O’Sullivan: Resign Out of Shame, Not Pressure

“Meghan O’Sullivan, you can’t hide, we can see your war crimes!”

“When missiles fly, people die, and O’Sullivan’s profits multiply!”

Activists from two groups — “Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex” and “United Against War and Militarism” — marched into the classroom of Harvard Kennedy School professor Meghan L. O’Sullivan on Oct. 5, chanting these slogans and thrusting her once again into controversy.

Over a dozen anti-war activists protested O’Sullivan’s professional background as a former deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan under U.S. President George W. Bush and a current sitting member of defense contractor Raytheon Technologies’ board of directors.

Though we must condemn the protesters’ methods — allowing non-affiliates to disrupt Harvard classes seems a dangerous precedent to set — we sympathize with their concerns: O’Sullivan’s non-academic activities, in particular her links to Raytheon, are a stain on our institution.

To be clear, we understand that much of the expertise on issues necessarily and unfortunately lies with people whose views we may vehemently disagree with. We understand that institutions like Harvard, in service of increasing our understanding of vital policy issues, will regularly hire such people.

Without calling for O’Sullivan’s firing, we still condemn her choice to retain a seat on Raytheon’s board in the wake of that company’s specific and repugnant actions following the outbreak of war in Yemen. Even as evidence mounted that Saudi Arabia was committing potential war crimes in Yemen, Raytheon not only sold bombs to the Saudi regime — to the tune of $3 billion immediately after the conflict broke — but heavily lobbied the U.S. government to allow such sales to continue, whitewashing conflict-related (or perhaps profit-justified) atrocities.

There is no reasonable defense for Raytheon’s sale of weapons to a government committing apparent war crimes beyond the lining of a few American pockets. There is no valid excuse for the slaughtering of children.

To see news reports of Saudi Arabia’s cruel and deeply immoral war-waging — including the deaths of thousands of civilians at weddings, funerals, and even on school buses — and then choose to resupply that very government is not only unconscionable.

It’s almost laughably evil.

By continuing her involvement with Raytheon, O’Sullivan has demonstrated extraordinarily bad judgment at best and frank, dark immorality at worst. No matter what one thinks of military contractors or American foreign policy in general, material support for the alleged commission of war crimes should be a line that none of us want to cross.

The tempting appeal of changing systems “from the inside” — so familiar to supposedly idealistic Harvard students courted by Goldman Sachs or McKinsey & Co. — falls flat here. As a Harvard professor, O’Sullivan had the opportunity to make an unusually large symbolic impact by loudly resigning.

Yet she has chosen — in the face of blood and carnage and piling Yemeni bodies — not to do so.

The logic of working from the inside must have limits; it cannot justify employees who stand by their employer no matter what. We all must have moral lines we will never cross, and O’Sullivan has had the opportunity to demonstrate that by showing what principled engagement with an imperfect world should look like. Instead, she has tacitly endorsed a worldview devoid of red lines — at least when it comes to middle eastern civilians — while seeking to remain engaged, through her Harvard position, with polite society.

We call on O’Sullivan to resign — not because of external pressure but because it would be wrong not to. Not out of pressure, but out of sheer, justified shame.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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