Make Veritas Great Again

Last week, Kennedy School of Government Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf threw into question the only word inscribed on the shields of both the Kennedy School and Harvard College: Veritas. I don’t speak Latin, but I know it means truth. Elmendorf’s decision to rescind Chelsea E. Manning’s fellowship at the Institute of Politics, while Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski keep the title, risks opening a tragic rift between our school’s professed values and its practices. At its most troubling, it suggests a commitment to self-interest over public interest, fake news over real news, and blind allegiance to power over the courage to follow one’s conscience. I came to HKS as a graduate student eager to fix a broken government. It seems that first, we students and alumni must fight to fix a broken school.

Spicer and Lewandowski both built a wall around the truth. On his first day at work, Spicer stood before the American people and brazenly lied about the size of his boss’s inauguration crowd. His assaults against the public’s right to transparency persisted almost daily, and he became a national anti-journalism caricature.

Lewandowski was charged with physically assaulting a woman reporter, and in the same month was criticized after he grabbed a protester at a Trump campaign rally.

Why should these two keep their fellowships when they lied and cheated the public to get ahead? Maybe veritas is a typo.

On the other hand, Manning is the textbook definition of a whistleblower acting in conscience for the greater good. After being sentenced to 35 years in prison, she said of her motives, “Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.” We may be wise to judge the crime she committed against the crimes she exposed.

Manning risked her freedom to defend the public’s right to transparency, for, “Sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” As an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army in Iraq, she stole and leaked more than 700,000 classified documents. News organizations worldwide recognized the value of those leaked documents for the public interest and reported widely on them. A Department of Defense report released this year found that her actions didn’t harm U.S. interests, and President Obama granted her a commutation.

Despite having faced conditions that some say amounted to torture, she continues to enhance the public interest. Manning’s personal sacrifices for the sake of revealing inconvenient truths of government wrongdoing stand in stark contrast with the conduct of the IOP fellows listed above.

Dean Elmendorf’s reasoning for selectively rescinding Manning’s fellowship was that since, “people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific... we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to which we aspire.” However, his specific reasons for judging Manning’s unworthiness compared to other fellows remain totally opaque.

Like other students and alumni with whom I have spoken, this logic leaves me dumbfounded and dissatisfied. I was in the Forum hours before Elmendorf reversed his decision, waiting to hear Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo speak, when the dean announced at the last minute the talk was canceled. I agree with those who weighed the evidence and found that, despite the dean’s dizzying logic, the real reason why Manning’s fellowship was rescinded was that the CIA and other powerful actors that are committed to government secrecy applied enormous pressure to reverse his decision. Twice in two days, conservative forces apparently swayed Harvard to reject a new recruit. Again, it seems the truth was twisted.

There is deep distrust of government across our country and world today. The dean’s statement said we don’t have much to learn from Manning, but it seems her fellowship may have been axed for the opposite reason. Many of my fellow classmates will go on to work at high levels of government and finance. Manning’s moral leadership might inspire the next great whistleblower. It would not be surprising to learn that powerful Harvard donors fear this prospect, as well as beneficiaries like the CIA who expect obedient recruits.

As a school of government committed to the public interest, it’s time to value transparency and commit to exposing wrongdoing by our nation’s most powerful actors. What better place to start than here? In order to align our school’s values with its actions, I believe that all IOP fellowships should be immediately rescinded until a transparent process involving students and other stakeholders creates clear criteria for offering such fellowships. Students have started circulating a petition to this end. We should also develop a transparent process involving students in selecting the next director of the IOP. These steps can start empowering students to make government serve the public over the powerful, and help uphold Harvard’s most-proclaimed value: Veritas.

Jeff Rousset is a masters student in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School.