During the speech that formally announced the start of Harvard’s $6.5 billion Capital Campaign, President Faust set forth her hopes for the university’s future and defined its mission. While asserting that the campaign should fund Harvard’s continued legacy of innovation and discovery, she also explained how it should ensure that the university’s work is “as good as it is great,” or as moral as it is excellent.
The sentiment that President Faust shared during her Harvard Campaign speech, however, is in stark contrast with her recent public statement regarding Divestment. In this statement, Faust reveals a “troubling inconsistency” between Harvard’s knowledge and its practice when it comes to investing and managing its wealth. This realization calls for a broader evaluation of the impacts of Harvard’s investments and a clarification of the university’s overall mission.
For instance, while Harvard faculty is making remarkable strides in the fields of agroforestry and sustainable farming, the university is funding companies that are antithetical to these discoveries. Dr. Joshua Humphreys, a fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, explained, “Harvard has been making very aggressive investments in real assets, such as timberland and farmland in developing markets. Those have had very deleterious effects on local communities and environments. Harvard has violated local laws in Argentina around wetland conservation, for example, and these are some of the most profitable investments that Harvard makes.”
Regretfully, there are far too many of these kinds of investments within Harvard’s portfolio. This summer, Harvard was sued for the illegal practices of Agrícola Brinzal, a Chilean logging company that is almost entirely owned by Harvard. The corporation’s methods were destructive to both the environment and nearby communities. The administration has yet to address or even to fully acknowledge this incident.
Meanwhile, just weeks after ascertaining a strong sense of Harvard’s broad moral obligations in her Capital Campaign speech, President Faust issued a public statement in which she argued that the university’s financial goals ought to somehow be entirely separate from their academic ones. Harvard’s discoveries become valueless if they are not translated into real action, especially by the university itself. Therefore, Harvard must gradually channel its investments in a more transparent, socially responsible, and sustainable manner.
First, as a non-profit, it not only benefits from tax exemptions, but also has a responsibility to justify its public subsidization. From offshore domiciled investments in the Cayman Islands, to sizable layoffs, and relying on subcontracted workers that receive less pay and benefits than regular workers, some of Harvard’s actions seem to fall outside the realm of a non-profit. As the university’s public benefits become increasingly called into question, Harvard runs the risk of threatening its non-profit status and image. This would potentially require the university to pay more in taxes, and yet another “capital campaign” would be in order.
Second, in both the investment world and culturally, Harvard has a major footprint, as it provides an example for other universities and institutions to follow. Harvard should provide an example of how to remove the wall between institutions’ academic and financial goals. A recent report from Oxford University posited that the success of the divestment campaign will not be derived from the direct losses for fossil fuel companies, but can be achieved through overall stigmatization of the industry. This stigmatization would ultimately equate to direct, tangible policy change, which would change the power dynamics of the current climate change debate. Therefore, Harvard must lead.
Lastly, Harvard’s responsibility does not stop with ensuring that its investments are socially and environmentally responsible. Rather, it also has an obligation to ensure that its innovations and discoveries are available to the people who need them most. And this is where students have already been leading the way.
Take, for example, the Harvard Global Health and AIDS Coalition (GHAC). A few school years ago, through their advocacy campaign “Say Yes to Drugs,” the undergraduate-led group successfully revised school policy to ensure that developments in medicine at Harvard are readily accessible and affordable for people in the developing world. According to Darshali Vyas, an active member of GHAC and a senior at the college, there is a surprising hesitancy among faculty and other staff members to engage in their campaign and the group receives little support from the university. This paradigm suggests yet another dichotomy between Harvard’s knowledge and its practice. Instead, Harvard should ensure that the sufficient accessibility of its innovations becomes the norm rather than the exception.
The privilege that Harvard affords should be based on neither the degradation of the planet nor the repression of people, whether they are an ocean away or across the Charles River. Thus, Harvard should marry its academic and institutional missions to its financial operations by investing responsibly and ensuring that its discoveries escape the confines of Harvard Yard to those who need them most. Achieving this goal is not straightforward and it will not be easy. But this is Harvard. I think that we can figure it out and move toward truly becoming “as good as we are great.”