Profs Criticize Bush in Letter

More than 50 tenured and emeritus professors from Harvard Business School told President Bush to roll back his administration’s massive tax cuts and stem the growth of the federal budget deficit in a harshly worded letter released late Monday night.

“[Y]our policy of slashing taxes—primarily for those at the upper reaches of the income distribution—has not worked,” the professors wrote to Bush.

Earlier on Monday, President Bush signed the fourth major tax cut bill since he took office. Combined, the four packages are estimated to reduce federal revenues by nearly $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

The 824-word letter, posted online at www.openlettertothepresident.org, marked a ringing condemnation of presidential policies from the faculty of Bush’s alma mater. Bush received a master’s of business administration from Harvard in 1975.

After organizers of the letter appealed to colleagues from other schools to join the open letter effort Friday evening, nearly 100 non-Harvard professors signed on in less than 72 hours.

The list of signatories includes two Nobel laureates—Harvard’s McArthur University Professor Robert C. Merton and Stanford emeritus professor William F. Sharpe—as well as two Pulitzer prize winners.

Louis T. Wells, who holds the Johnson chair in International Management at Harvard, said the organizers of letter hope that signatories’ stature will influence powerful decision-makers in politics and business.

“These are very well-known management gurus,” Wells said. “They had thousands of students who are now in very important positions. The goal is to get their attention.”

David A. Moss, who holds the McLean chair in business administration at Harvard, said the letter is “a critique of economic policy as it now stands and an expression of concern about where it seems to be going”—not an implicit endorsement of the Democratic platform.

But the professors warned that the prospect of Bush’s reelection in November could deepen the nation’s fiscal woes.

“[T]he economic proposals you have suggested for a potential second term—from diverting Social Security contributions into private accounts to making the recent tax cuts permanent—only promise to exacerbate the crisis by further narrowing the federal revenue base,” the professors wrote.

The professors warned that deficits were “politically addictive” but economically disastrous. They said that federal debt could ratchet up interest rates and set off a new round of inflation.

“If your economic advisers are telling you that these deficits can be defeated through further reductions in tax rates, then you need new advisers,” the professors said.

The letter also raises concerns over the widening income gap between rich and poor households. “[W]hen inequality becomes extreme, it can be socially corrosive and economically dysfunctional,” the professors wrote. “We don’t know where the breakpoint is for the U.S., but we would rather not find out.”

Professors who signed the letter said they hoped their effort would spur voters to focus on economic issues as well.

“The newspapers have not covered economic policy as much as maybe the should have,” Moss said.

Wells said the outpouring of support for the letter from his colleagues would help to erase the Business School’s reputation as a politically right-of-center institution.

He said the “traditional view” of the school is that it’s a conservative breeding ground, but that perception is “just not true.”

“It is the West Point of capitalism, but people aren’t as conservative as the image is,” Wells said.

Organizers of the letter decided they would only allow tenured and emeritus professors to sign. Moss said the move was designed to avoid situations in which tenured professors would encourage junior faculty to join the open letter effort. “Requests from senior professors can seem like they have some sort of pressure attached,” Moss said.

Wells said that no business school resources were used in the open letter effort, and that professors who signed represent only themselves—not their institutions.

Wells said that organizers are still accepting further signatures from senior faculty.

The White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign did not respond to repeated calls from The Crimson requesting comment yesterday.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.