Former Mujahideen May Be So-Called 'Harvard Taliban'

Masood Farivar ’94, a former member of the Mujahideen resistance that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, came to the U.S. for the first time in 1989. After applying to the College, Harvard suggested that he spend a year in an American high school. Farivar attended the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey before applying to Harvard again.

The college counselor at Lawrenceville recommended to Farivar that he apply to more schools than just Harvard. He applied to 10 schools in all; one of the only schools that denied him admission was Yale.

Last month, when The New York Times Magazine reported that Yale had admitted former Taliban envoy Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former Yale admissions dean Richard Shaw told the Times that a foreigner of similar caliber had applied for “special-student status” and that Yale had “lost him to Harvard.”

After The Crimson published a story about whether such a student had ever come to Harvard, Farivar’s former classmate and fellow Winthrop House resident Benjamin J. Heller ’94 stepped forward.

“I can’t help wondering if they are referring to Masood,” Heller said in an e-mail.

When contacted, Farivar—now a reporter for Dow Jones News Service—said that when he read The Times story, he too had wondered if Shaw had been referring to him. But he said that there “no way that [to] be sure” that Shaw had been talking about him, and that the former dean may in fact be “referring to another, more recent applicant.” He also said that “the comparison [between him and Rahmatullah] is a little odd,” as he was a not “special-status student” like Rahmatullah and had previously been a member of the anti-Soviet resistance, not the Taliban.

In fact, he immigrated to the U.S. a full seven years before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan.

Shaw is the only person who can say for sure to whom he was referring when he spoke to The Times. A secretary in Shaw’s office said that he declined comment on the name of the student that he “lost” to Harvard, or on whether Farivar was the student that he had had in mind.

Heller agreed that any comparison between Rahmatullah and Farivar would be erroneous.

“If [Farivar] is who Shaw is referring to, then he is full of crap,” Heller said. “Farivar was not some agent of a criminal regime like Rahmatullah.”

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.