[The elite public policy and government school may have reversed
course on Kenneth Roth, but its deep ties to Wall Street and
Washington remain. ]
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DOES THE HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL SERVE THE PEOPLE—OR POWER?  
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Michael Massing
May 18, 2023
The Nation
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_ The elite public policy and government school may have reversed
course on Kenneth Roth, but its deep ties to Wall Street and
Washington remain. _

An about-face: Dean Douglas Elmendorf re-invited Kenneth Roth, but
dodged questions about his original decision., J. Scott Applewhite /
AP

 

On January 5, just hours after _The Nation_ posted my article
revealing why the Harvard Kennedy School had rescinded its offer of a
fellowship to former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, I
received an e-mail from Roth saying that _The Guardian_ had already
contacted him for an article. “Maybe the Kennedy School will
re-invite you,” I jokingly wrote back. “Fat Chance!” he replied.

Two weeks later, the Kennedy School did re-invite Roth. The
reinstatement followed a wave of protest and media coverage directed
at Dean Douglas Elmendorf, who had vetoed the offer from the Kennedy
School’s Carr Center for Human Rights on the grounds that Human
Rights Watch has an “anti-Israel bias” (as a faculty member
described it to me). On January 7, Mathias Risse, the center’s
faculty director, sent around a letter observing that “Ken is
articulate and really quite brilliant, and never shies away from
debate,” and noting that his conversation with him to explain the
dean’s decision “was one of the lowest moments in my professional
life.”

PEN America issued a statement expressing “dismay” at the dean’s
decision, saying it “raises serious questions about the
credibility” of Harvard’s human rights program. More than 1,000
Harvard students, faculty, and alumni signed a letter criticizing the
“shameful decision to blacklist Kenneth Roth” and calling on
Elmendorf to resign. Among the faculty members protesting his decision
was Larry Summers, who tweeted that while he loathed Ken Roth’s
views on Israel, he thought that preventing a leading human rights
advocate from joining a leading human rights center “on the grounds
of the person’s views/modes of expression is not consistent
w/profound commitment to intellectual diversity that should be a
bedrock value in universities.”

The controversy was covered by not only _The Guardian_ but
also _The_ _Harvard Crimson_, _The_ _Chronicle of Higher
Education_, and _The_ _Boston Globe_, which, in a scorching
editorial, chastised the dean for sending “a chilling message that
there are significant limits at Harvard on which ideas count as
acceptable. In this case, it seems that if someone criticizes the
Israeli government too harshly, it could lead to consequences for
their career…. That’s why Elmendorf owes Roth and, more important,
Harvard’s students and faculty a proper explanation—lest he risk
contributing to an environment of self-censorship.”

Roth himself ran a tireless campaign against the dean, applying the
same tactics he had used against autocratic rulers while directing
Human Rights Watch. In dozens of interviews and talk-show appearances,
he demanded that Elmendorf reveal the reasons behind his decision.
“Being denied this fellowship will not significantly impede my
future,” he wrote in a _Guardian_ opinion piece. “But I worry
about younger academics who are less known. If I can be canceled
because of my criticism of Israel, will they risk taking the issue
on?”

A few scattered voices did express support for Elmendorf. Gerald
Steinberg, the founder of the vocally pro-Israel NGO Monitor,
congratulated the dean on not being fooled “by the moral façade
granted to Roth and HRW.” And Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of
the Anti-Defamation League, charged me in an article in _The Times of
Israel_ with going down “the antisemitic rabbit hole” and feeding
“antisemitic tropes” about “Jewish control, power, and financial
influence.” It’s all part of the ADL’s campaign to tar critics
of Israel—including Jewish ones—with the brush of anti-Semitism in
a desperate bid to intimidate them into silence. Not only will it not
work—it also discredits the ADL at a time when the fight against
anti-Semitism is as urgent as ever.

At a January 17 faculty meeting called to discuss the matter, the
sentiment expressed against Elmendorf was nearly unanimous. Pressed to
disclose the reasons behind his decision, the dean declined. Two days
later, however, he sent an e-mail to the Kennedy School community
insisting that his decision to rescind the invitation to Roth “was
not influenced by donors” but rather “was based on my evaluation
of his potential contributions to the School.” He added, though,
that he was going to create a faculty committee to develop a process
for evaluating the appointment of future fellows. As for Roth himself,
“I now believe that I made an error in my decision not to appoint
him as a Fellow,” Elmendorf wrote, adding that the invitation to him
would be reinstated. “I am so sorry that the decision inadvertently
cast doubt on the mission of the School and to our commitment to open
debate in ways I had not intended and do not believe to be true.”

In early February, Roth spent several days taking a victory lap at the
school—giving talks, appearing in classes, meeting with Elmendorf
himself. At every opportunity, he called on the dean to explain his
initial decision. “It clearly looks like this is donor influence
undermining intellectual independence,” Roth told _The New York
Times_. To me he said, “I think it’s all about Israel.”

Demanding accountability: Ken Roth has continued to press the Kennedy
School’s dean to explain himself.

Is it? While it’s impossible to peer into the dean’s mind, a close
examination of the Kennedy School’s operations can help illuminate
Elmendorf’s decision while also suggesting some deeper, structural
problems at the nation’s wealthiest and most esteemed school of
public policy.

A good place to begin is the large Israeli presence at the school. At
its core is the Wexner Israel Fellowship. Since 1989, the Wexner
Foundation has sent nine or 10 mid-career Israelis to the school every
year, underwriting their tuition, air fare, lodging, even textbooks.
An analysis of the program’s 300-plus alumni shows that the
overwhelming majority are Jewish Israelis. The 20 percent of the
Israeli population that is Arab and the nearly 5 percent that is
non-Arab Christian or does not otherwise identify as Jewish account
for only a tiny percentage of the fellows. Even within the Israeli
Jewish population, the range of fellows is narrow. Mizrahim (Jewish
Israelis from Arab or North African countries) constitute nearly 45
percent of Israel’s population but make up only a handful of Wexner
fellows. The great bulk of the fellows come from the same sociological
stratum and are not even representative of Israeli Jewish society.

That stratum consists mostly of professionals and civil servants who
are being groomed for higher positions. About 10 percent of the alumni
have worked in education, philanthropy, or social justice. Another 10
percent have worked in health, medicine, or hospitals, and a similar
proportion have worked in academia, journalism, and the arts. About 20
percent have been attached to government ministries—from
transportation and energy to finance and foreign affairs. Most of the
rest have worked in the military, intelligence, law enforcement, or
criminal justice. Of the 250 fellows whose occupations can be
identified, about a dozen have worked for the police or domestic
intelligence, including three openly affiliated with Shin Bet,
Israel’s domestic intelligence service. The largest
contingent—about 40—have worked for the Israel Defense Forces or
the Ministry of Defense. Three of the Wexner fellows are identified as
members of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, but
there are no doubt many more, including a number vaguely listed as
working for the prime minister’s office, a sprawling administrative
structure whose nearly two dozen subdivisions include the spy agency.

Applicants for a Wexner fellowship must first be accepted by the
Kennedy School, but the Wexner Foundation has substantial say over who
is chosen. It has a sizable office in Jerusalem that works closely
with Israeli officials in determining who will get the privilege of
attending Harvard. It’s remarkable that the Kennedy School would
allow an outside organization to have such influence over its
admissions process—especially when so many of those admitted work
for the security services of a foreign government.

In addition to the Wexner fellows, the Wexner Foundation funds a
senior leadership program that offers Israeli executives four weeks of
training at the Kennedy School. Since it began, in 2015, more than 250
have participated. On graduating, they join the foundation’s
extensive alumni networks in Israel and the US, helping to reinforce
the privileged status of the Israeli elite. (The Wexner association
may have lost some of its luster, however, after revelations about
Leslie Wexner’s long involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.)

Many Wexner fellows are engaging students whom the faculty say they
enjoy teaching. But they’re coming to Cambridge not simply as
individuals but also as part of a program to strengthen the Israeli
state.

A Palestinian graduate of the school told me how “scary” it is to
be a Palestinian there. The Israeli presence “is extremely
visible—there are the donors, the names on buildings. And your
classmates are literally from the army, the military, the prime
minister’s office—Netanyahu. They’re surveilling you. It can
have direct consequences for your well-being and your family’s
well-being. When Palestinians go back to Palestine, they have to go
through border crossings and checkpoints. They have files on
everybody. You can be questioned for hours at a time.”

In the wake of the Roth affair, much has emerged about the
difficulties that Palestinians have had holding events at the Kennedy
School. Joseph Leone, a recent graduate of the school, described in an
article in _Jewish Currents_ how its administration has used “red
tape and long delays” to “shut down speech, demoralizing
Palestinian students into forgoing the school as a venue for
discussing important topics.” In 2020, for instance, the school’s
Palestine Caucus sought to schedule an event featuring Sa’ed Atshan,
a Kennedy School alumnus (now at Emory) who has a PhD in anthropology
and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard. Fifty-five days before the
event was to be held, the caucus filed a request with the
administration to reserve a room. Usually, the school approves such
requests within days, but six weeks later it said it would not approve
this one until the students agreed to restrict attendance to holders
of Harvard student IDs and arrange for security. The administration
also demanded that Tarek Masoud, the director of the school’s Middle
Eastern Initiative, serve as the sole moderator. The students
eventually gave up and moved the event to the law school.

Sofiya Cabalquinto, a spokesperson for the Kennedy School, says that
all of its 117 student organizations must follow university guidelines
for campus events, including “prior approval from the school and a
review of safety considerations.” As for fellows attending the
Kennedy School, she says, “We have students from all over the world,
representing half of our student body, and our executive education
programs draw participants from around the world. Some of those who
come to HKS to learn are supported by their governments or their
organizations to earn HKS degrees or to attend our executive education
programs.”

The Roth affair “was the hair that broke the camel’s back,”
Atshan told me. “People are fed up. They said, ‘Oh my God—if
someone like Ken Roth is getting canceled, then we have to get
organized.’” The Palestine Caucus has since been holding Zoom
sessions, issuing statements, and meeting with school officials.

Every year at spring break, hundreds of Harvard students—many of
them from the Kennedy School—go on a Middle East “trek,” one
group to Israel and the other to Palestine. When they return,
they’re excited, filled with impressions—and often suspicious of
those who went on the other trek. Amid the contention, some trekking
students have sought a form of debriefing at the school, and to lead
it, they have approached Timothy McCarthy. An affiliate of the Carr
Center for 13 years and the school’s first openly gay faculty
member, McCarthy—a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights—was eager
to help, seeing an opportunity to create a dialogue between the two
groups, but at every step he faced resistance from members of the
administration, who, he says, “felt that I was trying to stoke some
kind of fire.” They are “afraid” of the issue and have made it
clear that the school “doesn’t want anything to do with it.” He
considers the school’s lack of engagement on the issue to be an
“abdication of moral responsibility” that reflects a more general
“blinkered” attitude that can help explain how “an unforced
error” like the Roth decision could occur.

That experience reinforced McCarthy’s sense of being a “misfit”
at the school, and his status as the school’s only openly gay
faculty member for so many years contributed to a feeling of being
“very alone.” So when the Harvard Graduate School of Education
asked him to join its faculty, he accepted without hesitation. The
“amazingly supportive” atmosphere there, he says, has made him
realize how “toxic” the workplace at the Kennedy School is. The
school “is not a place that welcomes people like me. They saw me as
a constant problem, a thorn in their side. I had to get out of
there—it was slowly killing me.”

Lucrative sidelines: New Belfer Center director Meghan O’Sullivan
lists Raytheon, McKinsey, and Citigroup among her outside ties. (World
Economic Forum)

The Kennedy School in general is not hospitable to misfits. Those who
too sharply question the established ways or stray too far outside the
accepted parameters of thought can find themselves pushed to the
sidelines, marginalized, and denied tenure or influential posts. The
school’s close ties to Washington and the heavy presence of generals
and admirals, intelligence officers and geostrategists, diplomats and
thought leaders, create a climate unsupportive of those who are too
outspoken on human rights, the Israel-Palestinian issue, or US foreign
policy.

On February 21, the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs—the school’s main foreign policy hub—named a new
director: Meghan O’Sullivan. The Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the
Practice of International Affairs, O’Sullivan served as a special
assistant to President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007, including two
years as the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and
Afghanistan. She spent a year in Baghdad, becoming a top aide to Paul
Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose
policies helped plunge Iraq into years of sectarian violence. Upon her
departure from the administration, Peter Baker wrote in _The
Washington Post_ that O’Sullivan “has been at the heart of the
most important project of the Bush presidency—the invasion,
occupation, and continuing war in Iraq—from the beginning.” Larry
Diamond, a Stanford University professor who worked for the CPA and
became a strong critic of Bush policy in Iraq, was quoted in
the _Post_ as saying that this policy “has been a tragic failure,
and she has been a central element of our policymaking” (though he
said that most of the blame had to be directed at higher officials,
especially Bush).

A year after leaving the administration, O’Sullivan joined the
Kennedy School. On her Kennedy School web page, she lists among her
“outside professional activities” Capital Group (investment
management), CEO Academy (training chief executives), Citigroup
(banking), the Hess Corporation (oil), Linklaters (corporate law),
Macro Advisory Partners (strategic consulting), McKinsey (management
consulting), PIMCO (investment management), and Raytheon Technologies.

Raytheon, on whose board O’Sullivan sits, is one of the five largest
US defense contractors. Its top customers include Saudi Arabia. Since
the start of Saudi Arabia’s war with Yemen in 2015, Raytheon has
made at least a dozen major arms sales to the kingdom and its partners
valued at more than $5 billion. Raytheon ordnance has been connected
by human rights groups to at least a dozen attacks on Yemeni
civilians. According to _The New York Times_, on three occasions
several US officials, both Democratic and Republican, tried to put a
halt to the killing by ending arms sales to the Saudis, but their
efforts were blocked by the Trump White House, largely at Raytheon’s
urging.

From 2020 to 2022, O’Sullivan received more than $900,000 in
compensation from Raytheon for her board service. Last October, about
a dozen activists invaded her classroom to protest her ties to the
company and her role in the Iraq invasion. In an editorial,
the _Crimson_ called her connection to Raytheon “a stain on our
institution.” While condemning the protesters’ disruption of her
class, the _Crimson_ said that by “continuing her involvement with
Raytheon, O’Sullivan has demonstrated extraordinarily bad judgment
at best and frank, dark immorality at worst,” and it urged her to
resign. The Kennedy School nonetheless decided that she was the best
person to lead its top center on international affairs. (O’Sullivan
says she plans to step down from Raytheon’s board in May.)

As my interviews made clear, the Kennedy School has long been
concerned with appearing too liberal and so losing its credibility in
Washington; it’s always on the lookout for good moderate
Republicans. A similar dynamic seems to have been at work with Roth:
Elmendorf was worried about a backlash from those who think Israel is
unfairly criticized.

The concern about appearing too liberal extends beyond international
affairs. On domestic policy, too, the Kennedy School is dominated by
solidly establishmentarian views—especially when it comes to such
urgent matters as inequality, the concentration of wealth, corporate
governance, and the influence of finance. The main place at the
Kennedy School where you might expect to find such matters addressed
is the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
Established in 1982, it was renamed in 2005 after receiving an
endowment gift from Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, the chief investment
officer for Goldman Sachs’s private wealth management group, and her
husband, Bijan, the chair of two oil and gas companies in the United
Arab Emirates and Norway. “The 2008 recession and the global surge
in populism have highlighted deep divisions between Main Street and
Wall Street,” the center’s website states. “How do we create a
growing economy and rebuild elements of shared and sustainable
prosperity for our societies?”

Conflicts of interest: Larry Summers is one of many leaders at the
school who has profited from his connections to financial service
institutions. (Darren McCollester / Getty Images)

The center’s director is Larry Summers. He is one of about two dozen
University Professors at Harvard, a distinction that allows him to
pursue his research free of the usual academic encumbrances. But he
faces constraints of other kinds, including a thicket of outside ties
extending from Washington to Wall Street. After Summers was forced to
resign as Harvard’s president in 2006, he was hired as a managing
partner by the New York–based hedge fund D.E. Shaw, receiving $5.2
million in salary and other compensation over a period of two years.
He also earned $2.8 million in speaking fees from such financial
institutions as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman
Sachs (which paid him $135,000 for a single speech).

Those paydays earned Summers a mention in the 2010
documentary _Inside Job_, which discussed the many economists who had
testified to the soundness of the financial system in the run-up to
the 2008 crisis while receiving payments from banks, hedge funds, and
insurance companies. In an accompanying article in _The_ _Chronicle
of Higher Education_, Charles Ferguson, the film’s director, wrote
of how, over the previous 30 years, the economics profession “has
become so compromised by conflicts of interest that it now functions
almost as a support group for financial services and other industries
whose profits depend heavily on government policy.” Ferguson cited
Summers’s career as illustrating an “extraordinary and
underappreciated” convergence of “academic economics, Wall Street,
and political power.”

_Inside Job_ prompted much soul-searching in the academy about the
propriety of the lucrative sidelines many professors pursued. Since
2012, the Kennedy School has required faculty members to disclose
annually their outside activities and encouraged them to post them on
their websites. From those listings, it’s clear that serious
conflicts remain. For instance, Richard Zeckhauser, a professor of
political economy at the school since 1972, is a partner and senior
adviser at Equity Resource Investments, a private equity firm
specializing in real estate; according to his bio on that firm’s
site, he has also been “a principal in two investment-banking firms
and a director of a number of high technology companies[,] two of
which were sold to Fortune 500 companies.”

In 2012, Iris Bohnet, a professor of business and government who
served as the Kennedy School’s academic dean from 2011 to 2014 and
2018 to 2021, joined the board of Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s
second-largest bank. Since then, the bank has been repeatedly
embroiled in scandals, including the manipulation of foreign exchanges
rates (2013), conspiring to help US clients hide offshore assets and
income from the IRS (2014), the looting of 1MDB in Malaysia (2015),
secret loans including kickbacks and bribes in Mozambique (2017), the
violation of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (2018), the collapse
of both Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital (2021), and money
laundering for a Bulgarian cocaine-trafficking ring (2022),
culminating this March in a decline in its stock price so steep that
the Swiss government forced the bank’s sale to UBS, its longtime
rival. For years, Bohnet sat on Credit Suisse’s compensation
committee, approving large executive pay packages despite the bank’s
egregious record of mismanagement; she herself received nearly $3.5
million in compensation for her board membership. In an e-mail, Bohnet
wrote that “my research and teaching as a behavioral economist at
Harvard Kennedy School are not related to banking or financial
markets. I have disclosed my outside activities and am compliant with
the Kennedy School’s policies, which like the policies of most
universities, allow faculty members to spend a specified amount of
time on outside activities, including serving on boards of public
companies.”

Larry Summers sits on the boards of Block Inc., a fintech company, for
which he received $1.2 million in compensation from 2018 to 2021 while
also holding 201,019 shares valued at about $20 million; Doma, a real
estate technology company, in which he holds 1,236,351 shares valued
at nearly $1 million; and, since May, Skillsoft, which offers
“corporate digital learning” to the _Fortune_ 1,000. He also
continues to consult for D.E. Shaw as well as for Citigroup and Atlas
Merchant Capital, a global investment firm.

Of the 45 members of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center’s advisory council,
some 33 work or have worked for financial institutions; four are
corporate executives; and two work in luxury real estate. Its members
include Steven Rattner, a former _New York Times_ reporter who
became a private equity partner until he had to pay millions of
dollars in fines and face a multiyear ban on some Wall Street
activities for (according to the SEC) delivering special favors and
conducting sham transactions when seeking investments from New York
State’s retirement fund, after which he created an investment house
to manage billionaire businessman and three-term New York City mayor
Mike Bloomberg’s money; Michael Klein, a prominent behind-the-scenes
dealmaker who ran Citigroup’s investment banking division for more
than two decades before starting his own boutique firm, which has
handled more than $1.5 trillion in deals for clients, including
Aramco, the Saudi national oil company; and Thomas Healey, the
council’s chair, who formerly taught at the Kennedy School while
also serving as a partner at Goldman Sachs.

According to Summers, the main concern at the Kennedy School as an
institution is that “the perspectives of only half the political
spectrum are represented, given that 90 percent of the faculty are
Democrats.” In general, he says, “universities are places where
people go to work if they don’t like business, so the worry is much
more in the anti-business direction than in the pro-business
direction.”

Among those faculty Democrats, however, the tight triangle of ties
between Washington, Wall Street, and Cambridge allows little room for
heterodoxy. For years, the school had only one faculty member who
consistently challenged the prevailing pro-globalization,
pro-trade-liberalization, pro-deregulation consensus: Dani Rodrik.
Since the 1990s, Rodrik has produced a series of books with titles
like _Has Globalization Gone Too Far?_ (1997), in which he has
examined the gap between winners and losers in the global economy. In
2022, he and his colleague Gordon Hanson received $7.5 million from
the Hewlett Foundation for a “Reimagining the Economy” project
aimed at freeing political and economic discourse from what Rodrik
calls the “prison of ideology” favoring market-centric approaches.
That project is housed at the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center
for Social Policy, which in recent years has expanded its research on
the causes of and remedies for inequality. Rodrik now worries about
what he sees as the obsessive concern among the school’s national
security specialists about China’s growing economic power and their
conviction that the United States must retain its dominance.

Closed ranks: The school’s choices of students, faculty, and fellows
reinforce an establishment worldview.

In 2019, the Kennedy School faculty moved to broaden its ideological
range by voting to recommend Gabriel Zucman for tenure. A French-born
assistant professor of economics at the University of California at
Berkeley, Zucman, then 32, had gained global notice for his work on
inequality, wealth, and taxation. While earning a PhD from the Paris
School of Economics, he helped his adviser, Thomas Piketty, gather the
data for Piketty’s 2014 bestselling book _Capital in the
Twenty-First Century_. The following year Zucman published _The
Hidden Wealth of Nations_, in which he estimated that about 8 percent
of the global financial wealth of households—at least $7.6
trillion—was held in tax havens, three-quarters of it undeclared. In
2016, he teamed up with his fellow Frenchman and Berkeley colleague
Emmanuel Saez to produce a paper on wealth inequality in the United
States since 1913, which became the basis for their book _The Triumph
of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay_. In
it, they proposed a tax on wealth, a version of which was later
adopted by both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. In 2018, Zucman
was named the best young economist in France.

Zucman was an active and sometimes contentious presence on Twitter,
vigorously engaging critics and defending his positions with
statistics, emojis, and scorn. At the Kennedy School faculty meeting
on his tenure bid, some expressed reservations about this. Still, his
candidacy was endorsed and sent to Harvard president Lawrence Bacow
and provost Alan Garber for approval. In June 2019, the provost
announced that Zucman’s tenure bid had been rejected. Almost
simultaneously, Berkeley granted him tenure.

As was the norm, no explanation was offered for the decision. _The
New York Times_, in a 2020 story about Zucman and Saez, noted that his
candidacy had been rejected “partly over fears that Mr. Zucman’s
research could not support the arguments he was making in the
political arena.” Larry Summers had publicly stated such fears. In
an April 2019 _Washington Post_ op-ed, for instance, he and Natasha
Sarin of the University of Pennsylvania criticized Zucman and Saez for
overestimating by two and a half times the amount that a Warren wealth
tax would likely raise. “Common-sense revenue estimates by
economists who are not very deeply steeped in revenue estimation tend
to be overly optimistic,” they gibed. On Twitter, Zucman dismissed
their revenue estimates as “unserious.”

In the _Times_ article about the Berkeley economists, Summers was
quoted as saying that “most serious professionals in the tax policy
area think that the polemical urge at some points has gotten the
better of Gabriel and Emmanuel, especially when Gabriel starts to
tweet.” But Summers also called Zucman highly talented and said that
he “was among the economists who argued strongly in favor of his
hiring at Harvard.” It nonetheless seems highly improbable that the
president and provost, in making their decision, would not have been
influenced by Summers’s very public clashes with Zucman. (Some
members of the economics department also expressed concern about
Zucman’s high public profile.)

The parallels between the rejection of Zucman’s candidacy and the
veto of Ken Roth’s fellowship are hard to overlook. Both were
vigorous advocates who could disrupt the smooth and seamless
functioning of the school and complicate its ties to donors,
policy-makers, and other powerful figures.

In recent years, economic policy-making has been freshened by an
infusion of new thinking—about trade and taxation, antitrust and
labor rights, dividends and buybacks—that has shaped the Biden
administration. Very little of that has come out of Harvard, whose
influence with the administration is small when compared with past
Democratic administrations. Instead, the new ideas have emerged from
such institutions as UC Berkeley (Zucman, Saez, Robert Reich),
Columbia (Joseph Stiglitz, Lina Khan, Tim Wu), MIT (David Autor),
Princeton (Cecilia Rouse), the New School (Heather Boushey), and the
Roosevelt Institute. (Dani Rodrik also belongs on the list.) Raj
Chetty’s Opportunity Insights team at Harvard has produced some
worthwhile studies of poverty and social mobility, but it generally
steers clear of larger, systemic issues.

Measured against its prestige and resources, the Kennedy School
seriously underperforms. Thanks to its revolving door with Washington
and Wall Street, the lucrative sidelines of its professors, the weight
of its donors, the allure of the Harvard name, and the many status
seekers eager to be associated with it, the school has become so
wedded to the system that it is unable to offer an independent
critique of it. Though it’s a school of public policy, the Kennedy
School has confused serving the public with serving power. It’s so
wealthy—why would anyone want to change how things work?

As this article was going to press, Harvard announced
[[link removed]] that
Kenneth Griffin had given $300 million to the university’s Faculty
of Arts and Sciences “to support the School’s mission and to
advance cutting-edge research and expand access and excellence in
education for students and scholars regardless of economic
circumstances.” In recognition, the school’s Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences was being renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences. The CEO of Citadel, Griffin has an
estimated net worth of $35 billion, good for 36th on the Forbes 400.
Perhaps that “cutting edge research” could include a look how the
nation’s financial barons have increasingly insinuated their way
into American academia, gaining not only prestige but also a form of
protection against those who might take a closer look at how they make
their money and what they do with it.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_MICHAEL MASSING is the author of Now They Tell Us: The American
Press and Iraq and Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for
the Western Mind. He is writing a book about money and influence._

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