Chelsea Manning and Harvard

It occurs to me that it may be worth spelling out more explicitly the logic of why I think the Harvard Kennedy School has gotten itself into trouble. So here goes. The Harvard Kennedy School Dean, Doug Elmendorf’s statement is here. The key sentences, as I read them:

Some visitors to the Kennedy School are invited for just a few hours to give a talk in the School’s Forum or in one of our lecture halls or seminar rooms; other visitors stay for a full day, a few days, a semester, or longer. Among the visitors who stay more than a few hours, some are designated as “Visiting Fellows,” “Resident Fellows,” “Nonresident Fellows,” and the like. At any point in time, the Kennedy School has hundreds of Fellows playing many different roles at the School. In general across the School, we do not view the title of “Fellow” as conveying a special honor; rather, it is a way to describe some people who spend more than a few hours at the School. … I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations. In particular, I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School 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. This balance is not always easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start with the presumption that more speech is better than less. In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea Manning was wrong. Therefore, we are withdrawing the invitation to her to serve as a Visiting Fellow—and the perceived honor that it implies to some people—while maintaining the invitation for her to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.

I can see the administrative logic which got Elmendorf to this position, but it seems to me to lead to a place that is unsustainable.

The way that the Kennedy School used to think about fellowships, as Elmendorf describes it – which I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about them – is as no more and no less than a way to facilitate debate and conversation. This is one of the things that universities are supposed to do – bring a diverse group of people into debate, reflecting a broad set of constituencies. That Chelsea Manning is anathema to other fellows like Morell should be neither here or there – the job of the university is to provide opportunities for both people like Manning and people like Morell to participate in public debate, without necessarily feeling the need to pronounce on the merits of either. When someone like Morell grandly announces that he is not going to be a fellow (at a different part of the Kennedy School, reflecting a very different constituency, with a different understanding of public service), then he has flatly misunderstood what a fellowship is supposed to be, and his views ought be disregarded, as should Pompeo’s. Under this logic, the granting of fellowships should be a pretty decentralized process, in order to allow a very broad set of constituencies to each appoint fellows according to their specific notion of the public good. This approach too implies edge cases – but the bias towards allowing faculty to invite whoever in their judgment contributes to debate is built into the system.

Now to Elmendorf’s proposal that the contribution to debate be balanced against some sense of “the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire,” since other people consider fellowships to be an honor. The problem is that this means that the Kennedy School weighing in on a set of heated debates over the role of the US government in a quite pointed way. The Kennedy School is now apparently saying that it is OK if former intelligence people like Morell, who have advocated for torture are fellows. Their “values of public service” pass whatever invisible bar it is that they are supposed to pass. However, it is apparently not OK for a leaker like Chelsea Manning to be considered for this honor.

One could sustain an argument for _both_ Morell and Manning being fellows under the previous broad standard of facilitating public and academic debate. Perhaps one could sustain an argument for giving a fellowship to _neither_ Morell nor Manning, if one wanted to see a Kennedy School fellowship as providing an honor for those who have lived up to a very exacting and specific standard. But to have a standard of public service that _discriminates_ in the way that the new approach does, so that it apparently _includes_ Morell, Corey Lewandowski and others, while retroactively and specifically being defined to _exclude_ Manning? That seems to me to be indefensible except under an entirely cynical reading – the “values of public service” that the Kennedy School aspires to are a euphemism for “you’re good to go if you don’t do anything that you can’t get away with and still remain part of America’s governing class.” I don’t imagine that this is what Elmendorf wants – but it’s hard to see how a standard of values of public service that includes thugs like Lewandowski and leakers like Petraeus can be interpreted differently. I also imagine (without having any direct information whatsoever) that the implications of a “the Dean knows it when he sees it” standard for faculty governance are being hotly debated within the Kennedy School right now.

None of this was a problem under the previous approach – which saw fellows as contributors to debate rather than people being honored. It is a problem now. And that’s why I’m taking the position that I am taking.