The University and its Discontents
A Thousand Possibilities
Universities, like most institutions, are built upon choices. Entrenched choices, perhaps, seemingly inevitable choices, but choices nonetheless. We choose, for example, to neglect our limitations, to ally with hegemonic power, to marshal our truth-seeking as absolution from moral duty.
But these are choices we do not have to make: We can, in fact, choose otherwise. We can choose to confront our scholarship’s complicity, to lead against injustice, to accept responsibility to those around us. We can choose to understand that inaction, too, is a form of action; that refusal to choose, too, is a choice. We can always choose otherwise.
University Ethics and the Spirit of Accountability
In 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.
Critique of Militarized Reason
In 2007, I went to a protest against the Iraq War with my family. Unbeknownst to us, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was using the protest to test new technologies: Small, surveilling “insect-drones” disguised as dragonflies flew over our slogans and signs.
Since the Cold War and, more earnestly, since 9/11, the U.S. government has funneled billions into developing such technologies: Defense and security research comprise over 48 percent of the overall U.S. Research and Development budget — the Department of Defense holds the largest share of such funding by a wide margin. The impact of this funding is clear: It underlies the sordid history of the 21st century’s well-documented travesties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and others less-documented across the world.
Negligent Forms of Academic Life
If you took Social Studies 10: Introduction to Social Theory, you, like me, may have been told that Durkheim’s use of “primitive” was simply an “objective” descriptor of aboriginal religion. You may have questioned Jefferson’s slavery, only to be told that although these failings were regrettable, they should not “impede” scholarly engagement.
Such qualms were likely deemed tragic yet forgone facts, immaterial to theoretical production. Western modernity’s underside was presumably extraneous to Tocqueville and Locke, germane only for Fanon or Chakrabarty. Questions of global significance were probably dismissed in favor of the West’s grand narrative of self-constitution, its great myth that its so-called progress was the product of truth-discerning rationality rather than historically-specific (and undeniably limited) approaches to the world.
Eyes Upon the University
On the top floor of Winthrop House’s newly-renovated Beren Hall, there is a beautiful meeting space built to host House and College events. In golden letters circling the ceiling, atop white pillars, are John Winthrop’s famous words: “We shall be as a city upon a hill: the eyes of all people are upon us.”
This is the promise of Harvard: We are an institution committed to truth, stubbornly free of influences that threaten it — the unbreakable bedrock of civil society. At our best and most courageous, we generate challenging ideas, launch incisive critiques at injustice, and call for the realization of a better and more truthful world for all of its inhabitants. In this vision, we are the city upon a hill, opening the eyes that gaze upon us and working for and alongside them. Through intrepid scholarship and bold critique, we live up to our liberatory potential, collectively expanding political possibility in a deeply aching world.