For Sale

For the past eight months or so, I’ve been writing a column based on the premise that Harvard is effectively “For Sale,” arguing, week after week, that our numerous controversial financial ties are improper of our institution. I’ve tried to claim the self-aggrandizing high ground on everything ranging from the opioid epidemic to tyrannical regimes — quite the unrealistic effort for an exiled freshman Spaniard.

But what if the crux of my column turned out to be, simply put, incorrect? What if tainted donations were, like Harvard insists, merely the means to a noble end?

I’d consider it intellectually cowardly not to at least attempt to probe the internal logic behind philanthropy fanatics. So let us inspect the University’s point of view, and let us do so through the one individual who has repeatedly been cited, by the administration and others alike, as a key source of sketchy donation positivity: former University President Derek C. Bok.

I’ve never considered myself a huge fan of Michael R. Bloomberg — quite an unenviable position for someone trying to enter a dying media market. His political career always struck me as less than ideal, his troubling past statements as, well, extremely troubling. He’s hardly the kind of person I’d envision as the ideal Harvard donor, let alone the main funder of an entire, extremely influential University program.

So when the former New York City mayor and graduate of Harvard Business School decided to expand his philanthropic commitment to our school last month, I knew the donation was worth inspecting. The donation in question? A massive $150 million to create the Harvard Bloomberg Center for Cities program, building on the work of the year-long Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative that offers leadership training for mayors across America.

It's worth prefacing any analysis of Bloomberg’s donations with a basic overview of the controversies that have defined his public figure. The mayor has a turbulent past, rife with questionable decisions. There is, for example, the ‘joke’ book once compiled by his former colleagues, a collection of 90s-appropriate (and hence utterly sexist) zingers attributed to Bloomberg, including gems such as “if women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.” Of more impact and significance was his tenure as mayor of New York City, during which Black and brown youth were terrorized through millions of barely justified police stops known as “stop-and-frisk,” a tactic that only ceased after a federal court ruled it violated the constitutional rights of New York’s minority groups.

Dr. Ambreen Zaman Riaz was impressed by the restaurant. “It was a sushi place,” she says, “and it was really good by the way, really good sushi.” But it was the company, not the food, that surprised her. The restaurant wasn’t segregated by sex or gender — a true rarity in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom was modernizing before her own eyes.

Over a sometimes glitchy Zoom call, Zaman Riaz, then a Harvard graduate student, recounted the details of her April 2018 visit to the Saudi Kingdom. The trip, organized by the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security in collaboration with Gateway KSA, sent eleven Harvard students on a nine-day-long academic and cultural exchange mission. It was only one of Harvard’s many ties to the Saudi Kingdom in the months leading up to journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination — ties that included, among others, a multimillion-dollar history of gifts, an official campus visit by Prince Mohammed bin Salman that same March, and even direct collaboration with Saudi policymakers through the Kennedy School’s Evidence for Policy Design project.

Yet the trip, like most of our institutional ties to Riyadh, proved complicated at best.

At first glance, Leon D. Black seems like the ideal university donor, a poster boy for billionaire philanthropy. In 1990, he co-founded Apollo Global Management, a now colossal private equity firm. Black’s subsequent fortune allowed him to become a productive, charitable member of elite society, a patron of the arts both as Museum of Modern Art chairman and as a private collector best known for purchasing one of the four original versions of “The Scream” for just under $120 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

A successful alumnus of the Harvard Business School, Black has also become a prominent supporter of our university and its intellectual mission. He and his family foundation have pledged almost $20 million to Harvard and its various schools, including a $7.5 million contribution to create student fellowships for U.S. military members at the Kennedy School of Government where he (coincidentally enough) also serves as a member of the Leadership Council.

Yet his Munch-buying luck has been down as of late. In October, a New York Times exposé revealed extensive ties between Black and another New York financier: convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein. Back in 2019, Black had dismissed the allegations of criminal Epstein connections and the “tsunami” of coverage as “the gift that never stops giving … it’s salacious, it involves elements of politics, of me-too, of rich and powerful people.”

Zeynep opens up rather easily — in fact, she rushes through our interview offering mostly unprompted answers, taking only small breaks to relight her dying cigarette. She strikes me as casual in a distinctly Gen-Z way, using expletives out of frustration, and switching swiftly to dry, cynical humor. But for the occasional pause to check the English translation of a Turkish word, she would fit right into our campus.

She also happens to be under house arrest, facing an uncertain and unenviable fate.

Zeynep — who asked to be identified by a pseudonym in The Crimson due to fears of retaliation from the Turkish government— is a student at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Her institution has been at the center of a spiraling national controversy for more than a month, ever since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed Melih Bulu — a political ally with no professional ties to Boğaziçi — as its new rector. Rector Bulu and President Erdoğan did not respond to requests for comment for this article. The decision, which broke with a decades-long streak of university-selected rectors, has been criticized as an attack on an institution known for its liberal, radically undogmatic campus, and prompted immediate backlash from students and faculty members. That’s what first prompted Zeynep — a self-described “apolitical” person who doesn’t usually get involved in protests with the exception of Pride parades — to act.

McKinsey & Company is in the news, again. The consulting company — at times dubbed “McHarvard” for its reliance on our graduates — has found itself at the center of a controversy over its role in the ongoing opioid epidemic. The story is as depressing as one might expect, featuring top executives seeking to increase revenue in a Machiavellian, almost too-dark-to-be-true fashion, including by discussing the possibility of offering rebates to distributors for Oxycontin overdoses attributable to their sales, helping Purdue turn a profit despite the deaths.

That much isn't surprising, not at this point. The consulting firm's penchant for unethical practices has been broadly publicized. This isn't even the first time McKinsey’s collaboration with Purdue Pharma has come under scrutiny: last year, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura T. Healey ’92 highlighted the firm's role in opioid marketing, including its efforts to “counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” on Oxycontin. McKinsey has also faced (and denied) other accusations of unethical conduct across nations and continents. Some are mundane and even meme-inspiring, like the alleged price-fixing efforts of bread in Canada; others, like the firm's ties to American immigration authorities and its efforts to cut spending on food and medical care for immigrants, prove more concerning. If that wasn’t enough, reporting by the New York Times has accused the firm of helping "raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe," through its work with Saudi Arabian, Chinese, and Turkish governments, among others.

But again, those controversies should hardly shock us as they embody the basic, understated ethos of the firm: ensuring increased profits for its clients, whoever they might be, at almost any cost. It fits a decades-long pattern that has, through cuts to middle management in the name of efficiency and the promotion of hyper-glorified managing consultants, helped gut the American middle class.

Rhonda Lotti heard a knock on her door.

It was a Monday, July 11, 2011. Rhonda was at her home in Watertown, Mass., barely a 15-minute drive from Harvard’s campus. She had spoken to her 19-year-old daughter earlier that morning on her way to work, chiding her for not coming home the night before.

“I passed her in the hall and just said ‘You know Mariah I’m really not happy with this and we’re going to have to talk about this when I get home from work.’ And I rushed out the door.”

The 2016 election came as a shock — even if it shouldn't have. I remember exactly where I was that night. Awake at 5 a.m. Spanish time, eagerly refreshing and cursing at the New York Times’s infamous needle. Four years and a pandemic later, the memory still haunts me.

Of course, 2020 is not 2016. Joseph R. Biden's lead is significantly larger than Hillary R. Clinton's ever was, and most pollsters agree that undecided voters (who decisively broke for Trump in 2016) are few and far between. But the outcome is still far from guaranteed. From concerns over lackluster Black and Latinx turnout to alarming Supreme Court rulings (including Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s assessment that late absentee ballots shouldn't be allowed to flip a state, as if that specific set of Democratic-leaning votes was somehow illegitimate), uncertainty has plagued the last few days of the campaign. And that doesn't even take into account the small but concerning possibility that the results will be outright rejected by a volatile president. Trump, despite the polls, could still be re-elected.

So what then? What if he wins? Or, for that matter, what if he refuses to lose?

When Harvard received a donation to revamp and rename its School of Public Health in 2014, most press releases and public coverage focused on the more amicable face of the deal. Gerald L. Chan, the "science enthusiast," was the only individual donor named in the University's official press release. Our own newspaper detailed his “quiet leadership”; we noted his extensive links to the University. Sure, naming an entire school after a donor (or, in this case, his father) was unconventional and entirely unprecedented. But given Gerald Chan's commitment to our institution and the fact that the sum was the largest donation in our history, we all settled in to enjoy the newly well-funded, School of Public Health — few questions asked.

Yet the donation didn't come from Gerald Chan — not directly, and certainly not exclusively. The official donor was in fact the Morningside Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit co-founded by Gerald and his brother Ronnie C. Chan.

A brief gloss of the foundation itself reveals that the Chan gift was significantly more complicated than the optimistic University press release. For one, the funding for the gift is at least somewhat unclear. The Morningside Foundation's publicly available 990 tax returns from 2014 cite three sources of income. Among them are two companies named after East Asian teas, Bancha and Keemun Inc, both located at the same Iowa address (one that's linked to Morningside Private Investors, another Chan Venture). Both donated the exact same amount, $1.05 million. But I couldn’t find any other mention of either company in the public domain, certainly not the presence you might expect for corporations engaging in millionaire philanthropy. These attributes — bland names, lack of an internet presence, stated address that lacks any kind of relevant professional infrastructure — are all typical of shell companies (though in all fairness my review of the existing record, or lack thereof, doesn't allow me to discern whether Bancha and Keemun do covertly engage in some extremely profitable, million-dollar generating business). The third Morningside donor, and the main source of the Harvard gift, is the “Echo Enterprises International Holdings Group Limited.” Its Monaco address appears in the Offshore Leaks Database of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as relevant in the Panama Papers, and linked to yet another Chan Venture, Stealth BioTherapeutics. The Morningside Foundation did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Dr. Gülnar Eziz seems eager to talk. As we settle down for our interview, she points out her Zoom background, a gorgeous image of sinuous, golden hills. It's a picture of the Tarim Basin in the northern Chinese region of Xinjiang, one of the most iconic natural landmarks of Dr. Eziz's homeland. Not that she is eager to use the region's name herself. In fact, she's quick to correct me: “So-called Xinjiang” she explains, means “new border” in Chinese. “It's really clear. It is a new border — for them.”

Dr. Eziz is a Harvard Preceptor in the Uyghur and Chaghatay languages. Her role at Harvard represents the careful balancing act that defines our University's response to the unfolding crisis in her native region; one that seeks to recognize the ongoing atrocities against the Uyghur people without ruffling any Communist Party of China feathers.

Her trajectory to our University is depressingly similar to that of other Uyghurs living abroad. She came to the United States to pursue the study of her native tongue in more depth, and witnessed from abroad as the Chinese Government’s crackdown on her people intensified. “All of my former professors are in jail right now,” she mentions at one point, adding that many of her colleagues have found the same fate “for no reason” other than studying a language and culture that have faced forceful suppression.

University controversies, particularly when connected to donations and funding, are frequently spoken of in abstract terms. We frame them as a matter of right and wrong; we describe some investments as "morally abhorrent", and deem Arthur M. Sackler's donations "dirty money." The entire approach is deontological, more concerned with rules of "good'"and "evil" than with the actual impact of the interactions themselves.

Those arguments remain fundamental. They represent the ideological backbone of several of the most promising campaigns on campus, including fossil fuel and private prison divestment, where the immediate material impact of policy changes is minimal or hotly contested. But focusing on whether controversial financial ties are inherently "wrong" can sometimes paint an incomplete picture, ignoring the real, practical consequences that they carry.

Jeffrey E. Epstein's well-documented links to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics offer a revealing example. The New York financier served as a prominent Harvard donor for years, until his 2008 conviction on child prostitution charges led to a University-wide ban on accepting direct gifts from him. Yet, as acknowledged by the Office of the General Counsel’s report on the matter, the ties between Professor Martin A. Nowak — director of the PED — and Jeffrey Epstein continued for years; visits, a private office, and access to other faculty were among the privileges accessible to the billionaire sex offender.