Paying for High Moral Ground

Like the citizens of Hamlin, who tried to get something for nothing. It's time for Harvard to pay the piper.

Almost two years ago, Harvard made a bold political move when it decided to move 1992's Eighth International AIDS Conference from Boston, where it had been scheduled for six days in May, to Amsterdam. The Harvard AIDS Institute, the local sponsors of the Conference, declared their and the University's opposition to a discriminatory U.S. policy barring those infected with HIV from entering the country.

But when financial concerns forced Harvard to pay for its decision, the University was quick to sidestep its principles. Three Boston-area hotels which would have enjoyed the benefits of more than 10,000 scientists, activists, health care officials and media representatives staying in their rooms, booked by Harvard in early 1990.

Late in January, the University filed a preemptive suit against those hotels to preevent a loss of up to $1.6 million in compensatory damages.

Harvard, taking the moral high ground, has decided to let others pay the price.

The University claims their decision to relocate the conference was a necessary response to U.S. travel restrictions imposed by the federal government in 1987. But Harvard was clearly aware of the restrictions in early 1990 when they booked the rooms. They had been lobbying the government for several months to have the ban lifted. They went ahead and booked the rooms anyway, hopeful the restrictions would end.

And despite the absolute discrimination espoused by the ban--a ban "not founded in public health policy," according to AIDS Institute Executive Director Dr. Richard G. Marlink--Harvard officials were surely aware of a specific loophole in the restriction allowing travel for the purpose of attending a conferences such as the AIDS Conference. Indeed, such a waiver was obtained by organizers of the last International AIDS Conference held in the U.S., 1990's San Francisco conference, allowing HIV-positive individuals from other countries to participate.

It's clear that Harvard was making a purely political move when it canceled the conference and moved it. We should all applaud the bold action. But while their sympathies might have been well-placed, we can't applaud the attempt to avoid responsibility for the decision. By not agreeing to shoulder the financial burden caused by their own cancellation. Harvard is refusing to pay the hotels who actually lost valuable revenue during a deep financial recession.

It would be wonderful, though idealistic, if the hotels threatening the sue Harvard had decided to stand behind the University and absorb the losses. But Harvard can't place responsibility on the hotels' shoulders. The decision to move the conference was the University's, not that of the Sheraton or the Park Plaza.

To their credit, the hotels did try to negotiate a settlement. Harvard could have assumed some portion of the financial burden, and thereby assumed responsibility for their decision. But the University refused to settle, and instead the case is going to court.

At the Rapallo Conference of 1918, the newly-formed Bolshevik leadership of the Soviet Union, led by Lenin, did the same thing when they decided they simply had no obligation to pay back any of the millions of dollars in loans incurred during World War I back to their debtors. But at least they didn't try to make anyone believe they had a legal right not to do so.

The preemptive suit, reported first by The Boston Globe just days after the U.S. Senate reaffirmed its utterly xenophobic ban on HIV-positive immigrants, must be especially disheartening to those AIDS activists and researchers who have fought for lifting U.S. travel restrictions, including AIDS Institute officials such as Marlink.

In the words of Holly D. Ladd, director of the Boston AIDS Consortium, Congress was "led by fear over rationality" in its recent vote. Health professionals and researchers agree that arguments for the ban, including claims of increased health care costs for HIV-infected immigrants, are particularly specious in a country which already contains within its borders the highest number of HIV-positive individuals in the world.

Harvard made the right decision in 1991. But today, if Marlink and his colleagues at the AIDS Institute, the School and Public Health and other University-affiliated institutions hope to make any more bold statements regarding U.S. health policy, they've been effectively stymied by cheap Holyoke Center administrative bureaucrats. The University should be more than conscious of the power of money, given its $5 billion plus endowment and the effectiveness of political statements it has made in the past.

It's a shame that Harvard refuses to shoulder the financial burden of its decision. By shirking its responsibilities, Harvard detracts from any future political statement it might attempt to make.

If Harvard wants to remain on its moral high ground, it shouldn't stoop down to pick up what for it is petty change.

Ivan Oransky is an Executive Editor and Science and Health editor of The Crimson.