOUGH? Over the last 50 years, the American education system has tried and failed to close the achievement gap between wealthy white kids and minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Today, only 15 percent of eighth grade students from lower-income backgrounds are “proficient” readers, compared to 83 percent of students from higher-income backgrounds. By the end of high school, black and Hispanic students’ reading and math skills are, on average, roughly equivalent to those of white students in eighth grade. No major urban school district in the U.S. has ever closed the gap. Moreover, the doubling of per pupil expenditures and almost one-third reduction in class size that has taken place nationally over the last 40 years has had little impact on the size of the gap.

Two major narratives attempt to explain this inability to close the achievement gap. The first claims that our school system is broken, while the second posits that schools alone are not enough to close the gap. On the one hand, school reform advocates point to individual charter schools that have managed to close the gap in recent years, arguing that improving the quality of our public schools is the key to closing the achievement gap. On the other hand, proponents of the community-driven approach argue that many of the issues students face originate outside the classroom, and that additional outside-of-school supports are therefore necessary in order to help students succeed.

Ideology aside, the debate about how to close the achievement gap comes down to a question of economics: What is the

best way to intervene in kids’ lives to help them succeed? In a world of limited resources, we can’t do all things. Should we focus our investments on school reform or on community supports?

EVIDENCE FROM THE HCZ Proponents of the community-centered approach to reform have argued that the HCZ’s incredible results prove that comprehensive social services are what is needed to give disadvantaged students the chance to succeed. However, in addition to a wide array of wraparound community programs, the HCZ also managed a set of “Promise Academy” schools for its students.

These schools implemented many of the same practices used in other high-achieving charter schools, including a longer school day, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, and a culture of high expectations.

According to a 2011 paper published by Fryer, it was actually the HCZ’s high-performing middle and elementary schools that were primarily responsible for closing the achievement gap for its students, with the other set of social services provided

by Canada’s group having a much weaker impact. Since not all students in the zone attend the Promise Academies, Fryer was able to estimate the schools’ effect on the achievement gap by comparing the test scores of students who attended the schools to those who did not. Ultimately, Fryer concluded that “highquality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor,” while “community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.”

However, advocates of the comprehensive approach to school reform argue that test scores alone do not capture the full effect of social programs on students’ lives. Former Boston Superintendent of Schools Thomas Payzant is a co-founder of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education Campaign, which advocates for a more comprehensive approach to education reform. As Payzant explained in an interview with the HPR, “when you’re evaluating a comprehensive program like [the HCZ], you need to look

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Now that the Harlem Children’s Zone has shown that every child can succeed if given the right opportunities, we need to do everything in our power to extend those same opportunities to students across America.

much more broadly than just test scores.” Indeed, research has shown that effective early education programs may significantly improve their participants’ life outcomes despite showing little effect on test scores. As a result, it may be necessary to follow HCZ participants longitudinally to determine the true effect of non-academic social programs.

Boston Promise Initiative are receiving only $1.2 million in federal funding per year, less than one-sixtieth of the HCZ’s annual budget. As HCZ biographer Paul Tough noted in an interview, “What the HCZ has helped show is that these interventions can be expensive, and that doing them on the cheap is likely not as effective.”

PROMISE FOR THE FUTURE?

WHY WE CAN’T WAIT

In 2012, the Department of Education awarded five-year implementation grants to seven new Promise Neighborhood initiatives to “execute community-led plans that improve and provide better social services and educational programs.” While many observers have lauded the Obama administration for working to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in cities across the country, there are at least two reasons to be skeptical that the new Promise Neighborhoods will meet with the same level of success that Canada’s group did in New York.

First, many of the new Promise Neighborhoods are attempting to replicate the HCZ’s wraparound community programs without reproducing its high-performing charter schools. According to school reform advocates, these new Promise Neighborhoods are missing the point; as Fryer’s research has demonstrated, the HCZ’s success was built on the foundation of its two Promise Academies. The Harlem Children’s Zone showed that ambitious community programs can make a big difference when paired with aggressive school reform efforts, not that community programs alone are enough to get the job done. By this logic, Promise Neighborhoods that reproduce the HCZ’s parenting classes and after-school activities are unlikely to close the achievement gap unless they also undertake serious school reform.

Second, even if wraparound community supports can make an impact in the absence of school reform, the Promise Neighborhoods program must receive adequate funding in order to achieve success. However, Promise Neighborhoods like the

If Promise Neighborhoods modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone have the potential to close the achievement gap in urban America, then investing in their success is crucial. The achievement gap in America is not only a profound injustice but also an economic disaster; according to an analysis conducted by McKinsey and Company, the achievement gap reduces American output by as much as $500 billion each year, the equivalent of a permanent national recession. Though investing in highquality programs may not be cheap, the rewards are well worth it. Perhaps President Obama should heed his own advice and make fully funding the Promise Neighborhoods initiative a top priority for his administration: as the president put it when he first proposed the initiative in 2008, “[this] can’t be done on the cheap, but we will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”

Similarly, while implementing fundamental school reform may not always be politically easy, our elected leaders need to stand up for our children and for the future of our country. Now that the Harlem Children’s Zone has shown that every child can succeed if given the right opportunities, we need to do everything in our power to extend those same opportunities to students across America. As President Obama put it in his second inaugural, “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

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MARKETING THE MOON Jay Alver

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n less than a year, the race to put the first commercial vehicle on the surface of the moon will be in full swing.

Eighteen teams from 12 countries are competing to win the Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP), which tasks contestants with building a space probe, landing it on the moon, and traveling 500 meters across the lunar surface while relaying HD video back to Earth—all before December 15, 2015. The prize: $20 million.

If the GLXP succeeds in its goal of radically transforming the economics of space exploration, and if Russia, India, China, and Japan follow through on plans to send their own robots to the moon in the next few years, our nearest celestial neighbor could become home to significantly more human travel and exploration. In the process, the legal questions surrounding the moon’s use, ownership, and visitation will likely become significantly more contentious.

REVOLUTIONIZING THE PLAYING FIELD The GLXP is a follow-up to the Ansari X-Prize, which saw the world’s first privately-funded human spacecraft launch in 2004 and paved the way for Virgin Galactic to begin commercial flights as soon as next spring. Both prizes are spiritual succes-

sors to the Orteig Prize, which spurred Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927. The GLXP intends to transform the lunar surface from the exclusive domain of superpower governments to a more open playing field comparable to Earth orbit, where private companies and other independent groups have operated satellites for decades. The GLXP also aims to radically transform the economics of sending payloads to the moon, in the same way that the Orteig Prize transformed air travel in the 1920s: by encouraging competition and creating tangible rewards for spaceflight innovation. Participants may raise no more than 10 percent of their budget from government sources, and the teams have found funding from a diverse group of investors ranging from Otsuka, the manufacturer of a popular Japanese sports drink, to noted gaming tycoon and Newt Gingrich enthusiast Sheldon Adelson.

If any of the 18 private lunar landers fulfill the GLXP’s goals next year, it will have demonstrated that depositing a payload on the surface of the moon can be accomplished for millions of dollars, rather than hundreds of millions. While still pricy, this would put lunar surface operations within the budgets of thousands of individuals and corporate entities, dramatically expanding the types of projects that could be feasible. In an interview

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The GLXP prize has helped incentivize private space exploration.

with the HPR, Brad Kohlenberg, media representative for GLXP frontrunner Moon Express, states that his company’s “MX-1” platform will open up the moon to “art, vanity, and business” where before it had only been open to government-sponsored research. Indeed, Moon Express and its competitors have already sold payload space for a Japanese sports drink advertisement, a Swedish art project, and vials of cremated remains for the space burial firm Celestis. Moon Express also hopes to begin prospecting the moon for rare minerals that might be worth mining for shipment to Earth. For the first time, it looks like it might be possible for groups to make money by going to the moon.

Scientific research would also benefit from access to lowcost small moon landers. Harvard astronomy professor Dimitar Sasselov told the HPR that the astrophysics community has long hoped for a small radio telescope on the moon’s far side to study objects in deep space away from the interference of human communications. Furthermore, the planetary science community is eager to study unexplored regions of the moon to fill gaps in our understanding left after the Apollo missions.

In 2008, Google and researchers from MIT and Harvard attempted to raise $20 million for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to look for nearby Earth-like worlds. However, according to Sasselov, university donors and administrators were wary of stealing the limelight from NASA. Many apparently feared that funding a university-led mission on this scale would weaken the political case for future government spending on exoplanet research, which would ultimately cost Harvard’s astronomy program considerably.

Sasselov predicted that in the next five to ten years the falling costs and rising legitimacy of private sector space research will create a transformation in the way universities conduct off-planet science. Today, experiments led by Cornell, the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins, and other universities are taking place on and around Mars and throughout the solar system, but all of them are attached to NASA spacecraft. With the advent of private missions beyond Earth orbit, university space science may begin behaving more like other fields of study, being conducted on both government-owned and private spacecraft and funded with both private money and government grants.

THE INTERGALACTIC ACADEMY

UBER FOR SPACE

As the costs involved in space exploration decrease, many expect universities to more aggressively participate in the process, raising questions about the relationship between academic institutions and NASA. Sasselov notes that, while university consortiums have invested millions in off-campus research facilities on earth, including giant telescopes in Hawaii and the Andes, no major space mission has ever been primarily university-funded.

Meanwhile, GLXP is also expected to bring more attention to the technical and economic challenges of bringing a spacecraft to the moon. Because the GLXP guidelines don’t specify how the spacecraft must get to the moon, participants are considering increasingly creative routes to accomplishing their goals on a budget. Rather than building or purchasing their own rockets—people in the space business prefer to call them launch

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vehicles—for tens of millions of dollars, most entrants in the GLXP plan on buying extra space from commercial communications satellite operators who can afford to buy their own rockets.

Modern rockets, like Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, are mass-produced with a limited number of configurations. As a result, the rocket purchased by a satellite television provider, for instance, might have extra space in its payload shell or be slightly overpowered for the primary satellite, and the satellite operators or launch providers will often sell that extra capacity to defray costs. Piggybacking on larger missions is a tried-and-true method for lowering launch costs of the tiny, standardized “CubeSat” satellites used by various researchers and start-ups, but a lunar lander would have to carry some of its own fuel in order to bring it from Earth orbit to the moon.

Unfortunately, because a communications satellite can cost upwards of $750 million to build and launch and can provide billions in profit over its lifetime, Team Phoenicia’s CEO William Baird explained, most satellite launchers are unwilling to stomach the risk that comes with carrying an explosive minirocket with them to space in exchange for the tiny profit offered by small secondary missions. For this reason, after securing a dedicated launch vehicle for their proposed moon lander, Baird’s company decided to drop out of the X-Prize. Instead, they shifted their focus to the potentially more lucrative prospect of using the space on their rocket to carry other missions with “active propulsion systems” to the moon, including a number of their former GLXP competitors and RevUp Render’s DogeCointhemed Lunar Iditarod. Because existing satellite operators do not want to accept the risks associated with new types of small satellites, Team Phoenicia has stepped in with a way for small firms with risky satellites to pool their resources together and get to orbit independently of the major players—a sort of Uber for space. Making lunar voyages a profitable enterprise will require risk-sharing schemes like this. Ditto other commercial rocket-propelled small satellite missions enabled by GLXP-fueled innovations. Team Phoenicia envisions a substantial market for their services.

GOVERNING THE NEW OCEAN Potentially more complicated than the technical issues surrounding commercial use of the moon are questions of sovereignty and international law. If a United States-based company opened a mine on the moon, does that give the United States the right to exclude others from the mine or bring minerals back to Earth for sale? Does the operating company possess this right? If, in Baird’s words, “the man on the moon starts having acne,” and a large-scale Helium-3 harvesting operation produced damage visible from Earth, would anyone be held accountable?

Many proponents of commercial space utilization agree that precedent exists for answering these questions. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is the foundational document for space law, and one of its provisions bans nations from claiming territory on extraterrestrial objects. However, it makes no mention of the status of extraterrestrial objects returned to the Earth inside a spaceship. Still, subsequent cases in international courts ordering stolen goodwill moon rocks returned to NASA affirm that objects returned to the Earth inside spacecraft count as parts of the spacecraft for the treaty’s purposes, and are thus under the

jurisdiction of the nation that launched the craft. As a result, Kohlenberg and others assert, space and the high seas have obvious analogies: the fish, oil, and other resources in international waters belong to no one, but any nation’s vessel can claim them.

Issues relating to conflicts between private entities, environmental damage, and space debris could be addressed through the frameworks of the Outer Space Treaty, which enables all signatory nations to request consultation regarding actions by entities from any other nation that might pose a danger to its own space activities.

Existing law, in the form of domestic launch regulations, may also allow for significant self-policing and cooperative governance under the terms of the Outer Space Treaty. Professor Joanne Gabrynowicz, editor-in-chief emerita of the Journal of Space Law, noted in an interview with the HPR that Article VI of the treaty obligates each signatory nation to regulate the in-space activities of entities that launched under its jurisdiction. In the United States, this regulation takes the form of FAA launch licenses, which govern the terms of launch and activities thereafter. This includes granting 200-kilometer non-interference zones around crewed vehicles in order to ensure astronaut safety. Gabrynowicz believes that these launch licenses could also be used by the FAA to regulate moon and asteroid landings undertaken by private entities that launch under U.S. jurisdiction. As the FAA already cooperates with flight safety agencies all over the world to ensure safe air travel, it is logical to believe that this cooperation would extend to the organizations that govern launches in various countries, eschewing the need for new institutions to resolve conflicts that might arise.

It is always possible, of course, that the mechanisms provided by the Outer Space Treaty or launch licensing could repeatedly fail to address some particular type of issue. If this is the case, amendments to the treaty or the creation of entirely new international frameworks might be necessary. However, it is unclear whether the political will for such an exercise exists, and the representatives of private space corporations interviewed for this piece remain noncommittal over the necessity of such a step.

One way to determine whether the world is ready for the challenges to come, suggests Baird, is to create a test case. The Team Phoenicia CEO argues that some private entity should send a mission to land on an asteroid, claim it for themselves, and have a rival corporate interest sue over it. The ensuing lawsuit would prove whether or not existing institutions were up for the task. If they proved themselves to be insufficient, the interest such a suit would raise might be enough to muster political support for changes to the existing framework of space law. As of yet, no group has laid out plans for such a mission to test the legal waters, but a test case would allow space entrepreneurs to be proactive about confronting the legal challenges ahead, rather than forcing them to react to later cases when the stakes might be higher.

The coming year promises to be a time of exciting change in our species’ interactions with the moon, as corporations, nationstates, and even universities return to the site of humanity’s first off-world footprints for profit, pride, and science. Policy debates over issues raised by these future endeavors will undoubtedly be contentious. Still, the fact that we will be having them at all is a testament to just how far we’ve come in only six decades of spaceflight.

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KURDISTANDOFF A PEOPLE’S CHANCE AT STATEHOOD Perry Abdulkadir

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y father originally came to the United Kingdom, and later, the United States, as a refugee of Saddam Hussein’s campaign against the Kurds. Several days ago, he took us to the house of one of the only other Kurdish families in the state. The dinner was sprawled out on a colorful Persian rug that covered nearly half of the otherwise off-white, bare room.

Rice was piled in a heaping mountain in the center, encircled by various bean sauces and kabobs.

My father began to chat with the father of the other family.

And although my knowledge of the Kurdish language is essentially limited to platitudes and the words of disappointment my father occasionally lobs at me, I began to pick up on a consistent theme running through the conversation. Over the unintelligible din of foreign words, I consistently picked out the words “Kurdî” and “Kurdîstan.” (One of the things Kurds talk about more than anything else is the Kurds themselves.) I kept hearing the word “serxwebûn,” and only later did I realize it that meant “independence.”

The Kurds are fiercely proud of their own heritage. However, their patriotism is unique in the world. Nearly everywhere else, nationalism leads to some kind of violence. But, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of the Iraqi Kurdish people are almost aggressively peaceful. Unlike the Kurds in Turkey who had been marginalized until very recently, or the Kurds in Syria who have dealt with a brutal dictator, or the Iranian Kurds who are still not allowed self-rule, the Iraqi Kurds have had no reason to fight for years. Their autonomy is so strong they are nearly

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independent in all but name. They realized that the best way to achieve stability and peace was just to play the game, earning an autonomous region within the existing system.

In an interview with Taban Shoresh, a survivor of Saddam’s genocidal Anfal Campaign and now an advocate for other Kurdish victims, she quickly responds to my question on whether or not the Kurdish people would be willing to fight for independence: “We’ve had enough struggle and violence over the years.”

The Iraqi Kurds have incorporated this peacefulness into their national character. They see themselves as somehow being above the everyday violence that plagues their Arab neighbors to the South. With the recent blitzkrieg of ISIS across the areas just south of Kurdish lands, complicated questions are bubbling to the surface. On one hand, there has never been a more opportune time for them to achieve independence. On the other, they may risk the stability, security, freedom, and prosperity that have made them the envy of the Middle Eastern world.

A RAPIDLY CHANGING SITUATION FOR THE KURDS The Peshmerga, the army of the Kurdistan Regional Government, has been deployed to confront the ISIS threat. The Kurdish fighters, who so far are faring far better than their Iraqi Security Forces counterparts against ISIS, have taken up defensive positions in cities in the wake of Iraqi security forces desertions

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Kirkuk, a diverse and resource-rich city of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, has long been desired as the capital of the Kurdish region.

(Kurds have always considered it theirs.) When the ISF abandoned the city in the face of the ISIS onslaught, the Peshmerga moved into the Iraqi soldiers’ posts, putting Kirkuk under de facto Kurdish control.

Moreover, the Kurds should be able to defend their territory against ISIS. David Pollock, the Kaufman Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former advisor to the State Department for Middle Eastern issues, stresses the Peshmerga’s prowess in an interview with the HPR. When asked if the Kurds would be able to hold off ISIS, he confidently replies, “ISIS won’t try. They know the Peshmerga would be capable of holding them off.” Although he doesn’t rule out the potential for a few “probing skirmishes,” he reiterates that if ISIS “fought with the Pesh they’d be sorry.” Furthermore, although the Kurds may want to expand their territory and strategically deploy their army in hopes of attaining an independent Kurdistan, they are also reluctant to allow the deterioration of a status quo that has been so favorable to them. Pollock points out that the Iraqi Kurdish leadership is “pragmatic,” and they now have all the bargaining power. Instead of declaring independence, they may instead choose to simply “adjust the power balance in the context of a unified Iraq.”

Despite setbacks and the psychological barrier Iraqi Kurds face in declaring independence, that is the direction the region is inexorably headed towards. A few weeks before this writing, the Erdogan government of Turkey said, “The Kurds of Iraq can decide for themselves the name and type of entity they are living in.” This comes after months of the Turks engaging directly with Erbil, the Kurdish capital, to purchase oil. This is especially remarkable, as Turkey is a historical enemy of the Kurds. Pollock notes that the friendly Turkish-Kurdish relations “would have been science fiction not long ago.” And recently, the Israelis began to purchase oil directly from the Kurds. Hot on the heels of that deal, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that “the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.” At the same time, former Israeli President Shimon Peres lauded the Kurdish autonomous region for its commitment to democracy as others in Israel hinted that the Jewish state would quickly recognize an independent Kurdistan. Other nations in the region are beginning to believe that Iraq is untenable in the long run and are looking for stable partners.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF INDEPENDENCE Although the Kurds wish they could ignore ISIS by simply declaring independence, the reality is not that simple. Redrawing a theoretical line on a map won’t be a deterrent to brutal extremists who have already declared an Islamist caliphate.

Shoresh is plainly in favor of independence, calling the lack of Kurdish statehood a “historical injustice.” In her eyes, Kurdistan would be a viable state, but even she recognizes that independence would be no panacea for the instability caused by ISIS. For one, she says, “The Kurds have everything in place to be a state but Sunnis and Shias do not.” The Kurds can attempt to wall themselves off in a fortress, but they cannot avoid the fact that what happens in Arab Iraq plays an intimate role in their daily lives because of sheer geographic proximity. Shoresh points out that even though the Kurds have largely been safe throughout

the ISIS onslaught, they have still faced psychological terror, fuel shortages, price hikes, and unpaid salaries. Although a partition of Iraq is one of many possible solutions to the crisis, it will be meaningless without an international commitment to all parts of Iraq.

The United States remains steadfastly dedicated to a unified Iraq, with Secretary of State Kerry urging a unity government.

Zagros Kamal, a Kurdish journalist and current media advisor to the Kurdish Parliament, expresses his frustration over U.S. policy in an interview with the HPR. Because the United States established a no-fly zone over Kurdistan in the ’90s and overthrew Saddam Hussein, who was loathed by the Kurds, he says, “the Kurds have always viewed the United States and its allies as liberators, not occupiers.” He also boasts of the almost nonexistent U.S. casualties in the Kurdish region, claiming that American soldiers visiting Kurdistan “would put their weapons and uniforms in the closet and stroll in the cities of Kurdistan freely.”

The loyalty the Kurds feel to the United States also contributes to a sense of betrayal during the current crisis. In their eyes, they have played all their cards right with the United States. Why is it that in the defining moment of their history, the United States has seemed to turn its back on them?

Of course, the United States must consider other issues as well. It reflects poorly on America if the Baghdad government crafted in 2003 by Americans comes crashing down. There are also broader foreign policy issues that could be raised by the dissolution of Iraq. Dr. Pollock explains that Iran is concerned that an independent Kurdistan could lead to unrest among its own “oppressed Kurdish population.” The Iranians could present problems to everyone involved, as they “have the leverage to give a bad time to the Kurds … , [and] the United States doesn’t want a new arena of confrontation with Iranians.” Still, the feelings of abandonment are very real among Kurds.

The Kurds add an important dimension in the fight against ISIS, one that must be considered as the United States is crafting policy to deal with the crisis. On one hand, Kurdish nationalism is ubiquitous. Kamal echoes the sentiments of most Iraqi Kurds when he asserts, “As a Kurdish nation we want an independent Kurdistan.” It is telling that he already refers to “a Kurdish nation.” An independent Kurdistan would present challenges for the United States in terms of logistically partitioning the country and making sure that the remaining Arab portion would be powerful enough to be viable. Additionally, the United States must realize that the Kurds are a key component in the fight against ISIS. They have proven themselves capable in battle, and Kamal shows the sentiments of his government and people when he says, “The Kurds will fight to the last drop of blood to stop ISIS.” The United States must engage with the Kurds, either within the current Iraqi state or as a separate nation, in order to have success in dealing with ISIS. TIME Magazine’s cover for last June was an image of Iraq in flames with the question, “The End of Iraq?” With so many rapid developments and international media attention focused on the issue, there is a sense of excitement in the air within the Kurdish community now that their longtime goals are finally coming into view. In fact, the Iraqi Kurds are already independent at heart.

My relatives on Facebook are currently engaged in long discussions over whether the new nation will be called “The Kurdish Republic,” “Kurdistan,” or as my cousin said, tongue-in-cheek, “Kuraq.”

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ON THE HORIZON

How quality education for all Chileans can combat inequality

Joe Choe

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ith banners, signs, flags, and noisemakers, 40,000 students and teachers have taken to the streets of Santiago, Chile in recent weeks. They are united by one goal: to express their discontent at the lack of quality education in poor neighborhoods and its effects on widening the inequality gap in Chile. The protesters are marching through a city filled with gleaming skyscrapers that house multinational corporations such as Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company—one only needs a quick glimpse of Chile’s capital to see how far this country has come in terms of economic development. Despite such growth, the lack of quality education in disadvantaged regions, and the socioeconomic inequality this perpetuates, threatens to undermine the progress Chile has made.

BREATHING IS NOT ENOUGH Chile’s economic growth in recent decades has been fueled by the development of its market economy, which has allowed

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for an increase in exports such as copper, the signing of 22 free trade agreements with 60 countries, and the attraction of foreign direct investment. This growth has produced tangible effects: Chile’s per capita income increased from $6,185 in 1992 to $17,310 in 2011, and its poverty rate decreased by more than half from 32.9 percent in 1992 to 14.4 percent in 2011. Today, Chile leads Latin America in terms of income per capita, economic freedom, competitiveness, and low corruption.

However, these gains have not been evenly distributed throughout society. Chile has the most unequal distribution of income among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Also, its Gini index, which measures inequality using income distribution, is higher than the Latin American average. In light of Chile’s exponential economic growth, these facts appear paradoxical. In an interview with the HPR, Paula Molina, a Chilean journalist at BBC Mundo and Radio Cooperativa Chile, described how “economic growth can take people out of poverty, which is like being underwater

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and not being able to breathe. Economic growth in Chile has indeed helped people to breathe. But this growth has not done enough about inequality.”

PROTESTS AND REFORMS This lack of improvement in shrinking the inequality gap, coupled with a rise in popular discontent and frustration, explains the surge of unrest and protests Chile has experienced in recent years. Roberto Matus, CEO of the Chilean-American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham Chile), described the Chilean economy as one that is currently experiencing “growing pains.”

He told the HPR, “With Chile’s growth, we’ve had a growing middle class. With this growing middle class, there are expectations, and when they are not met, there is discontent.” The 2006 March of the Penguins protests were led by 790,000 students demanding quality education, but the movement quickly encompassed other demographic groups, becoming a protest against inequality in general. Molina, who has covered these protests extensively, observed that “even for a country that is growing, when inequality persists, it hurts people and takes hope away from them.”

One way to mitigate socioeconomic inequality is to resolve the disparity in the quality of education between schools in affluent regions and schools in poorer ones. Mariana Aylwin, former Chilean minister of education, described to the HPR how “the most brutal form of segregation in Chile is territorial segregation. This country is divided by social classes, and each class lives in distinct regions.” In the poor regions, schools suffer from mediocre curricula, overworked and underpaid teachers, and a lack of resources, among other problems. The low quality of education leaves students in poor neighborhoods without the skills and knowledge that their more fortunate peers can use to succeed in life.

To address this problem, the Chilean government under the direction of President Michelle Bachelet proposed three major reforms in May 2014: ending for-profit schools, selectivity, and copay. These reforms will hypothetically end discrimination against students based on need and will prevent certain schools from charging families money in addition to receiving funds from the government. Such schools, which are private and partly subsidized by the government, can charge families anywhere from $10 to over $100 in additional payment. This segregates students based on their ability to pay. Bachelet wishes to address this and make quality education affordable for all, regardless of socioeconomic background.

However, these reforms have not been universally accepted.

Some critics decry them as ineffective, detrimental, overly ambitious, or simply a diversion from more urgent areas of concern.

Some, like Aylwin, suggest that focusing on teacher training, investing in preschool education, and reforming specific municipal schools would be a better use of government resources. She believes that addressing issues such as selection and “end of profit” are not as urgent and will do little to address the problem. Gisela Karow, director of communications at Aptus Chile, told the HPR that “education policy must be coherent and focused on the quality of the teaching, which is the heart of education. The changes must happen inside the classroom in order for them to have an immediate effect.” Aptus Chile is a nonprofit with

the goal of improving the quality of education through direct, on-the-ground work such as evaluating specific schools, offering training for teachers, and distributing learning materials.

Others, like Molina, believe the problem is more systemic.

The Chilean private schools that are partly subsidized by the government depend on a voucher-like system in which the owners get paid by the government for the quantity of students, not necessarily the quality of the education. Therefore, Molina believes that the underperforming schools are not “necessarily run by evil people. The owners are just following incentives in the system and playing by the rules. It’s just that those incentives are not working for education and need to be changed.”

ON THE HORIZON Although there are myriad opinions as to how exactly Chile should address this problem, one thing is clear: the importance of a quality education is undeniable. In an interview with the HPR, Pablo Zamorano, a Chilean member of Harvard’s Class of 2018, said, “The role of education is fundamental because students are not born with total knowledge. Everything in life is learned. Everything requires training and hard work.” Zamorano has been recognized nationally in Chile for being the first student admitted to Harvard College from a Chilean public school. Zamorano was born in one of Santiago’s poorest neighborhoods, and his family struggled financially. Despite this, he took advantage of every opportunity he could outside of his school, such as conducting microbiology research at a local university and teaching himself English. He also founded and led an English-speaking debate team in school, becoming the first Chilean public school student to participate in the World Debate Championship.

Zamorano’s story is encouraging and shows just how instrumental a quality education can be in overcoming socioeconomic barriers. There is no doubt that a higher-quality education can allow students to become more knowledgeable and more productive, and therefore more likely to obtain higher-paying, skilled jobs. This, in turn, can have positive effects on their own children, benefitting future generations as well. Manuel Sepúlveda, education policy researcher at Educación 2020, told the HPR, “Education is fundamental in order to overcome inequality. The problem we have in Chile is that the education system is reproducing and even deepening inequality. This is a problem that is strongly related to one’s natural rights because quality education should be a right.” Educación 2020 works with both the government and underperforming schools in the hope that by the year 2020, Chilean students of all backgrounds will have access to quality education.

In addition, Aylwin observed how “education can be a factor of social integration that allows society to become more integrated and more diverse. In the poorest sectors [of Chile], there is a lack of education and lack of knowledge of the world—a world that is large and diverse. The young need to integrate themselves in modern society and not be segregated. Education can open this horizon.” There is no doubt that Chile is asking itself the right questions when it comes to addressing this issue. Although the exact path to take in order to achieve universal quality in education may be in dispute, at least the end goal of using education to mitigate socioeconomic inequality is clear.

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GAZA IN PARIS

On the messy politics of anti-Semitism in France

Nancy Ko

E

very Friday, locals of this run-down Palestinian village in the West Bank gather with international human rights activists and the rare Israeli to protest the wall built to separate Bil’in from the adjacent Jewish settlement of Modi’in Illit. A Swiss ambulance stands by to treat protesters hit with tear gas or rubber bullets as they feebly chant, “One, two, three four, occupation no more. Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a fascist state.” But this Friday in July, the protesters come with another message. Dressed in cotton white t-shirts streaked with red, they march in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.

In Paris, the spray-painted cotton resistance is a popular import. Since the most recent Gaza war was announced, Parisians in solidarity with Gazan Palestinians have marched to protest Israeli aggression on civilian homes, hospitals, and schools, donning the same hastily made shirts.

But the protests in France have taken on an ugly hue. While the majority of pro-Palestinian marches are exactly that— calls for the end of the war in Gaza and the end of the Israeli occupation—a number of French protesters proudly chant, “La France aux Français! Juifs, Sionistes Hors de France!” (“France is for the French! Jews, Zionists Get Out of France!”). One man holds a sign reading, “Liberté, Egalité, Dieudonné,” lauding the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, whose claims that Zionism is an effort to take over the world have prompted fandom and disgust alike. In Paris, hate runs high.

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Why has anti-Semitism surged in Parisian pro-Palestinian rallies, endangering the legitimate effort for Palestinian statehood?

The anatomy of French anti-Semitism is ultra-nationalism.

Chants of “La France aux Français!” would sound fitting to an 18th or 19th century French Jew. That the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen allowed French Jews to be emancipated (which they were, by 1791) is misleading. In supporting their right to citizenship at the December 1789 debate on emancipation, Count Stanislaus Marie famously quipped, “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” He followed this statement by demanding that Jews must become French, and that if a Jew should refuse to assimilate, he must be expelled.

This nationalist-justified conception of Jews revealed that during the rise of the nation-state, the French elite saw Jews as a separate nation. But assimilation would not fix this “problem” in later centuries, contrary to Stanislaus’s claim. Although assimilated Jews became integrated into the upper echelons of French society, the late-19th century Dreyfus Affair—in which a French Jewish captain was falsely accused of spying and was publicly degraded to shouts of “À bas le Juif!” (“Down with the Jew!”)— shattered any surety that a Jew could be a Frenchman.

Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, believed that a separate Jewish state would be the end of anti-Semitism, as a Jewish state would eliminate the European discomfort with a

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nation living among nations. But today, the minority of protesters who have turned some pro-Palestinian rallies into hostile anti-Semitic headliners demonstrates that the existence of Israel alone would not extinguish anti-Semitism. In nineteenth-century France, anti-Judaism was motivated by resentment towards a separate nation dwelling in the streets of Metz and Paris.

Contemporary French anti-Semitism extends the logic, holding Jewish citizens of France responsible for the actions of the concrete nation, Israel.

Yet even the continuous nationalist aspects of French antiSemitism do not fully explain the source of tension. Partaking also in the upheaval is a contemporary French tendency to abuse democratic concepts to persecute disfavored groups. This is evidenced by France’s 2004 passage of the infamous Law Number 2004-228. Law 228 purportedly enforces laïcité (separation of church and state) by banning any conspicuous religious symbols or garb in primary and secondary schools in order to promote a secular society. Not only is this very law paradoxical to laïcité (for it uses the state’s power to determine public religious practice), but it has also promoted Islamophobia, framing public religiosity (e.g., wearing a hijab) as resistance to the French state.

Just as 228 engendered Islamophobia, certain French protesters have over-extended free speech to engender antiSemitism. The relationship between hate speech and French society is complicated by the fact that free speech is perhaps the most beholden of French rights. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, French sociologist Michel Wieviorka noted, “There are people who are not expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but are immersed in this culture of media, of the Internet, and of social networks. They sometimes have the idea that Jews, asserting that anti-Semitism is a criminal act, are against the [French] culture of liberty of expression.”

Not only are anti-Semitic opinions often veiled in pro-Palestinian sentiment, but anti-Semitism also has become perceived by some as a legitimate position on the spectrum of free speech.

As such, the stoppage of hate speech can only be perceived, by French extremists, as a slippery slope to complete censorship.

Indeed, protests spiked after French President François Hollande ordered police to ban potentially violent demonstrations.

These trends indicate an ominous failure to recognize nuance

within French society.

To be sure, there are a number of moving parts to this story.

To treat all protesters as subscribers to primordial anti-Semitism is to ignore those pro-Palestinian activists who condemn antiSemitism while condemning the war in Gaza and to submit to the very same failure to recognize nuance. And pro-Israelis in France have had their own violent factions. In a number of cases, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were peaceful until disrupted by members of the Ligue de Défense Juive, the Jewish Defense League.

According to Sammy Gozhlan, president of the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, the militant Jewish group has gained the “sympathy of the base [French Jewish] community” by “protecting” it, but the LDJ’s tactics and ideology place them under the umbrella of terrorism. The pro-Israel group has historically attacked and celebrated the killing of Palestinians, French Muslims, and French Jews who disagree with its ideology. Aligned with Meir Kahane, the late founder of the American Jewish Defense League, the organization’s actions have prompted the Ministry of the Interior to consider banning it.

The clashes in Paris are a mess of conflations: French Jews conflated as Israelis, Israelis as Netanyahu’s government, proPalestinians as anti-Israelis, anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.

These conflations are fatal, given how nuanced the situation is: even as a minority uses criticism of Israeli policy as a way to bolster their anti-Semitism, staunch supporters of Israel misinterpret dissent against specific Israeli policies as anti-Semitism and apply broad strokes to human rights activists. Ultimately, if pro-Palestinian sentiments are too consistently associated with anti-Semitic rhetoric, Palestinian nationalism will lose the moral prerequisite it needs for public support, and, muddled and stigmatized by these assumptions, will become a noble project yet again postponed.

Faced with dichotomous representations of domestic and international conflicts that are anything but black-and-white, a number of Frenchmen and -women are tallying and choosing sides. Meanwhile, violence in Paris continues, a shoddy translation of the conflict in Palestine. French police release tear gas.

Ambulances stand by.

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AN ENDEMIC, AN ENIGMA EBOLA IN WEST AFRICA Natasha Sarna

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est Africa’s current Ebola epidemic is the deadliest in recorded history. Since Patient Zero, a two-year old boy from rural Guinea, died in December of 2013, the outbreak has spread through the country and into Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, crippling already fragile healthcare infrastructures and garnering anxious international attention.

The disease has no existing vaccine or cure and finds its natural host in fruit bats or other traditional bushmeat, making rural communities far-removed from reliable medical clinics and international food markets particularly susceptible. For affected countries, poverty is intensifying the already daunting task of controlling Ebola’s threatening spread. Nigeria is the least statistically impoverished, at 45th on the IMF’s list of the world’s poorest countries. Guinea and Sierra Leone make the top 25.

Liberia sits perilously in fourth.

Even before fear of Ebola spurred research grants from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, foreign aid was an integral part of the economy in West African countries. The African Health Observatory’s statistical summary of federalized Sierra Leonean healthcare notes that “the sector is substantially dependent on external resources for funding.” The Free Health Care Initiative Policy, when implemented in the country in 2010, had an estimated cost of $35,840,173, of which 86.5 percent was provided by development partners that included the World Bank, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, and the Asian Development Bank.

Despite socioeconomic modernization efforts in Sierra Leone, government and donor expenditures on healthcare continue to fall short of goals set by the Abuja Declaration, a follow-up by the African Union to the Millenium Declaration of 2001. In 2011,

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the Ministry of Health and Sanitation received just 8.2 percent of the total government budget. Guinea spent 4.7 percent of their total budget on healthcare in 2007. To compare, the United States allotted 23 percent of its 2011 federal budget to healthcare initiatives.

Community funds exist and have, to an extent, evolved to cope with the deficit in federal aid. Such funds generally cover expenses that include obstetrics, nutritive supplements, and chronic illness, but a rampantly spreading pathogen as difficult as Ebola has drained existing resources and prompted responses from medical and non-medical NGOs alike. Fiona McLysaght, the Country Director in Sierra Leone for Concern Worldwide, a nonprofit that works to overcome the challenges of extreme poverty through sustainable solutions, acknowledged in a conversation with the HPR the limited funding available to combat Ebola: “The health systems in Sierra Leone are not equipped to deal with a public health crisis of this magnitude. Health systems like those in Europe and the United States have a much greater capacity to handle and contain an outbreak than do Sierra Leone or Liberia.” Without a recognized virus-specific option, treating Ebola follows the standard protocol of other intensive care; aid workers can only replace lost fluids and blood for those who are infected. With limited volunteers, equipment, and space, the existing infrastructure is simply too weak to maintain even this basic care for an extended period of time.

TARGETING TRADITION Cultural factors, such as consuming bushmeat and performing funeral rights—which even for victims of Ebola include

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washing, touching, and kissing the body—are exacerbating the spread of the disease despite campaigns for public education. Many civilians refuse to give up practices they believe are harmless. “Education is at the core of our response,” confirmed McLysaght. “Confusion is fueling the outbreak.”

Even foreign aid offices and NGOs with longstanding ties to communities affected by Ebola have been frustrated by the difficulty of convincing people to forgo tradition in lieu of preservation for the sake of pubic health and safety. As McLysaght pointed out, “Ebola is relatively difficult to spread, so having the basic information to prevent the disease can keep people from getting sick. However, we then have to deal with the ramifications of what some of that behavior change will mean.

For example, if families who hunted for food can no longer eat that meat, what are we giving them as an alternative? Telling people not to eat wild animals can compromise a rural community’s food security. It is incredibly difficult to reverse deep-rooted cultural traditions and get ahead of the rumor mill.”

Jussi Laurikainen, a program coordinator for Finn Church Aid, the largest Finnish development cooperation organization and the second largest provider of humanitarian aid in Liberia, addressed the public stigma attached to foreign support in an interview with the HPR: “The fact is that Liberia is very dependent on foreign development aid. At the same time, Liberia is very corrupt, and many think that aid is going to the hands of politicians and government officials. During the first and second waves of the Ebola outbreak, February to March and June respectively, the common man might have thought that Ebola was a new way for the elite to pocket foreign aid.”

McLysaght agreed. “Some believe that the disease is politically motivated or spread by NGOs or the government,” she said. Beyond the fear of corrupt politics, she continued, civilians mistrust the treatments available in Ebola-specialized clinics: “There is a widespread rumor that if you are diagnosed with Ebola, you are given an injection in a clinic to speed up your death, which is prompting people to flee and spread the disease.”

In response, NGOs are leveraging their established relationships with village leaders, who according to McLysaght “are critical partners in building awareness, understanding what Ebola is, and curbing the hysteria.”

Work done by NGOs with community leaders is often independent of government direction. Regarding the administration of ground-level organizations, Laurikainen explained that such organizations receive updates about the disease from Ministries of Health, although “coordination of [their] Ebola response is done without the clear involvement of the government. ... If the government would have taken Ebola seriously from the very beginning, then coordination mechanisms could have been set up earlier.”

ETHICAL DILEMMAS AND THE PUBLIC’S TRUST Controlling the outbreak also means a delicate, diplomatic strategy is necessary for aid workers. Their efforts are further challenged without an approved vaccine or medication for Ebola, though the American biopharmaceutical company Mapp has developed an experimental drug known as ZMapp meant to combat the disease. The drug came into the spotlight when Dr. Sheikh Umar Khan, a virologist at Freetown’s Connaught Hos-

pital responsible for treating more than 100 Ebola patients, fell ill mid-July. International aid workers and doctors assigned to Dr. Khan’s case struggled with the ethical dilemma of providing an untested drug to a patient of his medical status. Not only was there the risk of an adverse reaction, but Dr. Khan’s condition was so far advanced that there was a significant possibility that even if the humanized monoclonal antibodies found in ZMapp were to function as planned, it would be too late to control his symptoms. Workers were worried that if the public were to learn that an important Sierra Leonean doctor had died after receiving Western medication, whether or not the medication caused his death, public mistrust would run rampant and encourage those seriously ill to avoid help at the peril of their own health and the health of those around them.

Suspicion of Western medicine has lingered as a result of the Trovan case. In 1996, Pfizer provided a drug called Trovan to treat a meningitis outbreak during which 12,000 people died in the Northern Nigerian state of Kano over a six-month period.

The oral antibiotic was offered to 100 children, but after 11 children died and dozens were left physically or mentally disabled, Pfizer was sued by the government and the affected families.

Because of the communicable nature of meningitis, autopsies are too dangerous, and so official documented causes of death were shrouded in ambiguity. This ambiguity allowed Pfizer attorneys to argue that the disease had caused the deaths, not the drug, but Northern Nigeria persists as one of the few areas in the world in which polio remains endemic due to lingering suspicion of Western medicine.

The team on Dr. Khan’s case decided not to administer ZMapp, and he succumbed to the disease on July 29. Two American medical workers for the missionary agency Service in Mission, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, were flown out of Liberia in early August, after also contracting Ebola. Both were treated at Emory University’s medical center with ZMapp, and have since recovered from the virus, though it is unclear whether the drug, the transfusions of blood from an Ebola survivor in Liberia, the substantially augmented care Emory provided, or a combination of all three were responsible for the patients’ recovery.

The international community is anxious to find a cure for and control the spread of the disease. Laurikainen explained that he “tend[s] to agree with experts who say that the situation will still get worse before it gets better. The UN Humanitarian Air Service is starting operations in the affected countries, so they are expecting this situation to last.” Either way, arresting the outbreak will require the cooperation of a multinational healthcare force, and will set the stage for discussions about the need to reform crisis management protocols in impoverished countries. McLysaght sees the involvement of NGOs evolving with the outbreak to best serve the medical and psycho-social needs of affected communities.

Efforts to contain the outbreak are ongoing, and while medical and NGO personnel continue working to heal patients and communities, they are also looking to develop strategies to prevent the disease from resurfacing. This is the twenty-eighth recorded Ebola outbreak since its discovery in 1976; averting a twenty-ninth will be the most important effort made toward healing the countries, relationships, and lives of those left behind.

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 39

BOOKS & ARTS

IN SIGHT, IN MIND Yacoub Kureh and Giacomo Bagarella

B

aghdad, July 2007. The sound of gunfire coming from U.S. Apache attack helicopters echoes in the streets. They have sighted what appear to be insurgents.

The helicopters target them from the air. A few seconds later, as the dust and smoke clear from the scene, the aircrews comment on their work.

“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.”

“Nice.”

Eight people lie on the ground, some dead, some dying. The helicopters keep circling the area and soon spot a van approaching. Men exit the van and start loading bodies into it. The pilots interpret this effort to take the wounded to a hospital as an attempt to hide insurgents and their weapons. So the Apaches shoot again, firing more 30mm cannon rounds into the van and surrounding area. No one is left standing.

“I think we whacked ‘em all.”

Ground troops arrive and assess the damage. Then they peer into the van.

“Roger, I’ve got, uh, 11 Iraqi KIAs [Killed In Action]. One small child wounded. Over.”

“Roger. Ah damn. Oh well.”

The exchange between the soldiers and pilots continues.

“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

“That’s right.”

Footage of aircraft targeting buildings, vehicles, and people has existed in films, documentaries, and the Internet for de-

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cades. But WikiLeaks’s release of Collateral Murder, a previously censored video of this particular incident in Iraq, changed things. Collateral Murder afforded the public a new intimacy into America’s War on Terror. Viewers could see what the pilots saw in their crosshairs and hear what the pilots said over the radio.

The world witnessed as pilots mistook cameras for weapons and attacked the men on the ground. The cameras belonged to two Reuters reporters travelling with a group of Iraqis. Later, two children were badly wounded as their fathers sought to help survivors. The cameras kept rolling until no one came up again.

DEATH FROM A DISTANCE In the four years since their release, the scenes of death, punctuated by the gruesome commentary of the aircrews and ground personnel, have marked a new era in the popularization of real combat footage and the accompanying thoughts of the people peering through the scopes.

But what was changing for the public was also changing for the military. With the advent of armed drones and their growing

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usage in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and beyond, U.S. pilots were no longer hovering over battlefields and flying combat missions in person. From specialized sites in the continental United States and in bases across the world, pilots were now flying their aircraft through remote control. They were thousands of miles away from combat, but only a click away from unleashing deadly weapons on their targets.

War had changed, but its tragic outcomes remained. People in a growing number of countries—including civilians—continued to suffer the consequences of a war that had run astray. At the same time, drone pilots had to confront their actions in vivid detail, as their eye-in-the-sky systems gave them the ability to observe limbs torn off a person in the aftermath of a missile explosion and the grief of the relatives who arrived at the scene.

Initially, observers of the drone program feared that war had become a video game, reproduced on a screen observed from an office chair. John Yoo, the attorney who provided the questionable logic behind President George W. Bush’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” asserted that drone killings were “kind of antiseptic. So it is like a video game; it’s like Call of Duty.” Pilots might launch missiles, but the consequences were not there for them to see, hear, or smell from close range; it was as ethereal as obliterating competing players on an Xbox server.

To some, that was indeed the case. A former drone pilot likened the experience of flying a combat mission for a drone to that of playing a video game: the sight of blood pumped his adrenaline and surged his excitement. Even before drone strikes, in preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq the U.S. Air Force devised a computer simulation system to model the effects of bomb explosions. Through it, battlefield commanders could estimate and prevent collateral damage. The Department of Defense named the program “Bugsplat” because of the evocative shape the target area took on the screen. Military slang successively adopted “Bugsplat” to indicate a person killed by drone strike.

DRONES TO CIVILIANS, AND CIVILIANS TO DRONES In that moniker, the dehumanization of victims and the trivialization of death are apparent. Artists have teamed up with advocacy groups to challenge this, targeting both Western civilians and drone operators as their audiences.

Starting in 2012, British artist James Bridle began to trace the outlines of drones on city streets to nudge passers-by into thinking about the hidden pervasiveness of those weapons. Bridle’s series, “Under the Shadow of the Drone,” has populated sidewalks in Istanbul, Washington, London, and Brighton, England with the silhouette of the killer aircraft to make it as permanent a fixture there as it is in Middle Eastern skies. Bridle even released a “Drone Shadow Handbook” to share the ability to create drone “shadows” with anyone who might be interested. These outlines foreshadow the use of aerial surveillance returning from the battlefield and being adopted by law enforcement agencies domestically. Bridle’s art complements the necessary reflections on drones entering the daily lives of civilians in the West.

In Pakistan, where drones already saturate the atmosphere, local and international human rights activists and artists work in the opposite direction. While Bridle’s project makes visible on the ground something invisible in the air, a project in Pakistan serves to re-humanize people on the ground for those watch-

ing from the sky. The project, titled “Not a Bug Splat,” placed on a field a 100-by-70 feet picture of a young girl who survived a drone strike in which her parents and a sibling had been killed.

Clearly visible from aircraft and even satellites, this installation returns a human face to the victims of drone attacks. As drone operators peer at the ground from their screens, they will now see those below looking back at them.

A PARASITIC INSECT These initiatives aim to rebalance the uneven relationship between victims, perpetrators, and those in whose name the killing is done. These artistic installations challenge the dehumanization of drone targets and of drone pilots—the former to be struck and struck again until the last terrorist or insurgent has been eliminated, the latter turned into machines trained to guide their aircraft unquestioningly on their missions of death.

Above all, however, projects like “Under the Shadow of the Drone” and “Not a Bug Splat” underscore the reality of the situation, one whose consequences are much more dire and widespread than those of even the most gruesome video games. Many drone pilots may never have second thoughts about their actions, while others develop severe psychological conditions or commit suicide. Around them, citizens of the U.S. and its allies see their governments violate international law and their taxpayer money put to use in military missions of questionable security returns that sap democracy and human rights. Across the world, thousands have lost a loved one to a drone strike. Tens of thousands more live with the permanent soundtrack of the buzzing aircraft, a feature that has been shown in Pakistan and Yemen to cause rampant depression and anxiety in what are already severely disadvantaged communities.

Drones have parasitized U.S. foreign policy. They are a relatively cheap and effective means to eliminate undesirable individuals at no direct risk to American lives. They have become an ingrained component of the U.S. military, with conspicuous investments in the coming years and an ossifying logic that will leave future policymakers unable not to adopt them as a military policy tool as well. Under their veneer of aseptic efficiency and detachment from consequences, it is easy to appreciate all the advantages of drones and forget their costs.

Despite the unfortunate names the U.S. Air Force uses for its simulation software or the comments made by some military personnel, war is not and cannot become a video game. No amount of distance or technology can sever us completely from our actions. Remarking on the experiences of a drone operator, Mark Bowden of The Atlantic noted, “flying a drone, he sees the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family. ... War by remote control turns out to be intimate and disturbing.”

Whether we whack with a hammer or with a Hellfire, the results of our actions on the people we treat as moles—and on ourselves—are evident. Civil society ought to begin restoring the humanity stripped from drone victims and operators alike by over a decade of blundering war. Violence on a screen translates to real-life loss, and new artistic projects are raising the curtain to reveal the truths behind the drone wars: apathy and dehumanization.

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 41

BOOKS & ARTS

TOUR MY SQUALOR Jenny Choi

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ost among sweaty pictures of the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, a Beijing of a past era still exists somewhere on my computer’s hard disk.

At the naïve age of 12 years, my visit to China was about documenting what I saw rather than understanding it, taking photographs of people rather than connecting with them.

As such, my first encounter with urban poverty too was through the lens of a camera in a Beijing slum. My aunt, who had studied in the city and so knew the “real China,” was our tour guide. I remember how one storeowner threw onion skins at me when he saw I tried taking a picture of him. The terror was only momentary; the longer-lasting regret in my young mind was that I had missed a photo of the man throwing onions at me. From the perspective of a more aware “me” eight years later, the situation is an uncomfortable jumble of the “gaze” and the subject-object relationship.

Today, slum tourism is a formidable sub-industry, with its services especially concentrated in India, the townships of South Africa, and the favelas of Brazil. If monetized effectively for communities, slum tourism has great potential to benefit both tourists and locals. How can tour companies build structure-disrupting business designs that can bring about real change to these slums? How do community voices stay alive in the face of commercialization? As companies wade through the murky waters of morality and ethics, questions seem to articulate themselves more quickly than answers.

EYEBROWS RAISED Slum tourism is not a new phenomenon. It started with the industrialization and urbanization of 19th century London, when the upper classes developed a curiosity about the lifestyle of the newly emerging lower classes. Slum tourism as a business concept subsided for a long period of time until Rio de Janeiro’s 1992 Earth Summit, during which the city’s slums became popular tour destinaJenny Choi tions for the attendees. From there, it proliferated globally to countries such as India and South Africa, taking on a life of its own to become a formidable and lucrative sub-industry.

Implicit in the “worldliness” associated with travel also lies a bias towards seeing the unfamiliar, the “exotic.” According to John Lancaster, a freelance journalist who wrote an award-winning article on Indian slum tourism for Smithsonian, this exoticization isn’t necessarily malicious. “Tourists want to see these places as they are in their authentic forms and they don’t want to stay in five-star hotels ... I don’t think anyone does it because they take pleasure in other people’s poverty.”

If the intentions are indeed pure, the situational power dynamic keeps the eyebrows raised. While tourists, backpackers and luxury travelers alike, can whiz through these slums in the backs of motorcycles, on buses, or on two-hour walking trips, poverty itself has no mobility. Eveline Duerr, an anthropologist at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, told the HPR that this difference in mobility has implications that stretch beyond inequalities in physical agency.

“Mobility is often tied to knowledge—you get access to other knowledge systems that you wouldn’t otherwise, and you’re able to access networks with mobility.

It’s a question of privilege, power, resources, and prestige.”

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BOOKS & ARTS

WHO BEARS THE BURDEN? Chris Way, a Londoner inspired by the favela tour he took in Brazil, founded Reality Tours & Travel in 2005. The company describes itself as a “social tour operator” based in Dharavi, a slum town in Mumbai, India. According to Way, 80 percent of tour profit goes towards his company’s sister non-profit, Reality Gives, which provides “various educational and other activities that benefit the slums that we visit.” Last year, Reality reported net income of about $250,000 and saw approximately a 20 percent growth in the number of packages purchased per year.

Like Reality, other slum tour operators have built in “social impact” funds that try to massage the awkward inequalities in power. SlumGods Tours and Travel, another Dharavi-based company, dedicates 30 to 40 percent of its profit to a center that it established to teach dance to local children. Sunil Rayana, its founder, told the HPR, “whenever children came to the dance practice, some didn’t have shoes. So we distributed shoes to every single pair of feet in the group.” In slum tourism, doing business means much more than making profits.

Slum tourism is about transforming the physical mobility of the tourist into economic and social mobility for the slum dwellers. Whether in the form of shoes that open up a whole world of expressive movement or a pre-school that provides the basic foundation for education, the idea is that the profits of slum tourism bring both mobility and, possibly in the very long run, mobilization, especially as the poor begin to think politically and economically about their living situations.

This transference of mobility might also be more literal, as Duerr tells us. “Although it’s a bit of a tricky issue because it’s often done without their knowledge, pictures of these slums and their people are posted everywhere. Far more people are aware of poverty because of the increased mobility of slum dwellers via social media. I think this is something that can in fact be empowering.” Although Reality prohibits the use of cameras on its tours, the stories and oral images that travel around the world deliver a virtual mobility to the observed, raising foreign awareness around issues of global poverty and inequality. The irony lies in the fact that this newfound mobility is accompanied by an equal loss in agency, as the slum dwellers’ photos and stories are spread without their knowledge.

BANDAGES WITHOUT OINTMENT If the social impact-oriented intentions of slum tour operators assuage the worries of critics at all, the challenge that remains unmet is delivery on these ideals. Are the good social motives of these companies enough to bring about real change?

Or are they just a sticker for hiding the ethical discomforts of slum tourism? Many of the tour company leaders that the HPR interviewed, such as Rayana, displayed a rather simplistic and complacent understanding of their impact on the locals: “What is happening is that whoever is coming for the tour is generating a lot of revenue and the money stays in the slum. The money stays in Dharavi,” he said.

But where exactly is the money spent? How do companies ensure that they provide the financial transparency that they owe the slum dwellers? At both Reality and SlumGods, the social good portion of the money is spent on what leaders of both companies described to the HPR simply as “various activities.”

And while Reality is a more established organization linked

to an NGO, SlumGods still has not acquired a license for operating as a non-profit, which has prevented them from accepting formal donations. This has effectively allowed the company to decide how much of the revenue to put back into the community—with the lights turned off.

In a system that brings about slum dwellers’ increased dependence on one-time direct donations of a few dollars, the plan for change remains unclear. Compared to their counter- parts in academia, tour operators might not even be conscious of this problem at all. Duerr told the HPR: “There are different interests between operators and academics. Academics are more interested in the social and cultural phenomenon behind this and less in the question of net benefit. I’m sure that in the short term, there are of course people who always benefit. But does it really alleviate poverty at a structural level? I’m inclined to say no.”

Without a structurally profound understanding of how poverty prolongs itself, the tour operators’ mere good intentions may not translate into effective action.

CLOUDING THE WATER Diverting tourist money away from slum dwellers is another recent trend in some slum tour companies’ business strategy.

Jeanett Andrea Soderstrom, a writer about responsible tourism, found in her Cape Town research “a very sad reality of increased competition between local guides.” Tourists are now likely to give more money directly to slum dwellers, rather than to the company. In response, many companies tell tourists to wait until the end of the tour to show any kind of monetary generosity.

In Langa, an oft-visited slum town in Cape Town, a mysterious donation box sits in the pre-school, placed there by a local tour company. Even the director of the school does not know who fills and empties its contents. “The pre-school itself is one beautiful success story. But the donation box in there is a point of concern. There’s this mystery around it, a lack of transparency,” Soderstrom told the HPR. And while the question of community approval was shaky to begin with, even for relatively recognized and established companies like Reality, the issue of direct donations makes the picture even more complex. Many of these families know that they are being “exploited” by the slum tour operators in their towns.

But they return, time and time again, to the helpless decision of continuing to participate in the tour itineraries, all for the small potential of “earning something as opposed to nothing.”

At the end of the day, does heightened mobility matter so much if someone else is holding the key? In an industry that depends almost wholly on the tour companies’ honesty and transparency, the promise to change the status quo might be feeble at best.

Tour operators have taken an important first step towards becoming “social good” ventures. Whether or not these goals will actually be achieved is still an open question. For one, operators should reflect and deliberate even harder, perhaps with the input of sociologists and international NGOs, on ways to make their impact structurally penetrating rather than decoratively helpful. They should open up and continue conversations with the community on how they can better meet its needs. All of this is necessary to ensure that slum dwellers like the one that I met in Beijing have not only onions, but also the agency and power to throw them and say “no.”

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INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: REV. AL SHARPTON with Tim Devine

What is the significance of the Ferguson episode’s location – that is, in a suburb in the middle of the country?

We’re dealing with the heartland of America. We’re not dealing with a major urban center. We’re not dealing with the stereotypical “this is the problem of the inner city,” and yet you have the same kind of bad police community relations, the same kind of charges of racial disparity when you look at the fact that the black community is 67 percent of the population but 82 percent of the cars stopped according to the state attorney general of Missouri. We are seeing that the racial disparities in the criminal justice system are not an inner-city problem alone.

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INTERVIEWS

Rev. Al Sharpton is a civil rights activist and talk show host.

He spoke with the HPR on August 15, six days after the Michael Brown shooting.

There has been a dramatic change, it seems, in Ferguson in the last 24 hours. What do you believe precipitated that?

I think the change is that because of the pressure that all of us put about the militarization of policing there and then they arrested two reporters by accident—I think that it forced the governor and the state to come in, and once the governor and the state came in and they shifted to a kinder, gentler kind of policing that changed how they dealt with the protesters and all.

When I came in the day after the looting and the fire to denounce the violence and to answer the call of the families to stand for justice but to establish non-violence, they had begun this buildup of a military-like reaction and I think they just went overboard, and you can’t put a whole community under police state. I think that the looting was wrong, but I think the police reaction was wrong. But what I don’t want to see lost in this is that we congratulate ourselves in stopping the militarization of police and act like the job is done; the job is not done until we deal with the case of Michael Brown.

And at one level I’m glad to see the protest about the military presence that police had decided to assume, but at another level I’m disturbed that some elements, not all, some elements responded more to two reporters being arrested than an unarmed man being killed.

I’ve noticed online a lot of responses from people of the millennial generation, particularly Howard University students who held up their hands for a photo in solidarity with Michael Brown. What can you say about the use of social media as a protest tool? Is it replacing conventional protest, and if so, to what effect?

Social media is effective in spreading and helping to spread the word. I think it enhances conventional techniques, because if you have social media without the marching and the rallies, then it’s not as effective. I think that if you have the rallies and the marches and social media, then it is effective.

For example, social media put out Trayvon Martin. Nobody responded until we were down there and started marching. So you need both, because without the dramatic presence of bodies, people on social media are non-apparent to the political powers that be. When they see bodies they know that people will vote and get them out of office. When they see things in social media it makes people aware, but it doesn’t speak truth to power in a way that threatens their continued political existence.

Do you see it as part of your role to elevate some of the things that you may see on a grassroots social media level to the national dialogue?

Absolutely. That is part of my role as a civil rights leader of National Action Network and we’ve been doing that for decades, and it’s part of my role now that I also do talk radio and talk television. Clearly I’m not on as a newsman, I’m on with an opinion advocating certain things, debating people that may agree or may disagree, and that’s the role of a civil rights activist. It’s to put a spotlight on things that would have been ignored. Dr. King was the greatest activist, no one even approaches him, but ultimately he was not a legislature. He did not pass the Civil Rights Act; he raised the awareness and dramatized the need for a civil rights bill. The Voting Rights Act he didn’t legislate. Adam Clayton Powell legislated it.

Thurgood Marshall argued it in court. King used a grassroots movement to bring awareness, and I think all of us in our own ways, minor ways, are trying to do the same things.

The Washington Post compared Ferguson to the Watts Riots of 1965. How is this different from other cases of alleged police brutality in the past and other cases of social unrest?

The similarity with Watts and Rodney King in South Central L.A. is that most violent reactions have not been around poverty; they’ve been around police. As one who condemns violence, I think it shows that [they react most strongly] when people feel that those who are paid and sworn to protect them let them down. What is not similar is it’s not Newark, or like L.A. with South Central, or with Watts, or Miami. Here, it’s in the heartland of America, in the suburbs, and you have this kind of reaction, I think that’s the difference.

Would you consider the damage done to Ferguson by this situation similar to the damage done to Watts or to Detroit or Newark but on a smaller scale relative to population and population density?

The damage done is different. There was more property damage in Watts and South Central. I think it was only one or two stores done in Ferguson. But I think that the image damage is far more devastating because ultimately Los Angeles will be remembered for a lot more than a riot. Ferguson will always be remembered for this. In terms of the immediate monetary, they may not have had all of downtown burned like South Central was, but in terms of their image as a community, they have probably more damage than all of them put together because Ferguson is on the map now as the place where an unarmed kid got killed and there was violence.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 45

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: MARTHA COAKLEY with John Pulice prise to your office, or did you expect that ruling from this court?

Knowing the makeup of this court and the conservative nature of it, as well as the fact that they took the case, we had some sense that it might not be exactly what we wanted.

We had won in federal court on more than one occasion. We thought that we were in a pretty good position given other bills—on both the local and state levels—that had been upheld before, but certainly the granting of cert and the makeup of this court led us to believe that [the law might be struck down].

Martha Coakley currently serves as attorney general of Massachusetts. She is the Democratic nominee for governor.

As attorney general, you’ve been involved in many high-profile cases, from abortion buffer zones to the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. How do you view your role as attorney general, and what is your biggest regret from your time in office?

Oh boy. We cover so much in the attorney general’s office— it’s one of the challenges and opportunities [of the office] because we do civil rights, we do cyber crime, we do consumer protection going after Wall Street. That’s been one of the biggest opportunities and successes we’ve had as well as, I think, challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. I do not look back on the past eight years and say, “If only I could have done this or that.” No one has actually asked me that in a while. I actually am very proud of what our office has been able to do. We have great people in the office, and many of them have gone on the bench or gone to other offices.

For instance, Katherine Clark, who is now a congresswoman, worked for me, as well as Jen Stark, who is now a district court judge, and Jim Ilkies, an appeals court judge.

It would have been better to win the buffer zone, but we knew with this court that there was a risk of some or all of that law being struck down, but we got right back to work after it, we thought about what we might do if it were struck down, and we did that.

Did that ruling surprise you? The First Circuit Court approved the law, but then the Supreme Court struck it down 9-0. Was that a great sur-

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What would be the chief goal of Governor Coakley’s first term? If you could achieve one thing, what would it be?

I would like to see, as I think this economy is turning around, that we make sure we turn it around for everyone in every section of the state. In other words, Boston and Cambridge and parts thereof are doing great, but we have income inequality, and we have achievement gaps even in those two cities … If, at the end of four years, we can see our unemployment rate down, growth in our [state revenue] that is coming in, and we see that people and businesses are both coming here and staying here because they want to, that will be the measure of my accomplishment.

The HPR is a college publication. Most of our readers are millennials. What do you think is the most important reason why they should vote for you for governor?

I think that many [millennials] are either in education now or just coming out of it, so realize that they’ve made the investment in education … I think for people in Massachusetts now, it’s not just about going to Wall Street and making a lot of money, it’s about the quality of life and asking, “How can I make a difference?” I’m very impressed by a generation that says, “we want relationships. We want to see our kids raised.”

That is encouraging to me, and I think that I would be the first woman governor of Massachusetts to say, “We can be prosperous and fair.”

I think what I bring and offer to this next generation is to say that we can make Massachusetts prosperous and fair. We can have a generation of people who can do well and do good for the next generation.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: CHARLIE BAKER with Jay Alver of that back to the commonwealth’s cities and towns so that they get funds for public safety. But my overall view on state spending is that everything deserves a look, always. I don’t know why we would necessarily single one thing or another at all. We should always be looking for ways to get things done smarter, faster, and cheaper, and I don’t think we should limit it to one thing in particular.

Massachusetts as a whole, and Boston in particular, has a ton of universities. Do you think that there are any issues with public universities in the state that need to be addressed?

Charlie Baker is the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts. He previously served as CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

How do you think your business experience would serve you in office?

I spent some time as secretary of health in [former Massachusetts governor William Weld’s] administration. I think of my career as a career spent in both the public and the private sectors. … I think having a pretty good understanding of how the government works and a pretty good understanding of how to run and manage a business in Massachusetts is a nice combination for somebody who wants to be the chief executive of the government. The second thing I would say is that I spent most of my career in healthcare, and healthcare is a big issue in Massachusetts. I think it’s one of those things that I have a pretty deep background in and a very thorough understanding of.

You’ve mentioned before that there are some places in the budget where cuts might be necessary or helpful. What areas do you believe are ripest for spending cuts?

I don’t think about it quite like that. Over the past six to seven years, state spending has grown by about $6 billion, while the wages that we tax have gone down by about $500 million. … One of the things I’ve said since the beginning of the race is, I believe that if state tax revenue should grow, then state funding for cities and towns should grow along with it.

Job number one is we need to do a better job of [negotiating with] the commonwealth’s cities and towns to make sure that as state tax revenues grow, we pass an appropriate piece

As governor, one of the things I would like to see is [for] the public university system to try to come up with a threeyear degree program: if someone’s willing to get their degree in three years, [colleges] should accommodate them and help them figure out how to get it done. That would certainly reduce the costs of their education in a pretty big way.

I also think that we should do more with co-op programs; they’re enormously successful in other places where they’re used, and other states dabble a little bit, but I really think the state ought to think about making that a fundamental part of … educating kids. The co-op program is a great way to help reduce the debt cost of college for a kid who’s trying to figure out a way to make it all happen.

The third thing I talked about was that the state government and state public higher-ed really need to embrace the move to online classes. I think for some kids there’s a great way to work that into a program that involves a co-op with a program that involves trying to get a three-year degree, because you can take the classes when you have the time.

You don’t have to take them when they’re being taught, but whatever time would work on your calendar. I think it’s a complement to an in-classroom experience. There are big opportunities there to help all kinds of kids who are trying to reduce the amount they have to spend on higher education.

And let’s face it, the public higher-ed system is kind of the crown jewel of Massachusetts, and we should remember that and understand it, but there are plenty of opportunities for people to take a little risk and see about what the best way to move into the heart of the next century … is. And there’s a lot of activity going on in schools in Massachusetts, things like the edX program with Harvard and MIT, and I really think we should be proactive about it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

FALL 2014 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 47

ENDPAPER

RAGE AGAINST THE SHEPHERD Gram Slattery

On September 22, William Deresiewicz, the opinionated and controversial author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, sat down for a question and answer session in Harvard’s Paine Hall. The atmosphere was respectable enough: on an elevated stage beside the scrawny, bespectacled bohemian sat three deans, one English professor, a recent Harvard graduate, and a current senior. Beneath them, a crowd of about 150 Cantabrigians, many dressed in formal wear, listened intently.

The introduction by the gregarious intellectual Homi Bhabha was long, florid, and chalked full of praise. Deresiewicz’s opening monologue was somewhat boring—(if only he could speak like he wrote!)—but no doubt helpful for those who hadn’t read his book or, more likely, the excerpt of his book in The New Republic.

Yet soon enough, matters took a turn for the tense and confrontational.

Excellent Sheep—which derides elite universities for their propensity to churn out uninspired students who gravitate toward uninspiring careers like finance and consulting—was a direct attack on the world the panelists held sacred. Deresiewicz claimed that current pedagogical methods taught students analytical skills, but failed to cultivate these students’ “souls” and “passions.” Now, the writer was in the citadel of the enemy, and its residents were asking him, politely, to shore up the many sections of his argument that were heavy on rhetoric and light on evidence.

He seemed surprised by this and treated the panelists with sass. When Professor Diana Sorenson asked him to substantiate an argument he made in Excellent Sheep—that elite schools were intentionally putting out financiers to keep alumni donations flowing in—he dismissed the need for evidence, saying that “others have made this claim before.”

When Bhabha offhandedly referenced the book’s $30 price tag while questioning whether the work was based too much on invective and finger pointing, Deresiewicz loudly condemned his comment as “disingenuous”—a back-and-forth that was followed by several tense seconds of silence.

“He kind of came off as kind of a dick,” said one HPR reporter afterward.

Like most Harvard undergrads, I do think Deresiewicz’s text

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was laughably light on fact, and heavy on polemical rhetoric and platitudes.

But beneath all the puffed up generalizations, Deresiewicz’s writings have brushed upon uncomfortable kernels of truth— even if these truths are insulated by false claims. Last year, 31 percent of the senior class went into consulting or finance.

Among men, fully one in four went into the latter, and it’s not because we all dreamed of becoming financial analysts or consultants when we were kids. Some of us did, sure, but a third of us? Not a chance in hell.

One of the amazing aspects of Harvard is the level of passion and talent one encounters—the amount of people who seem reared to be the next great writer, or physicist, or diplomat, or biologist. Even those who lack a driving passion have an enormous amount of potential skill and energy to shed upon the world. I truly believe that.

And yet the stories many of us could tell are disheartening.

Several of my friends dream of being educators or academics, yet openly say that they’d ditch it all for a high-powered job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

Another friend—who is fluent in Mandarin, was elected Phi Beta Kappa junior year, and received high honors for a thesis on Brazilian politics—now works at a multinational consultancy flying down to the Cayman Islands every few days to work on his first case. (Yay, tax evasion!)

Yet another acquaintance inveighed against Big Finance for a leftist magazine on campus under an alias because he was hired by a financial firm senior fall.

I don’t want to be a downer. These are just individual stories that can’t be extrapolated to a majority of the student body, and there’s not a day I’m not enlightened by my classmates, many of whom go on to impact the country and the world in laudable, often unorthodox ways. I also concede that the financial necessity can obstruct us from our dream career path, even at the ripe age of 22.

Yet, if I were permitted as a senior to step up on the pulpit and issue one appeal to my classmates it would be this: at least try to follow your passions. Let’s prove Deresiewicz wrong.

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