Money and Morality, Humanity and Harvard

“It is not complex…it is not sophisticated. It is not intricate or undiscovered, secret or unknown. It is a clear and simple matter of the inability of intellectually asphyxiated people to summon up the courage for an overwhelming and restless instant of denunciation. We do not possess the sense of moral leverage to rise up and to denounce the evil now committed in our name.”

Jonathan Kozol wrote that in 1975, reflecting on a pervasive sense of impotence on the part of Americans regarding matters of injustice at home and abroad. As the debate over Senior Gift Plus and the Senior Gift rages on, we have seemingly reached a point where the debate is no longer about cold hard facts—but largely about the sense of impotence and disconnect described above. The “critiques” of Senior Gift Plus are sadly enough permeated with a sentiment that, often unbeknownst to those making said critiques, belies a deeper sense of hopelessness and uncritical acquiescence to the status quo. They ask: There are always going to be injustices in the world where our money may be invested, where will the protesting of Senior Gifts stop? This alone is not going to topple the genocidal regime in Khartoum, so why do it? And the most distressing question of all is arguably the most innocent: Why must there be a connection between my unconditional support for Harvard and the atrocities being committed in Sudan? Senior Gift Plus is making me choose between two good things…

The Senior Gift Plus website (www.seniorgiftplus.com) answers these questions at length, but I want to speak on the sense of impotence and disconnect that they all have in common. The incontrovertible fact is that Harvard has invested nearly $4 million dollars in PetroChina Corp., which in turn finances the genocidal Sudanese government. Harvard makes profit off its investment in PetroChina, which is then distributed back throughout the university—perhaps even as financial aid. Therefore, my financial aid may be partially subsidized by direct profits from PetroChina, which funds genocide in Sudan. Now, without my consent, I am indirectly profiting (materially, socially, psychologically, and intellectually) from genocide. The tremendous amount of freedoms accrued to me as a result of being a Harvard student are, by virtue of Harvard’s investment, intimately intertwined with the targeted mass murder of other human beings. So throwing all of the arguments for Harvard’s role as a global leader out the window, I must still object to Harvard’s practices; I cannot, in good conscience, know that there is a strong chance that I am benefiting from, or complicit in, genocide, and not protest it.

There is no ambiguity here. Senior Gift Plus is not making anyone choose between two good things—Harvard University is. If the Harvard Corporation were to divest tomorrow, there would be no Senior Gift Plus. It is the Corporation that has said through its actions that it is not willing to heed the concerns of students, faculty, and alumni about their investment in PetroChina. It is the Corporation that has said through its actions that it is not willing to divest from Sudan (or Burma for that matter) and thus not be involved prominently in the slaughter of human beings. Finally, it is the Corporation that has said through its actions that it is not only willing to carry on investing in PetroChina, but it also thinks so little of the human life at stake in Darfur and of the protests of the Harvard community, that it would double its investments before divesting. This is offensive on its face and deserves the most powerful moral outrage we can summon.

And, in the end, it is this lack of moral outrage that really disturbs me the most. It is as if people are not really even upset that genocide is occurring at all, much less angry that it is partially carried out with our money! Harvard students are quite good at segmenting all aspects of their lives so that there is no connection between what they believe in and what they do. But at this peculiar historical moment, we cannot allow ourselves to equivocate or make excuses. As a good friend of mine, Derrick N. Ashong ’97, said in an email, “the stakes are too high.”

What we are discussing is the genocide of human beings. We may pretend their lives don’t have meaning because they are thousands of miles away in Africa or because they are black or because they don’t live in well-manicured suburbs and watch The OC—but our delusion only changes reality for us, not them. This type of delusion is frightening, really, because it is what our entire culture of disconnect and selfishness and impotence is built on. It is what prevents us from responding adequately to homelessness, poor schools, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other crises that affect “them” and not “us.” We apologize away our inaction and turn our eyes while death and destruction march on somewhere, in some ghetto or foreign country or wherever, that to us is at best an unpleasant mirage in our peripheral vision or at worst somewhere that never really existed at all.

Even though I have been involved in activism on Sudan, the sense of disconnect did not strike me until I spoke at a rally at the State House on Thursday. Before the rally, a woman came up to me and asked, politely, if I was of Sudanese descent. What that question revealed to me, is that if I was in Sudan, living amongst the black Africans in Darfur, I would be just as much of a target as the next person. For no reason, other than by virtue of being born in America, am I granted a different level on the global hierarchy of moral worth.

To me, that is why Senior Gift Plus is so important. It is not revolutionary by any means, but it does allow seniors and their supporters to stand up and make a collective statement, not only about Harvard’s immoral investments and the blatant disregard for community dissent, but also on the very humanity of the people of Darfur. Harvard’s investment, and subsequent doubling of that investment, belies a pervasive sense that the lives of people in Darfur are meaningless. For that reason alone, Senior Gift Plus is a powerful vehicle for forcing a truly necessary conversation to be had at the highest levels of the university about the relationship between Harvard, humanity, money, and morality. And for that reason alone it deserves your support.

Brandon M. Terry ’05 is a government and African and African American studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.