"Hah-vad"

Photo By Matt Stone

Back in the 1970s, I attended Boston University.  From the windows of some of the second- and third-floor classrooms, we could see out across the Charles River all the way to the dreamy spires of Harvard University in Cambridge, and could imagine an invisible stream of employment offers, opportunity, privilege and prestige channeled from the upper strata of American society straight toward Harvard and bypassing BU altogether.

In a recent Washington Post article, poet, translator, essayist, and Biblical scholar Sarah Ruden, wrote that the real institutional mission of Harvard is "instilling in the elite a conviction of innate superiority and a corresponding contempt for people with technical knowledge, culture, talent or professional experience.”

As has been widely reported in the news, Harvard recently rescinded a fellowship offer to whistle-blower and transgender activist Chelsea Manning, but extended a similar offer to Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, justified the decision to select Spicer and Lewandowski and reject Manning based on what "the community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire.”   To quote Francine Prose in a recent Guardian article, Dean Elmendorf's statement implies that students could learn more from two men "who had lied in service of a liar than from Manning – who had gone to jail for bravely leaking documents that revealed the truth about (among other things) our use of torture and the number of civilian deaths in Iraq."

To be clear, Chelsea Manning did not compromise U.S. National Security or disrupt the U.S.from continuing its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  She paid a steep price for her actions, and hearing her express how one can both serve one's country and decide to follow one's conscience during wartime, especially when you become aware that your country is violating international law and that your President, Secretary of State, National Security advisors and military leaders are lying about their policies and their destruction of countries and people, would be well worth hearing and debating at the Kennedy School.

Elite schools have long exhibited a trend of hiring former government officials to teach, whatever their prior actions and histories. John Yoo, the author of many of the Bush administration’s torture memos, is a tenured professor of law at UC Berkeley.  John Negroponte, who oversaw the CIA’s brutal war in Nicaragua and death squads in Honduras, is a distinguished fellow of “grand strategy” at Yale.  Fordham has named former CIA Director John Brennan as a fellow despite his past statements on torture.

The only credible explanation I can think of for why Spicer, Lewandowski, Yoo, Negroponte, and Brennan are all considerable acceptable for positions at elite universities and Manning not is that the combination of gender, sexual orientation, and ties to power and the elite make the former attractive to donors and future donors to the universities and the latter less so.  It becomes a self-fulfilling loop of the elite reinforcing the privilege and prestige of the elite, and everyone else left out.