Harvard University

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel critic

      by

      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel criticACLU and Pen America back former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth and say decision ‘raises serious questions’ Leading civil rights organisations have condemned Harvard Kennedy School’s denial of a position to the former head of Human Rights Watch over the organisation’s criticism of Israel.Harvard blocks role for former Human Rights Watch head over Israel criticismRead moreThe American Civil Liberties Union called the refusal of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth “profoundly troubling”. PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression, said the move “raises serous questions” about one of the US’s leading schools of government. Roth also received backing from other human rights activists.But the Kennedy School found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW, particularly over the group’s report two years ago that accused Israel of practising a form of race-based apartheid in the Palestinian occupied territories.The Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered Roth a position as a senior fellow shortly after he retired as director of HRW in April after 29 years. But the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, allegedly vetoed the move.A professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School, Kathryn Sikkink, told the Nation that Elmendorf said to her that Roth would not be permitted to take up the position because HRW has an “anti-Israel bias” and its former director had written tweets critical of Israel.Roth told the Guardian that Harvard’s move was a reflection of “how utterly afraid the Kennedy School has become of any criticism of Israel” under pressure from donors and influential supporters within the school of Israel’s rightwing government.The director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, urged the Kennedy School “to reverse its decision”.“If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling – from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint, he said. “Scholars and fellows have to be judged on their merits, not whether they please powerful political interests.”PEN America also backed Roth.“It is the role of a human rights defender to call out governments harshly, to take positions that are unpopular in certain quarters and to antagonize those who hold power and authority,” the group said. “There is no suggestion that Roth’s criticisms of Israel are in any way based on racial or religious animus.“Withholding Roth’s participation in a human rights program due to his own staunch critiques of human rights abuses by governments worldwide raises serious questions about the credibility of the Harvard program itself.”The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which promotes free speech on college campuses, wrote to Elmendorf saying that the Kennedy School “undermines its laudable commitment to intellectual diversity and free inquiry when it rescinds a fellowship offer based on the candidate’s viewpoint or speech”.But Harvard found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW over the group’s reports on Israel.NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based organisation that campaigns against humanitarian groups critical of Israeli government policies, accused HRW under Ross’s leadership of seeking to “delegitimize Israel”.“The dean at Harvard was not fooled by the moral facade granted to Roth and HRW. He recognized Roth’s central contributions to legitimizing antisemitism,” NGO Monitor’s president, Gerald Steinberg, said.UN Watch, a pro-Israel lobby group, described the Kennedy School’s move as “good news”.“Ken Roth had a pathological obsession with singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment, disproportionately to shocking degrees, with the apparent aim to portray the Jewish state in a manner that would evoke repulsion and disgust,” it said.Roth has long been the target of a personalised campaign of abuse, including charges of antisemitism, even though his father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He said HRW faced similar attacks on its motives when it released its report titled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, even though leading Israeli politicians have also “warned that the occupation has become a form apartheid”.“The irony is that when we issued the report, the Israeli government was at a loss to find anything wrong with it. They fell back on the usual arguments of, ‘you must be antisemitic’. I take that as a … victory because if all they can do is name call, they have nothing substantive to say,” he said.The Kennedy School did not respond to requests for comment.TopicsUS newsUS politicsHarvard UniversityHigher educationUS universitiesIsraelPalestinian territoriesnewsReuse this content More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s worst toadies hold degrees from Harvard and Yale. Did they learn anything? | Robert Reich

      by

      Trump’s worst toadies hold degrees from Harvard and Yale. Did they learn anything?Robert ReichPoliticians educated at some of the US’s most elite universities are spreading conspiracy theories that they surely know are untrue. What happened to ‘service and stewardship’? The original justification for elite higher education in the United States was to train the future leaders of American democracy. As Charles W Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, noted, Harvard existed to inculcate the ideals of “service and stewardship”.Since then, Harvard has produced eight US presidents; Yale, five. (Stanford can boast Herbert Hoover, if it feels compelled to do so.)Elite universities have also produced a disproportionate number of senators and representatives from both parties. In fact, Republicans elected to the Senate over the last decade are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to have attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford.So how to explain Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, now the third-ranking House Republican, who recently called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch-hunt”, voted to invalidate the 2020 election, and has repeated Trump’s big lie of election fraud?Or Josh Hawley, Stanford class of 2002 and Yale law class of 2006, now senator from Missouri, who in December 2020 became the first US senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, then led Senate efforts to overturn the electoral college vote count, and fist-bumped the rioters on January 6?Or Ted Cruz, Princeton class of 1992 and Harvard law class of 1995, now senator from Texas, who in late 2020 joined in John Eastman’s and Trump’s plot to object to the election results in six swing states and delay accepting the electoral college results on January 6, potentially enabling Republican state legislatures to overturn them?And how to explain a new crop of Republican Senate candidates?JD Vance, Yale Law class of 2013, now Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, has claimed that there “were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. When asked earlier this year if he thought the 2020 election was “stolen”, he said, “Yeah, I do.”Blake Masters, Stanford class of 2008 and Stanford law class of 2012, now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, has declared in campaign ads that “Trump won”. He promotes rightwing “replacement theory” – that Democrats favor illegal immigration “so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat”.These alumni of America’s finest institutions of higher education haven’t adhered to their alma maters’ ideals of service and stewardship of American democracy. In fact, they’re actively wrecking American democracy.Nor can these elite graduates claim they don’t know any better. Most third-graders can distinguish a lie from the truth.No, these scions of the most prestigious halls of American academe are knowingly and intentionally abetting the most dangerous attack on American democracy since the civil war.Whatever did they learn from their rarefied education? Obviously, zilch.The core of a good liberal arts education is ethics. The central question is the meaning of a good society. This has been the case since the 18th century, when most of America’s prestigious institutions of higher education were founded.Adam Smith, the progenitor of modern economics, didn’t call his field economics. He called it “moral philosophy”, and thought his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments more important than his The Wealth of Nations.Edmund Burke – Irish statesman and philosopher, and godfather of modern conservatism – didn’t advise that people in public life seek power above all else. He argued that they owe the public their “judgment and conscience”.There is no single answer to the meaning of a good society, of course. It is the pursuit of it that draws on one’s judgment and conscience. This is why higher education has advanced the role of reason in human affairs and stood for the Enlightenment values of democracy and the rule of law.But this new crop of Republican pretenders hasn’t learned anything of the kind. They are practitioners of a much earlier and more cynical set of ideas: that might makes right, that the purpose of human endeavor is to gain power, and that ambition and treachery trump (excuse the verb) all other values.I can’t help wondering: what do they see when they look in the mirror each morning? And what do they tell themselves after a day of deceit?Any of them who tries to justify the despicable means they are employing by telling themselves they can do more good by gaining or keeping power is under a dangerous illusion. As the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin once said, “If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.”These products of the best education America has to offer are betraying the core values of America.They deserve only shame.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansDonald TrumpHarvard UniversityYale UniversitycommentReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Justice Thomas Ruled on Election Cases. Should His Wife’s Texts Have Stopped Him?

      by

      The nature of the text messages was enough to require recusal, legal experts said. But the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.WASHINGTON — The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy.It is one thing, experts in legal ethics said on Friday, for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to express political views, even ones shot through with wild conspiracy theories. That may not by itself require the justice’s recusal from cases touching on those views.But the text messages from Ms. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Ginni, revealed something quite different and deeply troubling, experts said.The messages from Ms. Thomas to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, sent during and just after the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.“I’m not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that ‘this is terrible,’ said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.“But she wasn’t doing just that,” Professor Frost said. “She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing.”The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas’s political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas’s “conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt” and that he had been “the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported.”Justice Thomas, Mr. Wyden said, “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”But Justice Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after being treated for the last week for flulike symptoms, has long been a pillar of the conservative establishment. Republicans, even those who have distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the more extreme wing of their party, showed no interest in pressuring him to recuse himself.Ms. Thomas’s text messages were heated and forceful, urging Mr. Meadows to pursue baseless legal challenges. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” one said.Ms. Thomas’s activities should have prompted Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from cases related to them, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.“He had an obligation not to sit in any case related to the election, the Jan. 6 committee or the Capitol invasion,” he said.Professor Frost agreed that the situation was “an easy case.”“When your spouse is conversing with people who have some control over litigation to challenge an election,” she said, “you shouldn’t be sitting on the Supreme Court deciding that election or any aspect of it.”But Justice Thomas did participate in a ruling in January on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block release of White House records concerning the attack on the Capitol. The court rejected the request, in a sharp rebuke to the former president.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal, one in which Mr. Meadows filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that “the outcome of this case will bear directly” on his own efforts to shield records from the House committee investigating the attacks beyond those he had provided.The Supreme Court last month refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, around the time of the text messages, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down.In February 2021, Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures.Ms. Thomas’s messages urged Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to pursue baseless legal challenges.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” he wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.”Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are subject to a federal law on recusal. The law says that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said.A more specific provision concerning relatives, including spouses, might also apply to his situation. Judges should not participate, the law says, in proceedings in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”Professor Gillers said the word “interest” was the key.“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Professor Gillers said. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

      by

      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican accuses Harvard of 'caving to the woke left' after school cuts ties

      by

      A Republican member of Congress claimed on Tuesday to have undergone a “rite of passage and badge of honor” and accused Harvard University of “caving to the woke left”, after she lost an advisory role for perpetuating Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York was removed from a senior advisory committee at Harvard’s school of government after she declined to resign voluntarily, according to Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Harvard Kennedy School.Hundreds of students and alumni called on Harvard to cut ties with Stefanik, a 2006 Harvard graduate, after last week’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol, which Trump incited.Stefanik was among 147 Republicans who went ahead with objections to certifying Joe Biden’s election, even after the attack left five people dead.She condemned the rioters but repeated false claims about “unprecedented voting irregularities” in the presidential election.Until Harvard took action, Stefanik was one of roughly a dozen current and former public servants on a senior advisory committee for the Institute of Politics, a program intended to get undergraduates interested in public service careers.In a statement, Stefanik said: “The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse and ultimately the student experience.”Elmendorf said the decision was not based on political ideology.“Rather, in my assessment, Elise has made public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.”Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district, was re-elected to a fourth term in November. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Harvard to reject $8.7m in federal aid after Trump cites school’s endowment

      by

      The Ivy League school is following the actions of Stanford and Princeton universities, which also turned down funds amid growing scrutiny People walk past a statue of John Harvard on the university’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: CJ Gunther/EPA Harvard University announced Wednesday it will turn down $8.7m in federal coronavirus relief, a day after […] More