Run Toward Life

Every year, President Faust stands before the senior class and, in a fit of inspirational rhetoric, urges them to move boldly from Harvard Yard to lives not just of success, but also of commitment, decency, and courage.

Her Baccalaureate Address this May was widely shared across and beyond the wider Harvard community. To her, the existential questions, the big decisions, are the stuff of life. We are, in her view, defined by our nobility of purpose, our grace, our willingness to act. “What do we owe to one another? How should we live?” She implored the seniors, assembled in the aftermath of the Boston Bombings, to “immunize [yourselves] against an excess of scepticism...run toward life.”

President Faust once again showed herself a master observer, excising the competing pressures of material success and allegiance to a higher sense of duty that all Harvard students face. Yet her recent statement on divestment was high on rhetoric and low on courage, flagrantly embracing the very scepticism that she so often condemns.

Her letter is considerate and extensive; it demonstrates, at the very least, her willingness to evaluate divestment. At its core, however, stands a glaring flaw. She claims that we should “be very wary of steps… that would appear to position the University as a political actor rather than an academic institution.” She writes that “the endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.”

Yet the endowment is the resource that propels this university. Harvard is not the sum of its buildings and its investments; it’s a community of people, of ideas. Every year, President Faust charts a transformation—students who arrive at Harvard endowed with intelligence and talent are awakened, emboldened, and driven towards truth while “improvising in the face of uncertainty.”

The threats to our planet are becoming increasingly certain, the path ever clearer. If the act of grace that is a Harvard education impels its students toward social or political change, how can President Faust deny her institution the very same purpose?

Daniel Z. Wilson ’14 is a history of science concentrator in Currier House. He is a former chair of the Harvard Environmental Action Committee.

Why Divest Isn’t Hypocritical

Among the most common arguments against “Divest” that you’ll encounter is that the movement’s goal is hypocritical. We rely on fossil fuels for our lights, our cars, and our heat, claim the detractors, so to pull the plug on the finance side is simply a confused, self-destructive gesture. This is a seductive argument—one to which I subscribed in the past. Faust even invoked it in her letter to the Harvard community, writing that we cannot jibe our “pervasive dependence” on the fossil fuel industry with financial divestment.

But it’s also a flawed argument in that it assumes the actions of institutions should always mirror those of individuals.

Though many of us care deeply about climate change and know it to be manmade, all of us consume fossil fuels anyways because we lack the funds to do otherwise, and because the alternatives are impractical given the realities of modern infrastructure. In other words, the fossil fuel industry has us at checkmate, and there is nothing substantive that any single one of us can do to resist without extreme personal sacrifice.

When we organize advocacy campaigns through an institution like Harvard, however, we undermine these infrastructural and financial confines. We overcome the capital constraints of the individual, and we exert pressure over the system that has made consumption-based resistance impractical.

Unlike the movement’s opponents, the leaders of Divest Harvard have realized that institutional resistance is a prerequisite to meaningful individual resistance. So, despite the naysayers’ claims, divestment isn’t hypocritical at all, but rather consistent—and pragmatic—to the core.

J. Gram Slattery ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.