THE HARVARD CRIMSON | April 19, 2019
Page 6
Editorial The Crimson Editorial board
op-ed
Student Voices and House Communities
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n a recent meeting, the Undergraduate Council voted against a measure that would have issued a formal statement of support for Danu A.K. Mudannayake ’20, a student activist, who has called for Winthrop House Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. to step down in the wake of his decision to represent Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Mudannayake, a Crimson Design editor, was involved in an incident with Winthrop House tutors Carl L. and Valencia Miller during which Miller claimed Mudannayake harassed his family without provocation, and Mudannayake claimed Miller took pictures and videos of her while she was eating dinner. The two parties have filed reports with Harvard University Police Department reflecting their opposing accounts of the April 3 confrontation. If the UC won’t stand behind its constituent students in their right to voice their opinions, then we will. This Board stands by the right of students to voice their opinions and free speech of students. Regardless of the nature of the differing opinions, they point to a concerning issue. We are deeply troubled by the state of affairs in Winthrop House. Our concern, as we have opined, began with Sullivan’s decision to take on the role of Weinstein’s attorney, while acting as faculty dean, a choice that made for a questionable House environment for victims of sexual misconduct and assault. Those concerns have been worsened by the perpetuation and heightening of troubling
power dynamics in the House, as relates specifically to student-tutor relations and more broadly to students’ sense of place in a House community. In critiquing the power dynamics in Winthrop House here, we do not claim to know the reality of the conflict in the dining hall two weeks ago. However, the way in which that conflict has played out makes clear that Harvard lacks an adequate procedure for these sorts of grievances outside of going to the police.
If the UC won’t stand behind its constituent students in their right to voice their opinions, then we will. Given that, the University should establish or, if already in place, clarify institutional processes available to students when they may not feel comfortable expressing questions, concerns, or grievances to those figures who have explicit or implied hierarchical and potentially punitive authority over them. Students who choose to speak up should not have to fear retaliation in airing their concerns. Such a process should address and level power dynamics in institutional relationships by providing an impartial evaluative body and framework, much like the Title IX office exists for cases of sexual or gender-based harassment.
We stand behind students who are making their voices heard to fight against these dynamics and this environment as well as those who have felt victimized by it. Moreover, we acknowledge that we are by no means the first to call attention to this issue. Rather, we hope to lift up the words of those around us who have spoken on their behalf, including the deans of other Houses and many of our peers. Last week, Eliot House Faculty Dean Gail A. O’Keefe sent an email to Eliot House denouncing the way in which the Millers have navigated the incident. We laud O’Keefe for standing behind her student and setting a positive example for the broader community. The language the Millers have used to describe and respond to the incident is disturbing at best. As a community, we should continue to encourage students to voice their opinions. Students who speak out in our community — with the intent of and goodfaith actions toward creating a welcoming and inclusive home for all — should feel safe in their ability to do so. This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
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University Ethics and the Spirit of Accountability Anwar Omeish The University And Its Discontents
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n 1980, Cambridge City Hall was draped in purple to mourn the city’s “slow death.” The killer? Harvard land purchases, which, due to Harvard’s tax-exempt status, endangered property tax revenues. As a result, the burden of funding city services — including those benefiting Harvard affiliates — fell on Cambridge’s other, often poorer residents. Today, Harvard owns 10 percent of Cambridge and six percent of Allston, paying a fraction of what would otherwise fund city operations. In this respect, as one union organizer put it, Harvard acts less like a university and more like a hedge fund with a university attached to it. This is true of past and present investments, labor practices, affiliations, and actual behavior as Greater Boston’s neighbors. It is clear to many of us that this relationship between Harvard and surrounding communities — a growing UniverCity — is immoral. Indeed, many agree that we need greater accountability for our impact on communities locally and globally; Harvard, it seems, must be held accountable to something. But to what? And what would that look like? Our motto, for its part, claims communal accountability to truth. University President Lawrence S. Bacow commented on the nature of this accountability at a recent event: He noted that Harvard scholarship on the harms of the prison-industrial complex — i.e. Harvard’s revelation of truth — offsets our moral imperative to divest from that complex — that is, to be held accountable based on truth we reveal. Far from “reasonable,” this is a moral logic distorted by power: We ourselves are not held accountable to values because our role is to produce the very terms within which those values operate. In this way, our truth production operates not as liberatory but as grounds for a state of moral exception in which shedding light is deemed more important than addressing that which light is shed upon. Our pursuit of truth is so sacred, we say, that it cannot be tainted by work toward its own logical conclusions. But whose job is it to hold us to truth, anyway? Theoretically, university ac-
countability is in faculty hands: Tenure grants them independence they subsequently use to steer decision-making responsive to truth’s imperatives. But the last half-century has seen the number of university administrators multiply, limiting faculty purview. Simultaneously, we have realized that those we are taught to trust — faculty, congresspeople, judges — rarely reflect the needs of those marginalized by the power they wield. As a result, we are left with arrogantly vacant self-accountability structures lacking both jurisdiction and perspectival knowledge necessary to their mandate. We, all-knowing, concurrently reveal the truth and hold ourselves accountable to it. This self-accountability pervades campuses, seemingly innocuous. We tailor political programming, for example, to student interest, granting self-gratification precedence over moral discomfort. We deem time commitments “barriers” to public service, creating insignificant service opportunities easier to squeeze into self-centered schedules. We limit our political stances based on donor discomfort, even discomfort borne of their own complicity. Even student-activists sometimes adopt this logic: We argue not in terms of justice, but based on campus opinion — the Harvard community wants x, so administrators should deliver. After all, we think, we produce leaders (and soon-to-be-donors!) here; we must indulge their interests, not hold them accountable to higher values. Our measure of success is not what good we produce in the world; it is, instead, whether we are seen by ourselves (and those we deem peers) as having produced it. Given rampant university corporatization and self-satisfied anointing of ourselves as arbiters of what needs doing in the world, we become lawmaker, judge, and jury of our own actions. This leaves us without answers to the age-old question: Who guards the guardians? The fact is, just like the state, we cannot trust universities to hold themselves accountable — especially as decision-making moves into administrative hands with neither tenure-granted independence nor insight into most-affected constituencies. Instead, to engage the world around us with moral courage, we must build systems that genuinely empower local and otherwise non-Harvard voices in our decision-making. Only
by doing so can we create space for true, rather than self-serving, institutional accountability. During my time here, I have been lucky to glimpse such possibility. Through the Phillips Brooks House Association, I am part of generations of students challenging Harvard to do better not according to self-defined standards, but according to what partner communities want for themselves. Because we are held accountable to these partners through our organizational structures, we hold others at Harvard accountable for community impact, too. That’s a form of leadership that centers non-Harvard voices over Harvard ones — and is stronger for it. PBHA is perhaps unique nationwide (and product of decentralized history rather than institutional design), but other structures suggest similar potential. The Harvard Foundation, for example, despite its significant flaws, had a director with the autonomy to challenge policies that hurt students of color (autonomy that will disappear upon integration into the Dean of Students Office and conversion to administrative leadership). Imagine if the Foundation had used that autonomy to pull stakeholders from communities of color into decision-making bodies that, rather than simply advancing student needs, challenged the University’s impact on marginalized communities worldwide! Imagine if that sort of accountability structure was a resourced, accepted part of campus ecology, part of continual self-review we make possible because our duty toward justice is so great that we cannot entrust it to ourselves alone. If we take our values seriously, we must find ways beyond ourselves to be held accountable for our impact. In pursuit of radical, liberatory universities that serve justice, what might shared ownership and control of universities look like? What might happen if we give those we hurt a stake in decision-making power over us? In confronting ourselves through others’ eyes, what types of institutions might we build — together? —Anwar Omeish ’19 is a Social Studies Concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.
The Kind of Community We Want to Be By Salma Abdelrahman and Ilana A. Cohen
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n response to recent events on campus, University President Lawrence S. Bacow has asked the question, “What kind of community do we want to be?” We, as members of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign and the Fossil Free Divest Harvard Campaign, want Harvard to be a community that has the right relationship with other people and our planet. Both mass incarceration and global climate change reflect a systematic disregard for the wellbeing of our communities and our collective home. We, above all else, are working for a world in which these relationships are healed and balanced — a world in which we are liberated. We recognize that this vision extends beyond Harvard’s endowment. We have seen the destructive forces of racial and climate injustice first-hand in our hometowns and here in Boston. As members of the Harvard community and of communities beyond these walls, we want a Harvard that advances a more just and sustainable future. We want a Harvard that displays the civic leadership it expects from its students. This is why we are asking the administration to honor our commitment to Veritas by divesting from two industries whose aims undermine the principles for which it claims to stand. Over the past few weeks, President Bacow has emphasized the importance of civil discourse. We recognize that real engagement between community members is vital for working towards a better future. However, that engagement must be equitable and honest. The efforts of organizers of color to show the urgency of these issues like mass incarceration, which disproportionately affect black and brown communities, seem to have been interpreted by the administration as hostile or aggressive. This framing has consistently been used nationally and historically to silence people of color, and specifically women of color, speaking honestly to the urgency of issues that destroy lives. This means that “civil” discourse is simply impossible for us to achieve on the president’s terms. We cannot have real civil discourse if the administration refuses to recognize the reality of the violations against people and communities it is perpetuating and the legitimate challenges to its disparate financial and ethical principles. As it stands, conversation around Harvard’s endowment can occur only on the terms of those with the power to manage it. Members of the Harvard community, who are not included in the closed-door meetings of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard Management Company, cannot know the realities of Harvard’s investment portfolio. Without any transparency or public accountability, injustice breeds behind those closed doors and Harvard faces no repercussions for profiting off of the exploitation of individuals, communities, and our planet. We have already seen efforts by the administration to keep those doors closed. Recently, Harvard Management Company scrubbed its website of references to divestment. There is no longer any mention of the ethical reasons to divest or any recognition of Harvard’s past decisions to do so from firms doing business with the apartheid South African government and big tobacco. Harvard’s administration is not only refusing to engage in real dialogue, it is actively working to stifle it. The first step towards real engagement, then, is to publicly disclose Harvard’s investment portfolio. For the time Bacow has been in office, he has ignored our vision of the community we want to be and of the leadership we want Harvard to display. In Fossil Free Divest Harvard’s public forum, he reiterated the same arguments against divestment that have been used since 2012 to justify Harvard’s inertia. Since 2012, the existential threat posed by climate change has only accelerated and over two million incarcerated people have suffered egregious human rights abuses behind bars — abuses off which Harvard continues to profit. Bacow told us that he responds to “reason,” not “pressure.” Yet it seems that even on the plane of “reasonable” discourse he cannot make a substantive contribution to the conversation we are asking to have. If Harvard can engage positively with the fossil fuel and private prison industries to shape a better future as the president contends, where is the evidence of that engagement? If industries predicated on extraction and exploitation can suddenly change their model of business to accommodate our ethical principles, where is the proof? At the public forum, Bacow asked, “What happens the day after we divest?” President Bacow, the answer is that — after celebration, of course, as Chemistry professor James G. Anderson suggested at the forum — we keep working. We are not fooled into thinking that divesting Harvard or just one actor, albeit a very economically and politically powerful one, can alleviate the stains of climate and racial injustice on our world. Divestment is just one step forward in the fight to remove these stains. But it is a step that our community can take, and one we have taken before. Disclosure of Harvard’s endowment holdings is a necessary component in beginning meaningful dialogue around what ethical investment truly means. During Harvard Heat Week, we are inviting our allies around the world to join us in calling for divestment. Yet our call is for Harvard’s administration to do much more than divest: We are calling for them to join us in realizing our vision for a more just and sustainable world and for a Harvard that is a leader in it.
— Salma Abdelrahman ’20 is an African and African American Studies Concentrator in Eliot House, and is a member of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign. Ilana A. Cohen ’22 is a joint concentrator in Philosophy and Social Studies in Pennypacker Hall, and is a member of Divest Harvard.