HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW
WHAT HAPPENED EUROPE’S INTERVIEW: TO THE AMERICAN RIGHT TURN DREW GILPIN FAUST DREAM?
VOLUME XL NO. 3, FALL 2013 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM
INEQUALITY. SO WHAT?
THE SHORT LIST Your one-stop source to the most scintillating and dynamic political content.
HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/THE-SHORT-LIST
INEQUALITY. SO WHAT?
10 Urban Inequality in Chengdu Rachel Wong
15 Protesting Everything Matthew Disler
13 Golden Veils: Privacy and Inequality in the Free Market Taonga Leslie
18 What Happened to the American Dream? Jeff Metzger
FUNNY PAGES
WORLD
3 Breaking Boehner Ben Shryock
29 Strangers in the Promised Land Jacob Drucker
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32 Afghanistan on the Rise Pooja Podugu
4 6
The Case Against a Crimson Empire Joe Choe
The Divesters: Tomorrow’s Activists Colin Diersing
8 Higher Education: Failing Our Nation’s High-Performing, Low-Income Students? Clara McNulty-Finn
UNITED STATES 26 Obamacare: He Built It, But Will They Come? Daniel Lynch
20 Just How Good Was the Obama Campaign? Frank Mace 22 Ushering in the New Era of Civil Rights
36 Letters from Turkey Cansu Colakoglu
BOOKS & ARTS 38 The Radical Redeemer Samir Durrani
INTERVIEWS 41 Rahm Emanuel Andrew Ma 42 Drew Gilpin Faust Colin Diersing
Emily Wang
24 Taking College Accreditors to School Matthew Weinstein
ENDPAPER 44 Surviving the Storm Frank Mace
34 Europe’s Right Turn Francesca Annicchiarico Email: editor@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Copyright 2013 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Flickr: 3- Gage Skidmore; 6- Macchi. U.S. Federal Government: 32- U.S. Department of Defense; 41- U.S. House of Representatives; 42- National Endowment for the Humanities. Cansu Colakoglu: 37.
FALL 2013 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1
FROM THE EDITOR
HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW A Nonpartisan Journal of Politics Established 1969—Vol. XL, No. 3
EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Andrew Seo PUBLISHER: Olivia Zhu MANAGING EDITOR: Beatrice Walton ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Arjun Mody ONLINE EDITOR: Frank Mace COVERS EDITOR: Matt Shuham CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Sam Finegold CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Taonga Leslie INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Colin Diersing U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Ross Svenson U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Daniel Backman U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Daniel Lynch WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Gram Slattery WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Priyanka Menon B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Holly Flynn B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Rachel Wong HUMOR EDITOR: Ben Shryock STAFF DIRECTOR: Tom Gaudett BUSINESS MANAGER: Naji Filali CIRCULATION MANAGER: Matthew Disler DESIGN EDITOR: Ashley Chen GRAPHICS EDITOR: Paul Lisker MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Jenny Choi WEBMASTER: Peter Cha WEBMASTER: Tom Silver
SENIOR WRITERS Alpkaan Celik, Caroline Cox, Zeenia Framroze, Medha Gargeya, Krister Koskelo, Eli Kozminsky, Joshua Lipson, Raul Quintana, Sarah Siskind, Simon Thompson
STAFF Jay Alver, Francesca Annichiaricco, Humza Syed Bokhari, Alex Boota, Florence Chen, Samuel Coffin, Cansu Colakoglu, Corinne Curcie, Tyler Cusick, Neha Dalal, Jacob Drucker, Mikhaila Fogel, David Freed, Caleb Galoozis, Harleen Gambhir, Jenny Gao, Nicky Guerreiro, Barbara Halla, Rachael Hanna, Eric Hendey, Harry Hild, Kaiyang Huang, Jonathan Jeffrey, Elsa Kania, Brooke Kantor, Arjun Kapur, Gina Kim, John Kocsis, Ian Kohnle, Sandra Korn, Ha Le, Johanna Lee, Tom Lemberg, Ethan Loewi, Zak Lutz, Ken Mai, Jacob Morello, Mai Nguyen, Andrea Ortiz, Caitlin Pendleton, Sylvia Percovich, Valentina Perez, Heather Pickerell, Anthony Pietra, Cory Pletan, Pooja Podugu, Ivel Posada, John Prince, Gabriel Rosen, William Scopa, Alexander Smith, Martin Steinbauer, Alastair Su, Danielle Suh, Rajiv Tarigopula, Alec Villalpando, Joy Wang, Selina Wang, Matthew Weinstein, Danny Wilson, Teresa Yan, Benjamin Zhou
ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz
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Limitless Possibilities Dear Readers, “Anything Could Happen at Harvard.” It’s the latest viral video sweeping campus, and it is generating all kinds of buzz among the student body. Students, feeling everything from disillusionment to unbridled optimism, look to the video as either a serious misportrayal of the Harvard experience or spot-on encapsulation of undergraduate life. After watching the video, which is Harvard College Admissions and Financial Aid’s latest multimedia creation to inform and educate prospective students of the wonders of the College, I felt a wave of school pride and exuberance. The video so adeptly underscores the reasons why attending Harvard at this moment is so exciting and told such poignant stories of my classmates. The nearly 17-minute video is broken up into shorter vignettes, highlighting some of the most inviting and accommodating facets of the undergraduate experience: first-year life in the Yard, a strong financial aid program, the upperclassmen houses, and the enriching academic experience. Hearing each individual story—of current students, illustrious alumni such as Nicholas Kristof and Jeremy Lin, and faculty members—gave me a renewed optimism and vitality. The video brought me back to memories of high school, when I had first fallen in love with Harvard. I soon realized that this institution is better off than it was four years ago when I was applying, and the steps we are taking as a university suggest that things will continue to improve going forward. But what does this all mean for us right now? While intended for high school students, “Anything Could Happen at Harvard” should prove useful for current students, as well. We should use it to reflect and re-evaluate our time here. Too often we see students failing to pay attention in class, opting instead
for texting or perusing Facebook. We frequently find ourselves too reluctant to leave campus and explore the surrounding area. Too uncomfortable with the notion of trying a new extracurricular pursuit. Too risk averse to take courses outside of our concentration. Too obsessed with maximizing the efficiency of every minute of every day to just take pause and relax. As I continue on this journey that is senior year, I hope to avoid these common traps. I hope we can all use this moment as a motivating force to capitalize on the limited time we have here at Harvard. Together, we can create a new ethos of risk taking and adventure, of academic inquisitiveness and bravado, of community building and sincerity. Anything should happen. The tools and resources are at our fingertips. We should take advantage of them, and hopefully give back one day to provide that same access and opportunity to future classes. We are attending this university at one of the most exciting times in its history. In this issue of the HPR alone, you will find Colin Diersing’s profile of a new group of activists pioneering the nascent divestment campaign (p. 4). Two HPR writers describe their peripatetic summer adventures (p. 29, 36). And finally, we interview President Faust about the capital campaign, new teaching methods, and improving gender dynamics on campus (p. 42). These are just a few of the many things occurring on campus and beyond. Each of our passions and goals may be different. But we find ourselves united under this one university, which has provided us with so many resources and opportunities. The possibilities are truly limitless. It is now our time to capitalize on them.
Andrew Seo Editor-in-Chief
FUNNY PAGES eaking Boehner HOUSE SPEAKER SUPPORTS SENATOR CRUZ’S PLEDGE TO END INEQUALITY IN THE METH INDUSTRY
After watching his first episode of Breaking Bad, Texas Senator Ted Cruz held a press conference to announce his commitment to ending inequality in the meth industry.
Speaker of the House John Boehner spoke out in favor of Cruz’s idea. “I haven’t seen the show, but I think a lot of Americans can identify with the story of a meth lord that becomes a high school chemistry teacher.”
“It wasn’t until I saw the story of Heisenberg that I realized it isn’t right for one percent of the people to have 99 percent of all wealth. The success of the kingpin comes at the expense of the street pushers, hired guns, and drug mules that make this country great.”
An also confused House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stated that Cruz’s idea would receive support from across the aisle. “When Heisenberg became a chemistry teacher and distributed his millions of dollars to meth addicts across the Southwest, it was one of the greatest welfare victories of all time. It was regrettable and unforeseeable that the majority of the welfare recipients used the money to buy more meth.”
Though many Americans were surprised by Cruz’s unexpected announcement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed there was a reasonable explanation. “When the shutdown occurred, budgetary concerns forced us senators to switch from doing both useful work and partisan finger-pointing to just partisan finger-pointing. This reduced our workloads by about 10 percent, and we’ve mostly used that time to marathon shows on Netflix.”
At press time, Boehner and Pelosi were seen watching season three of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and giggling.
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THE DIVESTERS: TOMORROW’S ACTIVISTS How two diverse groups are coming together to shape campus politics Colin Diersing
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he tactics and goals of divestment campaigns are generally well documented and understood. Generally, these campaigns seek to persuade and cajole universities into changing the way they invest their endowments so as to remove fossil fuel producing companies from their investment portfolios. Dynamic, fast growing, and media savvy, these campaigns have captured the attention of national media outlets from The New York Times to Fox News. Less well understood, however, are the students behind these campaigns. With relatively little fanfare and recognition, divestment movements around the country are doing much more than advocating for a particular set of responsible investment strategies for universities. They are attracting, training, and shaping a new generation of activists who together are changing the face and feel of environmental activism on college campuses. In seeking to explain their heterogeneous motivations, interests, and concerns, this article will explore the individuals leading these campaigns and how they function as one group. Young, diverse, and generally inexperienced, divesters are already reimagining environmental activism in a way more immediately relevant to their generation’s concerns. It is these motivations, interests, concerns, and relationships that represent much of the future of campus activism.
DIVESTMENT AND STUDENT POWER If you ask divestment leaders what is most surprising about the movement, they usually describe how they did not anticipate “how fast they would grow and how much attention they would garner on campus.” Answers like these are undoubtedly part of a savvy movement’s
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Today’s divesters are reimagining on-campus environmental activism. attempt to shape media narratives, but equally reflect the truly extraordinary growth in student involvement and media coverage. Just a few years old, divestment campaigns have grown in membership and salience faster than any of their contemporary activist groups. Indeed, much of divestment’s promise draws roots in its broad appeal. Student leaders argue that what makes divestment so appealing to young students is that it changes the fundamental power dynamics most students experience in activist spaces. In many other instances, limited resources and low levels of experience combine to limit student leaders’ effectiveness. For divesters, however, being a student is a source of power and influence. They are able to effectively lobby university officials with significant credibility precisely because they are students. Young and naïve they may be, but powerless they are not. This power is appealing both because it increases the footprint of student activism and because it reduces the focus
on individual choices. The focus on big systems over which students have considerable power has helped divestment to avoid what Alli Welton, a Harvard student and divester, told the HPR is the “annoyance factor” of past environmental campaigns. According to Welton, divestment counters an “image of climate campaigners as super preachy annoying people who will run around turning off your lights.” Divestment, she argues, recognizes that “the system we’re all set in is structured against making a seriously sustainable lifestyle viable.”
THE CONSERVATION DIVESTERS The major cleavage within the divestment movement lies in the motivations and background of its members. Some, referred to here as the justice divesters, are primarily interested in the effects climate change will have on humans, especially traditionally marginalized groups. Others, the conservation divesters, are primar-
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ily concerned with the environmental consequences of climate change. This distinction is in some cases artificial, and undoubtedly more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, but it nonetheless describes important variation between groups with a stake in divestment. For conservation divesters, concern for nature and the environment runs deep. Harold Eyster, a Harvard student, might just be the archetypal conservation divester. He discovered environmental activism through his love of birds and considers his greatest hero a prominent ornithologist. If not working on a divestment campaign, he would almost certainly be engaged in other work specific to the environmental movement. Hannah Nesser, a leading divester at Yale, began her activist career petitioning the state of Minnesota to ban certain types of hand soaps with potentially harmful toxins—before she had even reached the age of 12. As a group, conservation divesters look very similar to members of past environmental movements. Their concerns are primarily with the environmental impacts of climate change, their approaches generally less radical, and their backgrounds somewhat more institutional.
THE JUSTICE DIVESTERS Alli Welton is a justice divester. Her introduction to serious climate activism came from a trip she took to an international summit, where she volunteered to help island states without significant representation who view climate change as a serious threat to their existence. For her, climate and, by extension, divestment, is about how the lives of people, especially very poor people, will be affected more than it is about saving any one particular species or biome. “I guess I’m just really concerned about poverty,” she explains, while recalling her childhood in a heavily impoverished town. Issac Lederman, a divester at Princeton, splits his time between divestment groups and labor activism. When asked about the divestment and environmental dichotomy, he told the HPR that ultimately everyone involved recognizes that climate change “is going to be bad for people.” “And,” he adds, “I think it’s really important that that’s expressed.” The social justice divesters are, by and large, interested in issues such as poverty and inequality. They draw inspiration from living wage and labor campaigns, and are concerned with climate change’s effects on low-income communities around the world. It is not the environment, per se, that concerns these students, but the way that the environment manifests deeper social justice concerns. They are perhaps best embodied in Swarthmore’s divest campaign, originally founded in solidarity with mountain communities whose day to day lives were being significantly impacted by coal mining.
A MOVEMENT EMERGES Two such remarkably different groups of people do not, of course, come together without tension or conflict. One student tells the story of a retreat for divestment leaders where one group, representative of the concerns of justice divesters, had planned a workshop on the role of privilege in shaping divest-
ment campaigns which, they hoped, would encourage students to think about ways sexism, classism, or racism might be influencing divestment. Conservation divesters present, uncertain of the value and, perhaps, simply unaccustomed to the cultural specificity of such a program, questioned whether the event should happen at all. The event went forward, but those present recall the event as an uncomfortable and contentious reminder of differences in cultural and normative commitments within the group. “Does that create a tension?” asks one student. “Yeah, sometimes on a one-on-one level it does,” she answers. And yet, despite considerable internal differences and some conflict, divestment groups work remarkably well together. This in part is accredited to the ability of those involved to focus on building effective campaigns despite possible differences. One said in an interview with the HPR that “there’s a lot of internal stuff going on in social movements, but at the end of the day you never want it to distract from your ends.” As long as a common cause unites their desires and tactics, divesters seem content to work with the at times uncomfortable disagreements that come with a multifaceted and heterogeneous social movement. Ultimately, the ability of these two groups to work together on divestment issues may help to shape future environmental campaigns towards a more social justice themed message. Lederman hopes that divestment will ultimately serve as something of a bridge between the more traditional environmental movement and broader social justice groups. He argues, “The beauty of divestment is that it encourages people to see the connections between climate change and environmental racism, polluting justice, mine workers getting stripped of their rights, stuff like that.” Divestment, as an incubator for crossover, may be building the relationships and loyalties that ultimately help bridge this gap on campuses around the country.
A PLACE IN HISTORY When you ask divesters for historical predecessors, they invariably offer up divestment campaigns on college campuses in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that petitioned universities to divest from apartheid South Africa. The claim speaks both to their understanding of past activist attempts at divestment and to their moral certainty around the work that they do. Pressed for further examples, many turn to less immediately analogous but equally morally significant causes. One divester recalls the civil rights movement, if only to keep perspective on the relatively low levels of danger and pain involved in divestment activism. Relatively few speak of past environmental campaigns. It is far too early to know the legacy of divestment. The campaigns are young, and their ability to influence university investment portfolios is still unclear. Yet the divesters are already leaving their footprint on the world. They imagine an environmental movement more focused on structures, a social justice movement more concerned with environmental concerns, and an environmental movement more responsive to low-income communities. And they are willing to invest everything they have in making that a reality.
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The Case Against a
Crimson Empire The Dangers of International Expansion Joe Choe
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op American universities have begun expanding their services through the establishment of campuses abroad. These ventures include not only branch campuses such as New York University Abu Dhabi, but also joint ventures such as Yale’s and the National University of Singapore’s new Yale-NUS College and NYU’s Shanghai campus, a partnership with the East China Normal University. Harvard, however, has chosen not to expand its physical presence through branch campuses—a wise decision. This does not mean that Harvard should isolate itself from the world. Rather, Harvard should spread education and solidify its brand abroad in ways that pose less risk to the institution.
FOR FAME AND FORTUNE Universities are constantly under pressure to raise money. Therefore, it is no surprise that they would pounce on an opportunity to establish a campus in a foreign country, especially if the host university is footing most of the bill. Jim Sleeper, a lecturer of political science at Yale and an outspoken critic of
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new campuses, wrote in a Huffington Post article that many of these foreign countries are “buying liberal education’s prestige by bearing all or most costs of constructing the campuses.” Not only are branch campuses economically attractive, but they also appear to be the perfect opportunity for an American university to expand its brand name and compete more effectively with its peers. In an interview with the HPR, Sleeper argued that universities feel competitive and “act like business organizations much more than they should. Trustees and presidents think like multinational corporations and become competitive with one another. They want to expand brand name and market share, which philosophically and pedagogically goes against what a liberal arts education should do.” Additionally, many universities see branch campuses as a way to globalize and reach out to the world. However, in an interview with the HPR, Steve Heyneman, professor of international education policy at Vanderbilt University, countered that although a tendency exists towards thinking that American universities should open up their campuses globally to remain competitive, “The reality is very different.” A branch campus is certainly not
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the only way for a university to expand internationally, and in many cases, a full-blown foreign campus can become a detriment.
CULTURES CLASHING ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM Countries come in many categories. Some may have cultures and values similar to those of the United States, whereas others may have restrictions on ideals that American universities view essential, especially in an academic context. Both Yale and NYU’s faculties have protested restrictions on publishing and open inquiry in their host countries. Often when these universities enter legal-financial relationships with authoritarian governments, it becomes difficult to maintain important ideals such as freedom of speech, thought, and association. Recently, Wellesley College warned Peking University that their partnership would end if Peking chose to fire a faculty member who is an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party. Johns Hopkins University is another university that has teamed up with a school in China. Students at the School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing have had their right to political discussion restricted. Specifically, they have been prohibited from showing a documentary of the Tiananmen Square uprising and had one of their student publications censored. It is for this reason that Heyneman believes that branch campuses are “suicidal” and “flawed goods.” He wonders, “What happens after you’ve invested $100 million into the infrastructure and find out you can’t teach history? That’s a problem.” Of course, to circumvent this, a university wishing to expand abroad could make a conscientious effort to partner with a country that is democratic, humanitarian, transparent, espouses freedom of expression, and allows open inquiry, but countries that fit these criteria either already have flagship institutions of higher learning or can be helped in a plethora of other ways that do not involve a full-blown branch campus.
DON’T KILL THE “GOLDEN GOOSE” In many respects, Harvard’s priority should continue to be its Cambridge campus. After all, many hope Harvard will perfect its current state of education before expanding, as Harvard is by no means perfect yet. In an interview with the HPR, former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis spoke against the idea of opening campuses abroad: “I don’t think we are doing a good enough job for students already on this campus. We would be stretching ourselves too far and compromising ideals that are important to us.” He explained that while Harvard has “such incredibly talented students… It always hurts me when the opportunities we offer them are not as good as the students themselves—and that happens regularly.” This lack of opportunity comes in many forms, such as lotteries determining spots in popular courses or the large number of students packing into introductory lecture halls. Instead of allocating resources abroad, Harvard should focus on fixing the flaws it currently has. However, Harvard should not dismiss any possibility of reaching out to the world. There is no doubt that isolation today is neither viable nor sustainable. Universities must “increase their cultural competencies as well as their real understandings
of those regional differences,” Haiyan Hua, a lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told the HPR. According to Hua, education is not a zero sum game. Therefore, “the more you share, the more you [get back] too.” From this perspective, there is no reason why Harvard should not expand its global reach. The question is simply how. Instead of trying to team up with a foreign university and build an actual campus, Harvard should instead dedicate certain resources like education funds that can be used for goals such as building learning facilities or reaching out to vulnerable children. Before it was shut down in 2000, the Harvard Institute for International Development did just that by overseeing international aid and development programs in foreign countries. Hua worked for the HIID and helped more than 50 countries improve everything from public health to education with financial support from the university. Harvard could also follow a model similar to that of Columbia University, which created international learning centers that are not as invasive and are not complete campuses. The Columbia Global Centers are hubs of research and learning in cities such as Amman, Istanbul, Nairobi, Paris, and Santiago. Columbia has formed partnerships with host universities and governments, but unlike degree-granting branch campuses, these centers have formed flexible agreements, and the university can always leave if it decides that its hosts are hostile or if its values are jeopardized. Columbia takes advantage of the regional diversity of its center locations to collaborate with scholars on an international level to address global issues. Massive Open Online Courses are another viable strategy for expanding globally. Harvard teamed up with MIT in 2012 to found edX, a platform through which universities can offer college courses to the world for free to anyone with access to the Web. Most famously, 16-year-old Battushig Myanganbayar was featured in the New York Times for being one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at MIT that he took as a MOOC from a remote village in Mongolia. The ability for universities to increase accessibility of education to students such as Battushig is tremendous. Already, more people have signed up for MOOCs at Harvard than have attended the university since its founding in 1636. Harvard should continue harnessing the power of MOOCs because they have a huge potential to expand education in ways that were unthinkable even just a few years ago. All of these initiatives would be just as effective as establishing a campus abroad and would still accomplish many of the same goals of a branch campus while giving Harvard independence and flexibility. The university would be able to provide an environment conducive to scholarship while also allowing freedom of expression and open inquiry unrestricted by external forces. Harvard must not stretch itself too far and be prevented from achieving its goal of fostering a world-class liberal arts community. In addition, it can still accomplish many of the goals of its peers who have already created full-blown international campuses by pursuing less precarious and less invasive initiatives. In the words of Heyneman, “What Harvard does best is solve world problems, but it must solve them from the base and center. It’s not only the world’s wealthiest university. It’s also the world’s ‘Golden Goose.’” So let’s not risk ruining it.
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HIGHER EDUCATION FAILING OUR NATION’S HIGH-PERFORMING, LOW-INCOME STUDENTS? Clara McNulty-Finn
“I
f young people don’t have an equal shot at getting a great education, we’re going to create a society we’re not very happy with,” Catherine Hill, the president of Vassar, firmly believes. Her statement underscores a recent focus in the United States on equalizing the college application process across socioeconomic backgrounds, following a disturbing 2012 publication, The Missing ‘One-Offs’: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students, by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. The study gained national attention with its revelation that while more than three-quarters of high-achieving, wealthy students attended one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, only a third of high-achieving, low-income students attended one of those schools. This gap between the fourth and first income quartiles on U.S. college campuses has attracted much public criticism of colleges and universities for their lack of socioeconomic diversity initiatives. The problem, however, is not a lack of college-level diversification efforts and financial aid programs. Rather, lowincome students remain disproportionately under-resourced and under-informed, and consequently continue to not even consider higher-education programs in the first place. Equality in higher education can be achieved only with a concerted effort to increase awareness of the admissions process and financial aid programs among high-achieving, low-income students, and to increase the application resources available to these students in middle school and high school.
THE INFORMATION GAP There exists a widespread but unfounded belief that toptier colleges are inaccessible, financially or otherwise, to high-achieving, low-income students. Yet Harvard’s financial aid policy offers a prime example of how colleges are working towards eliminating financial obstacles for low-income students. The policy makes a Harvard education free for families of admitted students with annual incomes of $65,000 or less.
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Similar initiatives have been adopted by many of the country’s elite universities. But these opportunities can only help students aware of their options. This information gap expands beyond a lack of knowledge of financial aid: many low-income students are simply uneducated about the application process itself. Leslie Sullivan, a representative from the third-party student-college liaison QuestBridge, pointed out in her interview with the HPR that students who have more resources, or come from families who are familiar with the college process “know how to best portray [themselves] on an application,” whereas firs-generation or low-income students “don’t have that resource.” High school college guidance programs may seem like an obvious resource, but due to sparse funding in many public high schools, counselors can only do so much to enable highachieving, low-income students. John Katzman, CEO of a start-up called Noodle Education that provides data-driven recommendations to students applying to college, told the HPR that schools with a wealthier student population spend vastly more on student tutoring and SAT prep than schools servicing students of a lower socioeconomic background, where the average guidance counselor is often responsible for as many as 600 students. In such situations, as Katzman puts it, guidance counselors often “point students at good resources, and [focus their] energy on the kids they can help, through a triage process.” This sort of guidance program, however, often dismisses students who do not plan on going to college at all, thus ignoring the root of the issue and again promoting a socioeconomic gap among college-educated students.
THIRD PARTIES STEP IN With high school guidance departments stretched thin, third parties have entered the advising space and have developed a number of creative solutions. Rutgers University, for instance, realized that very few low-income students from the high
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schools bordering its campus applied to Rutgers. It therefore founded the “Rutgers Future Scholars” program to select about 200 local, low-income students and guarantee them admittances to Rutgers upon successful completion of the RFS program. RFS has proven highly effective: in 2013 RFS scholars graduated high school at a rate 10 percent higher than the state average and 90 percent of RFS students enrolled in undergraduate institutions. The program has gained national recognition as other universities are beginning to mimic RFS. Similar organizations, yet without any ties to specific universities or high schools, try to accomplish the same goal as RFS. QuestBridge is one high-profile organization that emphasizes the importance of training educators to act as a long-lasting college resource in under-resourced high schools. Sullivan emphasizes the importance of the organization’s relationship with teachers, as well-trained educators often encourage students to look into such resources. American Honors, another third party organization, not only preps students, but also goes deeper and provides alternative paths through higher education. It does this by encouraging students to enroll in two-year community colleges and then transfer to four-year schools. In an interview with the HPR, Chief Academic Officer David Finegold said he believes that the organization is unique, as it combines “rigor and preparation for success” with two years of “big savings.” As student debt and tuition prices continue to rise, an undergraduate education that begins with community college leaves middle- and lower-income families and students with more resources to pursue both undergraduate and graduate educations. Finegold also addressed the importance of reaching out to high school students earlier than junior or senior year to provide students with advisors throughout the college admissions process. American Honors, Finegold explained, “gives first generation, lower-income students a playbook for college applications” that allows them to remain competitive in the college application process. Katzman’s Noodle Education has also shown promise for dra-
matically widening quality college advice with little cost. Guidance counselors across the country can use Noodle to help their students find colleges that match their preferences. Noodle also calculates what financial aid package students would receive.
MORE TO BE DONE Despite the development of programs like RFS and American Honors, there remains a persistent socioeconomic gap on college campuses across the United States. The consensus is emerging, however, that greater impact will be realized by reaching out to students earlier in high school. Finegold says American Honors has already begun this process by ensuring that students as young as 14 are already thinking about their academic future so that they may be competitive in the admissions process. The organization plans to accomplish these goals by developing tutoring programs and better preparing students for college-level math. QuestBridge also plans to dedicate more resources to contacting younger students and expand its target population from standardized test takers to those students who have not even considered applying to colleges. Of course, as outreach expands, colleges will have to find a way to maintain their financial aid programs, which in the wake of the financial crisis may become increasingly limited as more low-income students apply. Maintaining a commitment to financial aid, even as the number of qualifying students increases, will be essential in socioeconomic diversity efforts. Yet private institutions are unlikely to solve the education gap on their own. Despite cuts to state and national education budgets, public educational institutions should continue to support earlier outreach to high school students. The federal government, meanwhile, should focus efforts on widening advising access. After all, education can be, as Horace Mann said, “the great equalizer,” but only if the machinery is in place.
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INEQUALITY
URBAN INEQUALITY IN CHENGDU P eople go to Paris to see what is there, but also what is not there. Haussmann’s boulevards, the Louvre’s glass pyramid, and the spires of Notre Dame would not amount to much if they had to compete with modern skyscrapers. While most cities grapple with slums and industrial sprawl, Paris has also had to sweep another problem under the rug: how to build without demolishing. Just a few miles to the west of Paris is a forest of glass and steel called La Défense, a business district that does not look all that different from its counterparts in Barcelona or Vancouver or Kuala Lumpur. Masterminded in the 1950s and ’60s, this “edge city” has ensured Paris’ relevance in the global economy, but not without costs. Like many other development projects, the process displaced residents, razed homes, and colonized farmland without creating many viable new living spaces. Today, the city empties out after five o’clock, with its few residents living in little pockets of subsidized housing among all the skyscrapers. The district’s master planner told the New York Times, “La Défense is like an iceberg that is disconnected from the areas around it.” Some five thousand miles away, the southern Chinese city of
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Rachel Wong
Chengdu is about to do what Paris did 50 years ago. But while La Défense spans around five square miles, Chengdu’s new Tianfu district will cover over 12 times that area, with plans to then triple in size by the year 2030. When finished, Tianfu will include wide boulevards and sprawling plazas, high-rises and high-tech development zones, eco-friendly transport networks, and a contemporary art center by Zaha Hadid. Just this summer, the world’s biggest stand-alone building, New Century City Global Center, opened its doors in Chengdu. A town in its own right, the Global Center could easily swallow 30 Yankee Stadiums. It boasts a university campus, a high-end hotel, 4.3 million square feet of shopping, and massive artificial beach overlooked by a 490-foot-long LCD screen projecting Caribbean sunsets. If that sounds excessive, that is because it probably is. In China’s wild west, city officials dream big.
BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME The Olympics were held in Beijing, the World Expo in Shanghai, and the Asian Games in Guangzhou. All along China’s
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The average Chinese citizen might not blame the state for the spectacular wealth of his neighbor, but he will blame the state if he believes it is carrying out its policies unfairly.
coast, the glitter of skyscrapers and sprawl of factories tells a story of both newfound wealth and lingering poverty. The west remains a relative backwater, with its wide swaths of farmland and uncultivated marshes. But Huang Xinchu, party secretary of the city, notes that economic growth in China’s west has actually outperformed the east for the last five years. Fortune magazine declared the Chengdu Model, which preserves cultural ties while developing an ambitious Tianfu edge city, as the key to China’s future. It wasn’t just empty praise: this year’s Fortune Global Forum was held in Chengdu. Will Chengdu really become a hub for global commerce, or will the bubble eventually burst and turn the city into a debt disaster? As farmers become laborers for public projects like the Global Center, the land they leave behind will be taken in by the government and sold off for the city’s expansion. The congestion and constant construction within city limits will test how much faith Chengdu residents have in their city’s motto: “Today’s trouble for tomorrow’s convenience.” And beneath these changes, there are the twin issues of inequality and corruption. Chengdu’s success will depend as much on its sources of investment as the ability of its government to manage public opinion. The Tianfu district promises to transform Chengdu into a world-class metropolis, but the story of La Défense gives us a glimpse of how this transformation could come at the expense of the average citizen.
RISING TIDE OF INEQUALITY Studies of inequality in American cities tend to focus on how wealth gaps affect crime rates, high school dropout rates, or voting behavior. When social scientists turn to China, however, their main concern is political instability. Does rising inequality lead to greater discontent with the state? Could the next Tiananmen Square be triggered by the growing ranks of rural migrant workers, who do not receive the same social services as city dwellers? China’s 2012 Gini coefficient was 0.474, approaching the level of Brazil and Nigeria, two of the most unequal societies in the world. The gap between urban and rural income levels, which were 3:1 before the economic reforms of the 1970s and ’80s, has now risen to 4:1. The hukou system, which prevents those living in rural areas from moving freely to the cities, ties
peasants to the land and denies them easy access to employment in the cities. A 2004 national survey found that 50.9 percent of respondents thought that social inequalities persist because the rich and powerful wanted them there, and a similar number of Chinese believed that economic inequality links directly to political instability. Of course, these facts tell only part of the story. For a country as large and diverse as China, national data can only give us a snapshot of conditions on the ground. A country with extreme levels of inequality across all regions, for example, would worry about instability differently than one with relatively equal communities, but extreme wealth differences from region to region. China, though, has aspects of both. The link between inequality and instability becomes more complicated when we consider why protests happen in China in the first place. Harvard sociology professor Martin Whyte distinguishes between two types of injustice: distributive and procedural. Distributive injustice refers to inequalities in wealth or income, the type of tension that arises from seeing wealthy neighbors driving Maseratis, for example. Procedural injustice, on the other hand, refers to corruption, nepotism, or a rigged court system, the type of complaint that might be lodged against a government official who used welfare funds for said Maserati. When Whyte’s team teased apart these two types of injustices in the survey data, they found that most Chinese were unhappy about procedural injustices, not distributive ones. The average Chinese citizen might not blame the state for the spectacular wealth of his neighbor, but he will blame the state if he believes it is carrying out its policies unfairly. Even the 2008 global economic meltdown did not change attitudes all that much. “Conspicuous consumption in China has a long tradition,” Whyte told the HPR. “But pollution, chemical plants, and land expropriation for the development of cities are new sources of discontent. People feel that the authorities are not doing their jobs properly, but if they voice their concerns, they could get in worse trouble.”
DIGGER HUANG AND DEMOLISHER LI There is a reason why the nickname “Digger Huang” is censored out of Chinese social media. Aside from Chengdu Party Secretary Huang Xinchu’s unpopular projects to build metro
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As cities in China modernize and develop, remnants of Mao’s old power inequalities emerge.
lines and elevated highways in downtown Chengdu all at once, he also cracked down with surprising ruthlessness on a factory protest earlier this year. With billions of yuan cycling through these projects each month, Chengdu residents find it hard to believe that Huang is not linked to the corruption scandals that have rocked the city over the past year. Last December, Chengdu’s former deputy mayor Li Chuncheng, nicknamed “Demolisher Li,” was expelled from the party for his under-the-table dealings with real estate giant Vanke. Legal Weekly estimates that he raked in billions of yuan by massaging land rights auctions, and that he should even be held responsible for the death of 47-year-old Tang Fuzhen, who set herself on fire when a demolition crew attempted to bulldoze her home. And this month, the Global Center itself came under scrutiny. Deng Hong, the billionaire who helped fund the world’s largest building has disappeared and is likely in police custody. “There are more investigations, and more arrests, to come,” a state newspaper editor told the Telegraph. Over 50 government officials have been detained. If the 50 billion yuan used to fund the Global Center were tainted by corruption, then Chengdu Party Secretary “Digger Huang” may also be implicated. “The very system that drives development in China creates men like Li Chuncheng and Deng Hong: powerful, supremely wealthy, and until very recently, unaccountable to anyone,” Chengdu Living’s Sasha Mutascak writes. In this way, the dangerous side of rapid growth is not so much a widening wealth gap, but rather widening inequalities in power. With the fall of key players, developers could pull their plans, property prices could fall, and public opinion could become public dissent. Residents may criticize “Digger Huang” and “Demolisher Li” for their vast
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wealth, but if we take Whyte’s findings to heart, it’s the injustices that destabilize a regime, not the inequalities.
REMEMBERING MAO From a distance, mass rallies and mass demonstrations can look remarkably alike. Rallies during the Cultural Revolution would feature rows of Mao portraits, raised like sacred picket signs in Tiananmen Square. Mao would seem rather misplaced at a modern-day protest, but his image appears with surprising regularity. “Chairman Mao, we are missing you very much,” read a sign at a 2012 Beijing protest. In a nation whose Marxist fervor had faded with the death of its Chairman and with the economic reforms that followed, the people’s renewed fondness for Mao is not only perplexing, but perhaps also a little threatening. “It’s a way of critiquing some of the features of the current era,” Whyte explains. “While I think there are very few people who would go back to the years under Mao, there is still the idea that the rules were clearer and simpler, and the people had higher moral standards back then.” With full sensitivity to the famine, stagnation, and political persecution that plagued those years, it may be worth thinking about how much China has changed, and how much it hasn’t. For Mao, a new nation could only be built by digging up and demolishing old habits. For the leaders of Chengdu, a new global economy can only be built by displacing traditional labor and demolishing old neighborhoods. Yet the more they excavate, the more they find remnants of Mao’s old power inequalities within themselves, buried somewhere between those concrete pillars and LCD sunsets and wild west dreams.
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GOLDEN VEILS
PRIVACY AND INEQUALITY IN THE FREE MARKET Taonga Leslie
W
hile traditionally privacy has referred to our ability to decide what to disclose and what to keep secret, it also entails the right to self-presentation. In Europe, this right is considered so important that members of the European Parliament have proposed enshrining a “right to be forgotten” in new privacy legislation. Such a right would allow parties to demand that their personal data be deleted. While the passage of such legislation remains uncertain, the very idea highlights a broad divide between the trajectory of personal privacy in the United States and Europe. While in Europe, citizens have responded to privacy threats with legislative action, in the United States, citizens turn to market-based solutions. This is the narrative of privacy rights in the 21st century. Instead of embracing the “right to be forgotten” of their European counterparts, wealthy Americans continue to fight for increased control over their online presence through firms like International Reputation Management. IRM is a boutique firm that handles privacy concerns for the rich and powerful by suppressing negative search results. Founders Nino Kader and Dr. Christine Schiwietz explained to the HPR that the first couple of pages of search results a person generates are increasingly viewed as an extension of that person’s presence. Thus, for a couple thousand dollars, IRM marshals a team of writers and tech experts to create positive web content. Another team contacts the owners of sites containing critical information and
negotiates with them to have key posts removed. While Kader and Schiwietz are emphatic that their organization has rigorous ethical criteria for approving clients, wealth is the only obvious prerequisite for the service. For the vast majority of Americans, online reputation management is not an affordable option and as a result their control over self-presentation are severely diminished. The very existence of firms like IRM indicates a tacit agreement that unauthorized sharing of information is here to stay. The vast gulf between the ways the wealthy and the disadvantaged control information online is only a small part of the story of privacy and inequality in America. Similar disparities exist in the way Americans interact with government, employers, and even vendors. In the short run, these disparities in information control benefit the wealthy and middle class, but in the long run all segments of society are more vulnerable to privacy violations.
PRIVATE PROPERTY The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” While over the past two centuries, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Amendment to apply to a variety of modern contexts that the framers could not have foreseen
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including use of night-vision goggles and GPS tracking, these decisions have always been limited by the assumptions of property enshrined in the letter of the law. According to Amanda Conley, a former fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute, the courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment to provide strong protection to items and information within one’s house, drawing a bright line around the home as the seat of privacy. The result of a bright line protecting those who have houses is that items or information residing outside the home are entitled to significantly less protection. Additionally, the Supreme Court has taken a rather narrow view of what constitutes a home. In the 1925 decision, Carroll v. United States, the Court found that the government could search cars without warrants because motor vehicles carry a “lower expectation of privacy.” Over time, the court has expanded the list of motor vehicles that carry this exception to privacy to include motor homes, trailers, and houseboats. By denying those who can’t afford houses the same level of privacy as they would have had otherwise, the Supreme Court has effectively attached a price tag to Constitutional protections.
SELLING SECRETS: PRIVACY AND THE POOR As problematic as inequalities in access to constitutional protections are, they pale in comparison to the structural choices that force the poor to give up their privacy in exchange for basic resources. Writer Heather Denkmire has suggested that workers who are paid by their time have access to far less privacy than salaried workers. Having grown up in a white, college-educated, relatively affluent family, Denkmire described her experiences with poverty to the HPR as a culture shock. Hourly-wage workers are expected to practice constant self-surveillance and report to their employers before when they choose to eat, drink water, or use the bathroom, as well as how long each of these functions takes. Because there are few laws regulating what information employers may demand of employees, those who need entry-level work are forced to consent to the surveillance of their employers. Similar forces of surveillance are marshaled against the poor who receive federal or state assistance. In many states, the poor must submit to drug tests, consent to warrantless searches, and report to social workers about their child rearing tactics in order to receive aid. John Gilliom, a professor of political science at Ohio University, has observed in his research that the poor and vulnerable have traditionally served as testing grounds for more invasive technologies. Mandatory drug testing was first instituted against GIs seeking benefits after the Vietnam War before being expanded over the decades to apply to prisoners, the workforce, and finally high school populations. In Gilliom’s analysis, vulnerable populations provide the path of least resistance to both the state and private companies who expand the use of technology to ever-larger contexts.
THE DANGERS OF DATA While the above examples illustrate how inequality is helping to fuel a decline in privacy, the decline in privacy also fuels inequality. As corporations learn more and more about the popu-
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lations they employ and serve, they are in a position to exploit the most vulnerable in those populations. Conley and Laura Moy, a former fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation, illustrate this principle with reference to the current trend toward personalized customer sales cards. Many stores have begun to shift their focus from providing general sales to loading specific sales onto each customer’s card based on their shopping habits. Based on Conley and Moy’s research into industry-wide practices, groceries tend to rely on wealthy, big-ticket spenders who purchase foods like halibut and caviar for their bottom line. They attempt to avoid attracting “grazers,” the usually less affluent shoppers who follow sales from store to store. Conley and Moy theorize that with personalized sales cards, groceries will be able to lure loyal, wealthy shoppers to sample new merchandise that is temporarily marked down while avoiding sales that would attract grazers. The decline of privacy has a similar exploitive benefit to employers. Since Frederick Taylor developed the theory of scientific management in the late 1890s, employers have sought to coordinate the activities of their workers to optimize production. Especially for wageworkers, this has usually resulted in longer hours, tighter scheduling, and higher production demands. Admitting the right of employers to collect such large amounts of personal information on their employees’ personal choices could be opening the door to the right of employers to similarly manipulate those choices in the name of efficiency and productivity.
A FIRMER FOUNDATION The decline of inequality in the “free market” is generally accepted because individuals give their consent, but market inequalities render such consent meaningless. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 94 percent of American teenagers have an account with Facebook, by far the leading social networking site. A mere three percent of teens have accounts with Google+, Facebook’s most similar social networking competitor. As a result, when Facebook expands its privacy policies, users must either consent or risk losing access to an unparalleled network of contacts and information. A better system could draw upon the efforts of the EU to formulate a comprehensive system of privacy protections that apply against government and corporations alike. In the EU, the Data Protection Directive has defined the right to privacy with respect to the processing of personal data as a fundamental right of European citizens since 1995. In 2012, the EU began further efforts to update their privacy apparatus in response to changes in technology. America could adopt parallel legislation and establish once and for all that privacy rights are attached to individuals—not property. To do so would be to use European methods to protect uniquely American conceptions of freedom and liberty. If we do not act decisively, the forces of technology and inequality may continue to eat away at the privacy of all of us, rich and poor alike.
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PROTESTING EVERYTHING Disillusionment and Politics in Brazilian Demonstrations Matthew Disler
M
any Americans’ image of Brazil is colored by films like the Oscar-nominated City of God (2002), which described the tribulations of young people growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This favela image—crowded, gangland slums with little hope of escape—paints a picture of a nation that still seems to be suffering from enormous socioeconomic inequality, where the poor are too often left in dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods plagued by drugs and crime. Even Pope Francis’ visit to Rio de Janeiro this past July was marked by his visit to the Varginha favela, which has been compared to the Gaza Strip. At first glance, the massive protests that began on June 6, 2013, and spread throughout the country seemed to be about inequality. It was a reasonable assumption: many other large protest movements over the past few years have spoken out against class divides. Occupy Wall Street pushed against the one percent. Protests during the G20 summits in London and Toronto included calls to lower poverty and punish financial
malefactors. Even the Arab Spring began with union-led strikes and marches following a poor Tunisian street peddler’s self-immolation, after a policewoman confiscated his equipment. Brazil seems to fit the model perfectly. “Brazil is historically one of the most unequal societies on Earth,” Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told the HPR. “The reason has a lot to do with our colonial past. It has a lot to do with slavery … in terms of inequality, we still have an enormous way to go.” But it would be inaccurate to argue that economic inequality alone caused the Brazilian protests. Rather, it played a relatively minor role among several factors, all of which led to one conclusion: Brazilians today are disillusioned with their government, which they hold responsible for abuses stemming from political inequality. In Brazil, taxes do not yield dividends, and politicians do not live up to promises; corruption is rife, and public services are poor.
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This summer, Brazilians demonstrated their discontent with government social programs.
THE UNDERPINNINGS OF PROTEST The protests began with groups organized by the radical Movimento Passo Livre (Movement for Free Travel) demonstrating against an increase in São Paulo bus fares. However, following a brutal, seemingly disproportionate police crackdown a week later, the marches spread like wildfire. Demonstrations in over a dozen cities focused on a medley of topics, from corruption to economic policy change to the extravagant spending on the series of sporting events that the country is hosting. Apart from the Confederations Cup that occurred during the protests, Brazil will also host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Costs for the World Cup alone are projected at around $14 billion. “These protests were so gripping because they were so unexpected,” Frances Hagopian, Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies at Harvard, told the HPR. Imagine, “things are going well, the government is popular, the economy is growing, poverty’s been reduced, inequality’s been reduced, and all of a sudden we have this explosion of protests.” Before the protests, everything appeared optimistic for the country. Since 2000, Brazil’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) had dropped by six percent. Years of strong economic growth, since stalled, had allowed the nation to mitigate many of the repercussions of the 2008 global financial crisis. The poverty rate had decreased nearly 10 percent in eight years. Things were going well, and this national optimism was reflected in political rhetoric: “You had the rhetoric of the government that seemed to suggest that Brazil is improving,” noted Sotero, “almost a ‘Morning in America’ type of thing, like [under President Ronald] Reagan.” Notably, this same political class was falling farther out of touch with its constituents. Corruption was common, even infiltrating into political initiatives. Perhaps the most egregious scandal occurred in 2005, when reports accused then-President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party (PT) of bribing politi-
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cians for votes. Lula and the PT had risen to power as “the party that introduced ethics into politics.” As Sotero noted, Lula’s defense that the PT’s actions were continuous with Brazilian political tradition undermined citizens’ belief that the political elite would ever change. The PT still remains the strongest party in Brazil’s multiparty system, but the polemics arising from the so-called Mensalão scandal and the recent protests have severely damaged its credentials, perhaps irreparably.
“IF THE FARE WON’T DROP, THE CITY WILL STOP” Profound discontent with government social programs further fueled protest. However, the demographics of the protests seemed unusual. “If you were to draw the profile of the average protester, he would be young, urban, middle-class, and welleducated. So it would definitely not be the average Brazilian,” Andrei Roman, a graduate student in the Harvard government department who completed a study of the Brazilian protests, told the HPR in an interview. Protests solely focused on economic inequality, on the other hand, likely would have drawn from poorer populations. The growth of the middle class in Brazil has been perhaps the most salient change of the new millennium. A World Bank study showed that the Brazilian middle class grew 40 percent between 2003 and 2009, making it the fastest-growing such demographic in Latin America. With this new wealth came new expectations of government for effective public schools, health care, public transportation, infrastructure, and policing. But the government has not delivered on these commitments: public services remain fragile, inept, and often corrupt. Instead, citizens saw their taxes spent on expensive preparations for soccer tournaments. These grievances were not unique to the middle class, and ultimately much of the rest of the population supported the demonstrations. Protesters organized marches to coincide with Confederations Cup matches, which serve as prequels for next
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Politicians were nonplussed and paralyzed: they attempted to include the party in the marches, but PT leaders who tried to join the demonstrations were rejected and shut down.
year’s World Cup. Banners were covered with catchphrases like “If your son is sick, take him to the stadium!” and “If the fare won’t drop, the city will stop.” While the protests did not focus on economic inequality as a priority issue, the idea of an unjust system did inform how many Brazilians perceived their government and their society. “The fact of inequality maybe doesn’t make society feel like it’s a large, middle-class society where everyone is equal and doing well,” explained Hagopian. “Even if the middle class has grown, even if it now has 100 million people, it could be that this is in the background and this is what makes the appeals able to resonate.” Today’s Brazilians have grown up in a society with high inequality, and it is probable that this influences their politics: protesters who took to the streets believed that they were being ignored, underserved, and underrepresented. They felt as though they were at the bottom of a pyramid of political power, just as their parents had been at the bottom of an economic one. The government, on the other hand, seemed completely oblivious.
THE PT’S POLITICAL TRAP The PT was born from inequality, emerging in 1980 from workers’ movements against the then-military dictatorship. It has long branded itself as the representative of the common man and of the lower classes, and historically it has been behind many working-class protests and strikes. It is ironic, then, that as the disillusion-fueled protests spread throughout the country, the ire of nearly every socioeconomic class in Brazil was centered on the PT. Politicians were nonplussed and paralyzed: they attempted to include the party in the marches, but PT leaders who tried to join the demonstrations were rejected and shut out. It wasn’t until June 22 that President Rousseff, a PT member herself, and a former member of the anti-dictatorship resistance, appeared on television to deliver a statement calling for peaceful protest and promising reform. “The problem was that she didn’t really appease anybody, and that she wasn’t really
credible,” explained Roman. Add to that perception of Rousseff as an uninspiring—albeit usually dependable—bureaucrat, and the protesters remained unconvinced that the government could really help them. Although Rousseff proposed a series of reforms and constitutional changes, nearly all of these failed in Brazil’s legislature. The one surviving measure—a plan to bring foreign doctors to underserved Brazilian populations—has been severely weakened. Admittedly, much of the legislative dead ends can be explained by Brazil’s fragmented political system, which consists of dozens of weak political parties, each with only a few seats in government. Roman believes that the protests could exacerbate this situation even more. “The protests tend to actually accentuate the fragmentation of the system. The parties are very weak, [and] they’re getting even weaker now because of the protests,” he said. “Instead of driving positive change, there is also a risk that they might actually lead to institutional processes that could make it even harder to fight the ills that the protests are all about.”
BABY STEPS The future of Brazilian political reform is unclear. Although the protests have established wide-ranging social consensus on a number of problems in public life, solutions are hard to come by. Certainly, for now, the government could bolster confidence in the short run by improving transparency and working to streamline existing agencies. A constitutional amendment that would have given legislators impunity was robustly rejected in Brazil’s Congress soon after the protests, but symbolic measures will only appease people to a point. Real reform will be difficult, but it is nonetheless necessary as a means of giving political representation and empowerment to the Brazilian public.
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE
AMERICAN DREAM?
Jeff Metzger
O
f the various myths that define the United States, few are more prominent than the American Dream. Yet in the face of high economic inequality and disappointing intergenerational mobility, an important question is increasingly asked: is that dream still alive? The fact that inequality is rising is undisputed. But the causes and impacts of inequality, as well as its relationship to economic mobility, spark furious debate. In general, the left howls about inequality’s evils while the right tries to dismiss its significance altogether. In reality, both sides consistently oversimplify inequality, tossing aside the nuances that should define the debate.
WHY MOST AMERICANS WERE LEFT BEHIND It is easy to see why economic inequality in America has gained so much attention: the simplest statistics about it are hard to ignore. The top one percent rakes in nearly 20 percent of the nation’s income and controls roughly 43 percent of the nation’s wealth. The wealthiest 400 Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined, while about 95 percent of post-recession income gains have gone to the top one percent. In some ways, a rise in inequality was inevitable. “The two principal causes are the financialization of the economy and the run-up in executive pay,” Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, told the HPR in an interview. “There was a
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movement in investment banks away from partnerships towards public ownership, which put a lot more money into the hands of the big banks,” Noah explained. As this happened, the American economy’s shift from “labor” to “capital” continued, and CEOs began receiving compensation in stock options, which allowed their pay to skyrocket. Federal policy, including changes to the tax structure, has exacerbated the rise of the ultra-rich. “1977 was probably the peak year for progressivity,” Bob McIntyre, director of the nonpartisan tax research and advocacy organization Citizens for Tax Justice, told the HPR. Since the late 1970s, tax cuts such as the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the Bush Tax Cuts have disproportionately benefited the rich. As McIntyre explained in a 1992 paper, “Without tax cuts, the wealthy would have a much lower share of total pretax income,” given that these tax cuts have allowed the rich to increase their investment income. But the narrative of inequality is not just one of rich and poor. “There’s not one divergence, there’s two,” Noah explained. “There’s the divergence of the one percent versus the 99 percent, and then there is the divergence between skilled labor and less skilled labor.” Two phenomena have played large roles in increasing the gap between skilled and unskilled workers. Most notably, the United States’ education system has not produced enough high school and college graduates. “It’s a story about the increasing demand for … workers who have a college education, and the failure of the supply of the workers with those skills to keep up with demand,” argues Scott Winship, a senior fellow at
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If those born on the bottom had nearly as much of a chance of reaching the top as those born on the top have of staying there, few could doubt the merits of the American Dream.
the Manhattan Institute. A shortage of skilled labor increased demand for those with college degrees while most others were left behind. The decline of unions accentuated this divergence. Unions once provided a backbone for unskilled labor; they fought for higher wages and stronger benefits for their members, leading to a more equitable society on the whole. “Holding a union card used to be the practical equivalent of holding a B.A., but a lot fewer people in the private sector hold a union card today,” said Noah. The weakening of organized labor has also had political ramifications. Unions were the working class’s most effective allies on Capitol Hill, but their waning power has left them less able to advocate for pro-labor and pro-equality government policies.
AN AMERICAN DREAM FADING AWAY Inequality itself might be a bit more bearable if economic mobility were strong. If those born on the bottom had nearly as much of a chance of reaching the top as those born on the top have of staying there, few could doubt the merits of the American Dream. In the face of a recovery that has left most Americans behind, however, many are beginning to question the validity of that ideal. In fact, there is broad consensus across the political spectrum that America is lagging behind other developed countries when it comes to economic mobility. According to Winship in an interview with the HPR, “The problem with mobility in the United States is not that it’s getting worse, but that it’s always been low enough that we should not be satisfied with the levels that we have.” Interestingly, not all areas in the United States are equal when it comes to intergenerational mobility. The Equality of Opportunity Project, a study looking at economic mobility throughout the United States, found vast differences across the country. “What we found is that there is just tremendous variation across the United States in the extent to which kids rise out of poverty,” Nathaniel Hendren, a professor at Harvard University and one of the lead researchers in the study, explained. In San Francisco, California, for example, the odds of someone born in the bottom fifth of income distribution making it to the top fifth is 11.2 percent. Go to Atlanta, Georgia, and the probability sinks to four percent. In general, the South and Midwest have worse rates of mobility than the rest of the country. Many factors are related to these variations in economic
mobility. There are strong correlations between an area’s economic mobility and its income inequality, K-12 education quality, social capital, and overall strength of family structure. Hendren, however, cautioned against reading more into the results of past research than were actually there, noting “we don’t have the causal statement here. We have the correlation.” Indeed, this introduces perhaps the most controversial part in the debate of the causes of economic mobility. With the exception of improving education (which experts broadly agree promotes mobility), there is significant disagreement over which of the correlates of mobility actually cause it, particularly in regards to inequality. Noah explained that the suggested causal relationship between inequality and mobility “is still a matter of some controversy among economists, but intuitively it makes sense.” One consensus is common among economists, and seldom heard among politicians: we cannot jump to conclusions without more research.
THE MEANING OF INEQUALITY Inequality and economic mobility are not just arcane terms to be debated among economists; they are realities in America that, if not addressed, will lead to real consequences. The future is not necessarily hopeful on this front. As Noah explained, while the economic recovery has allowed many in the “one percent” to gain back what they lost in the recession, it has not been sufficiently strong to increase median income. Perhaps the most striking problem inequality poses is political. Wealth inequalities also drive inequalities in the political sphere, as campaign donations condition candidates to lean towards the preferences of their donors. Inequality also has economic consequences. In concrete terms, McIntyre notes that it simply means “ordinary citizens are less well off” as income gains concentrate at the top. Others worry that high levels of inequality will act as a disincentive to the middle and working classes and will lower economic productivity. These high levels of inequality and low levels of mobility in the United States clash with the vision of America that many want to believe exists. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity and relative equality, but this is becoming less true daily. If the United States continues on its current trend, it very well might face an existential crisis, as reality drifts farther away from the inspirational vision that has bound the country together. The American Dream, for this reason and many others, is something worth holding on to.
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JUST HOW GOOD WAS THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN? A MORE COMPLICATED STORY EMERGES
Frank Mace
C
onventional analyses of the 2012 presidential race paint a consistent picture: President Barack Obama’s data-driven, technologically savvy campaign dominated the Mitt Romney campaign, out-organizing on the ground and out-messaging on the airwaves. Yet an emerging body of research is challenging this currently accepted narrative, asking whether the election had an inevitable conclusion despite the endless resources and hours spent by both campaign teams.
THE EARLY ADVERTISING GAME Political scientists are in disagreement with Obama campaign advisors over the efficacy of early advertising, a strategy in which Obama For America heavily invested. These ads drew the attention of Professor John Sides at George Washington University and Professor Lynn Vavreck of UCLA, who studied this strategy of early advertising in their book, The Gamble. Sides noted that “ads on the day before the election appeared to produce small but measurable gains in vote share,” yet “ads aired
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before that Monday—even the calendar week before the week of the election—had a much smaller effect.” He and Vavreck found back-loading advertising to be much more influential upon voters on Election Day. That finding conflicts with senior Obama advisor David Axelrod’s account of the campaign. Axelrod explained to the HPR that early TV ads are effective because of both their timing and the more malleable audience. Axelrod also spoke about the relationship between the Obama campaign’s advertising strategy and national media coverage of the election. As the cycle progressed, the argument goes, and the press pays more attention to the candidates, the influence of advertising begins to wane. In particular, “news overwhelms advertising after the nominating conventions,” according to Axelrod. Indeed, political scientists have studied the optimal time to advertise during a campaign for several years. In one remarkable study, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 2006 reelection campaign allowed the launch date and volume of television advertising to be randomly assigned in 18 of the state’s 20 media markets for a
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period of time. Professors from Yale, the University of Maryland, and the University of Texas, analyzing the data, concluded that “television campaign advertisements initially have a large and statistically significant effect on voter preferences,” but “just a week or two later, the advertisement’s effects have all but disappeared.” These results may be specific to the types of positive ads played during the Perry campaign, however. There is agreement about the impact of sustained advertising campaigns, which characterized the 2012 presidential election. In an interview with the HPR, The Washington Post’s Reid Wilson wrote, “The Obama campaign took a major risk by spending money earlier than other campaigns in order to start telling the story of Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and Massachusetts.” The story of an elitist, wealthy businessman who could not relate to ordinary Americans was a specific narrative “that ran through all of Obama’s advertising.” According to Wilson, the message was both believable and constant, which is why it proved so effective. Vavreck is more skeptical, due to fact that this was not exactly a novel way to criticize Romney. “Other Republicans had labeled Romney as a rich, out of touch, plutocrat long before Obama did this in July, so I doubt those ads redefined Romney in a ‘new’ way,” he said. But he also made clear that sustained advertising can mean a sustained advantage, and Organizing for America had exactly the resources for this sort of campaign. Bowdoin professor Michael Franz expressed that idea memorably. Franz, who believes Sides and Vavreck “undersell the potential effects of early ads,” argues that ads are “like drugs, in a way. You’re trying to get the electorate high on you,” and then “they try and keep you high for the course of the campaign.” It comes as no surprise, then, that Axelrod made the case for the continuing effect of the early ads. “We defined the race and Governor Romney before the conventions, and he was digging out of that hole for the remaining two months,” Axelrod explained.
TECHNOLOGY AND VOTER MOBILIZATION Apart from their advertising strategy, the Obama team was widely lauded for their on-the-ground voter mobilization efforts, a strategy that also enjoyed success in 2008. Howell Raines, the former New York Times executive editor, articulated a common perception of the Obama team when he wrote in The Washington Post: “But the overriding lesson for future candidates lies in Obama’s computer-driven voter-mobilization machine.” He described the operation as a combination of “digital weaponry and an army of foot soldiers.” But how impactful was all that digital weaponry and that army? Ryan Enos of Harvard and Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago measured voter mobilization by comparing activity among voters who live in the same media market but are divided between battleground and non-battleground states. Although Enos emphasized to the HPR that their results are part of a continuing project and subject to minor change, their preliminary findings show that “there are campaign effects of 15.4 percentage points for registered Democrats and 13.8 percentage points for Republicans.” These numbers suggest that both the Obama and
Romney campaigns ran effective on-the-ground strategies. “Despite all the celebration of the Obama campaign’s technological and other superiority, their campaign only had a 1.6 percentage point advantage over Romney in turning out party registrants,” he argued. Of course, Axelrod pushed back, noting that even that 1.6 percent figure makes a large difference in battleground states. On the margin, he argued, these are the voters that win Ohio and Florida and thus the Electoral College. Yet even Axelrod compared the Obama campaign’s technology strategy to a “field goal team”—helpful, but not able to win the game singlehandedly.
HOW MUCH CREDIT DOES THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN DESERVE? Enos sees a psychological effect behind the effusive praise for the Obama campaign. He thinks that the Obama campaign probably “receives too much credit” due to what’s known as attribution error. In essence, people are likely to “attribute causes to things we see immediately in front of us,” regardless of their role in the actual outcome. To Enos, and many others, the outcome of the election was fairly predictable, but analysts love to point to specific strategies and tactics used by the campaigns to explain the results. Drew Linzer was one person who had such highly accurate, Nate Silver-style election forecasting models long before the election. Linzer’s models combined historical prediction criteria (changes in GDP, for instance) with up-to-date polling data, and he correctly predicted all 50 states as early as June. But even that predictability and stability hasn’t convinced Linzer that campaigns are ineffective—he explained to the HPR that he believes campaigns can still matter. Where does this leave us? The academic literature suggests in places that presidential campaigns aren’t as influential as they might seem in the news. Daily stories about the latest polling numbers due to a gaffe or specific advertisement certainly make for attractive entertainment, but also might be much ado about very little. Regarding Nate Silver, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote, “A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.” Sullivan also drew an interesting comparison, “Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie Moneyball disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.” Sides himself has invoked Moneyball on the Times website, so perhaps journalism is ripe for its own transformation, just as campaigns have seemingly changed in the past few years. We don’t have a final tally on the efficacy of presidential campaigns—we might never—yet parsing through the post-November accounts of Axelrod, professors, and the campaign press corps, we can get a better grasp on that elusive and important tally. The impact of presidential campaigns, like so many other things, is likely a story best told with moderation in mind.
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SHELBY COUNTY V. HOLDER
Ushering in the New Era of Civil Rights Emily Wang
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n a 5-4 vote this past June, the Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to the legacy of the civil rights movement in Shelby County v. Holder. Striking down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the decision nullified the coverage formula that determined which states and local governments required preapproval from the Department of Justice before modifying voting laws and requirements. Within hours of the decision, Texas and Mississippi state legislators announced their intentions to move forward with stricter voter identification standards. Stripped of preclearance, Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to invoke Section 3—a related but less powerful statute—in order to block Texas from implementing its voter ID laws. Meanwhile, Congress has yet to pass a new coverage formula to replace its supposedly outdated predecessor. With the current partisan divide, compromise seems highly unlikely, and the future of voting protections remains uncertain. Shelby, though comprising only a single moment in the history of civil rights, marks an important turning point. The discourse surrounding Shelby highlights the increasing divergence of this modern movement from its mid-20th century predecessor, although the decision may serve as a rallying point for a broad, progressive coalition in the near future.
A SETBACK FOR CIVIL RIGHTS No one can deny the astounding progress of the past 50 years. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Shelby,
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optimistically proclaimed that while “problems remain in these States and others … our Nation has made great strides.” Pointing to dramatic increases in minority voter turnout and AfricanAmerican political representation in preclearance states, Roberts argued that the voting rights protections ensured by Section 4(b) are no longer necessary. The driving factors of the civil rights movement have shifted significantly; instead of race riots and Jim Crow laws, activists today grapple with voter identification laws and persistent socioeconomic gaps. But attempts to paint the United States as a post-racial society ignore reality. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized the Court for prematurely declaring the goals of the Voting Rights Act fulfilled. Though she acknowledged that “the VRA wrought dramatic changes in the realization of minority voting rights,” she highlighted Section 4(b)’s continued relevance in the current age, arguing that “[ j]urisdictions covered by the preclearance requirement continued to submit, in large numbers, proposed changes to voting laws that the Attorney General declined to approve.” While the coverage formula is indeed outdated, anecdotal evidence suggests Section 4(b) retains its efficacy, especially in comparison with a nonexistent alternative. The elimination of Section 4(b), then, reveals either ignorance of or indifference to the undercurrents of racism driving the fallout of Shelby. In addition to Texas and Mississippi, state legislators from North Carolina and Florida have announced new voter identification laws. These restrictions, which empirically target minorities, threaten to weaken or reverse much of
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the progress the Voting Rights Act has wrought. In an interview with the HPR, Theda Skocpol of Harvard explained that “in many ways we have seen concerted efforts to roll back minority voting rights and participation … where progress hasn’t been irreversible is in the area of political rights.” The seeming irreversibility of civil rights gains is a myth. Indeed, the fallout of Shelby reveals the tentative nature of progress in the contemporary civil rights movement. Speaking with the HPR, Whitney Taylor, director of Public Advocacy at the Massachusetts ACLU, suggested that a lack of public awareness of institutionalized racism may have driven the Court’s decision in Shelby: “People need to understand civil rights, civil liberties, and the reality of racism in this country.”
A NEW MOTIVATION FOR THE MOVEMENT Although the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby marks a setback for civil rights, it may also act as a rallying cause to energize and engage potential advocates. Skocpol argues that the Court’s decision “was not a reflection of popular opinion” but rather of a particular conservative jurisprudence. “In general, Americans understand that the right to vote is something that needs to be protected,” she added. By enabling states to move forward with voter identification laws targeting minority voters, Shelby may have generated common ground among progressives to revitalize civil rights activists. In fact, organizations like the ACLU are hoping to use voting rights as an issue with which to engage the public. Mike Meno, legal director of the ACLU’s North Carolina branch, told the HPR that public outreach efforts have expanded in the wake of Shelby. “We’re especially concerned with voter outreach and education,” Meno explained. “People need to know what to expect at the polls.” Rebecca Robertson, legal director of the ACLU’s Texas branch, outlined their three-tiered approach to these issues: “Litigation is one strategy. Lobbying state legislators to work on a new coverage formula is another strategy. And public education is a third strategy.” The issue of voting rights is uniquely poised to appeal to a
wide range of demographics, and unlike in the 1960s, civil rights activists today benefit from an energy that spans racial divides. Many involved in the African-American civil rights movement align closely with other activist movements from the Latino civil rights movement to the feminist movement. A new focus on intersectionality has boosted youth involvement across the spectrum of activist causes: the universal appeal of issues such as voting rights for disenfranchised populations has succeeded in resonating with youth voters. According to Skocpol, “young people are always critical to movements to expand rights,” as demonstrated by much of the social media attention around the same-sex marriage cases. Meno adds that recent laws passed in North Carolina would disproportionately disenfranchise not only minorities but also college students, adding to their engagement in activist causes. Youth involvement in social justice movements has already produced impressive gains and more importantly has revealed the millennial generation’s potential for political activism. During the fight over restrictive abortion legislation in Texas, Robertson described the youth involvement as “unprecedented.” The legislative battle energized youth activists, giving them an opportunity to flex their political muscle. If the public outcry over the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby is any indication, voting rights will enjoy similar popular support. The success of the contemporary civil rights movement, like that of its predecessor, will be determined largely independently of the official branches of government. Perhaps Shelby has, as some commenters have suggested, sounded the death knell for expansive voting rights protections. But the future of the movement remains hopeful, in spite of these setbacks. An expanding youth activist base, coupled with widespread support for voting rights protection, suggests that if anything, the elimination of Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act will only further mobilize activists around a singular goal. The decision presents an inflection point to activists, a chance to frame voting rights as a fundamental civil right. If leveraged correctly, Shelby is a critical opportunity to regain the sense of unity that characterized the civil rights era of the 1960s.
The driving factors of the civil rights movement have shifted significantly; instead of race riots and Jim Crow laws, activists today grapple with voter identification laws and persistent socioeconomic gaps.
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Taking College Accreditors to School A market-based approach to the college accreditation system
Matthew Weinstein
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he college accreditation process in the United States, governed by six separate regional agencies, is up for reauthorization next year under the Higher Education Act (HEA). A relic of a 19th century regulatory model, this old process is ill-poised to address the needs of a national, 21st century education system. American colleges need a modern accreditation system that encourages nationwide marketplace competition among accreditors, based on a common core of fundamental assessment standards. By liberating colleges from the regulatory confines of arcane and anti-competitive accreditation rules, a modern, market-based system would spur innovation to both improve educational outcomes and lower tuition costs.
THE ACCREDITATION MONOPOLY Since the HEA was enacted in 1965, colleges must be accredited to receive federal grants and the proceeds of federal student loans—with good reason. Accreditation eliminates sham colleges that scam students by charging high tuition costs for a low quality education. Amidst an evolving educational landscape of online classes, for-profit universities, and rising student debt, the need for regulation is apparent. But even well established and respected educational institutions can run afoul of accreditation standards, as the University of Virginia and UNC Chapel Hill did last summer. Lost accreditation is crippling for two reasons: it abruptly stops the flow of federal grant money and as a result, students leave the school, looking elsewhere for loans. Today, 29 percent of students nationally rely on federal loans to fund tuition, and last year the New York Times described lost accreditation as “a death sentence” for colleges. It is altogether unsurprising, then, that even institutions as prestigious as Stanford University spend over $1 million annually to manage the reaccreditation process. While the HEA requires all accreditors to develop and enforce standards in 10 broadly defined categories, including faculty qualification, curriculum requirements, and financial and administrative capacity, implementation and enforcement of these standards are delegated to six regional accreditation agencies. In effect, each agency manages a regional monopoly.
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THE MONOPOLY MODEL UNDER THE MICROSCOPE Supporters of the current regulatory regime argue that such monopolies allow accreditors to tailor accreditation standards to meet the unique educational interests and needs of their region. Harvard Professor Timothy Bowman, one of 26 members of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ (NEASC) college accreditation commission, explained to the HPR, “part of the advantage of having these six regional bodies is the opportunity … to think individually and customize standards for their particular areas and interests.” Bowman favorably compared the regional accreditors’ monopolies to the United States’ system of federalism, whereby “each state has autonomy over how they implement federal standards.” Yet the challenges facing higher education today require more national solutions than in the past, and traditional regional distinctions may no longer serve as the best way to differentiate accreditation bodies. As students increasingly choose colleges based upon their cost, size, or curriculum rather than location, schools themselves are becoming less regional. Even colleges are recruiting students more broadly. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2011 that public colleges are looking to enroll a higher proportion of out-of-state students. For example, the University of Michigan has increased its proportion of out-ofstate freshmen by 7.1 percent since 2009. Inconsistent standards also plague the current regional accreditation system. Even though geography has little bearing on a college’s ability to deliver quality education, the current system results in some accreditors penalizing colleges for decisions that would be permissible in other regions. Such differences can restrict colleges from developing programs that suit their students’ needs, thereby forcing students to travel further, and often pay more, to attend schools that offer suitable programs. This past summer, Sharon Hart, president of Northern Marianas College in the Northern Marianas Islands, experienced the downside of this geographic inconsistency firsthand. Accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), Northern Marianas was prevented from offering both two-year
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Liberating colleges from the arcane accreditation process would spur higher education innovation.
associate and four-year baccalaureate degrees due to a regional regulation. As Hart noted to the HPR, had her college been located in any other region, “we would have been congratulated for everything we were doing. It was just a fact of our region.” As a result, Hart and her staff spent five exhausting and expensive weeks petitioning the Department of Education to persuade WASC to adjust its policies. In the absence of such an appeal, given the college’s remote location far west of Hawaii, students would have been forced to travel thousands of miles to pursue their educational goals. In addition to regulatory inconsistency, disparities in enforcement exist between the regional organizations. For example, while only one percent of colleges under NEASC’s jurisdiction lack full accreditation, the same is true of nine percent of colleges under the WASC. Such a disparity would seem to indicate variations in enforcement among accreditors, but there is even disagreement among college administrators regarding the true cause for such a difference. Pam Fisher, who served as interim chancellor at City College of San Francisco when the college faced severe accreditation sanctions, told the HPR that she “doesn’t think the Western Association’s enforcement standards are any higher than anyone else’s.” Instead, Fisher cited the longterm failure to adhere to accreditation standards at numerous western colleges as the reason for the statistical disparity. These suggestions of unequal enforcement, which threaten the reputation of the accreditation process, require careful Congressional study and fact-finding in advance of HEA reauthorization.
THE MEDICINE OF THE MARKET In reauthorizing the HEA, Congress should disrupt accreditors’ regional monopolies by allowing colleges to “shop” for accreditation among all six agencies, while developing a comprehensive set of minimum standards that each accreditor must
enforce in order to prevent a “race to the bottom.” Over time, each regional accreditor would establish a market reputation and brand, and market differentiation would allow different accreditors to specialize in reviewing different sectors of the higher education market, such as small liberal arts colleges, large research universities, technical and scientific programs, and online offerings. Without the pressure of competition, the traditional accreditation system has adapted slowly to change. Accreditors like NEASC generally revise their standards every ten years, an insufficient time period given today’s rapidly evolving educational arena. As Barbara Brittingham, president of NEASC’s Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, told the HPR, “the thought now of doing something that would last for 10 years is a lot more humbling, and I am just not sure it’s possible.” A competitive marketplace would spur each regional accreditor to swifter action. Meanwhile, robust minimum standards and federal oversight would ensure that market competition does not diminish accreditation’s quality control purpose. And market competition would force accreditors to eliminate many of the inefficient standards that currently compel colleges to waste time and resources in order to ensure compliance, allowing them to allocate their resources towards hiring more faculty, building new facilities, or offering financial aid. When Congress considers HEA reauthorization next year, issues of rising tuition and measuring educational value will dominate the public debate. However, to address these issues, Congress should confront an often-overlooked process: the governing system for accreditation. By seizing the opportunity to move towards a market-oriented regulatory approach, legislators can create an innovative environment that would encourage colleges to tackle core problems of cost, value, and accessibility well into the 21st century.
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OBAMACARE HE BUILT IT. BUT WILL THEY COME?
Daniel Lynch 26 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2013
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nrollment for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as “Obamacare,” began on October 1, in preparation for the official launch of these new insurance plans on January 1, 2014. Yet the massive overhaul of the nation’s health care system faces almost as many questions and challenges now as when it was first enacted. Republicans in Washington and in many states continue to fight its implementation tooth and nail, which culminated in the shutdown of the federal government this October. Meanwhile, many of the very Americans the law is designed to help are skeptical or simply unaware of its potential benefits. Obamacare’s fate, as well as its namesake’s legacy, will depend on the ability of its supporters to reach and to persuade such Americans in the coming months.
PASSING THE BUCK—AND PASSING UP THE BUCKS Many Republican governors and state legislatures have refused to set up the “exchanges” established by Obamacare, online marketplaces that connect uninsured Americans with providers. Republican governors may stand to gain politically from their uncompromising stance on the exchanges by washing their hands of Obamacare, blaming the federal government if anything goes wrong, and scoring points with their right-wing base. But ironically, the states’ refusal means that a majority of the exchanges are instead run by the federal government. Paul Ginsburg, an economist and president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, explained to the HPR that “Democrats in the House preferred an entirely federal exchange” and provided for one in the original, more progressive legislation initially passed by the House. From the perspective of the Obama administration, the states’ rejection of the exchanges is a mixed bag. It increases the logistical and financial burden on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but it also empowers the federal government to establish a more progressive model for the exchanges. Yet given a lack of funding, Harvard health economist David Cutler told the HPR that “it will be very interesting to see if ... the law has a more salutary effect in, say, California than in Texas.” If the federal government cannot effectively fill in for the states, the quality of coverage may be lower in states that have resisted setting up the exchanges. In addition to declining to set up exchanges, many Republican governors have refused the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Cutler argues that this is a far more serious problem than their intransigence on the exchanges, since “they’re hurting real people … who are, according to the federal government, eligible for coverage that would cost the state nothing.” Given that the federal government would fully pay for the first three years of the Medicaid expansion before reducing its subsidy to 90 percent by 2020, Cutler views the opposition as motivated by political, rather than fiscal, concerns: “It’s interesting to see how many people they are willing to kill in order to make clear the fact that they hate the president,” he bluntly observed. In a more encouraging sign for the low-income uninsured, several Republican governors, especially swing-state governors such as John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan,
have agreed to accept the federal money and expand Medicaid. Meanwhile, Harvard government professor Theda Skocpol told the HPR that some swing-state Republican governors who have refused to expand Medicaid, such as Paul LePage of Maine, will likely lose in 2014, “paving the way for those states to accept the expansion.”
“LET THE PEOPLE KNOW THE FACTS, AND THE COUNTRY WILL BE SAFE” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN Ultimately, however, the most daunting challenge facing Obamacare and its proponents may simply be the fact that many uninsured Americans remain skeptical of the law and unaware of its potential benefits. A September NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that “among the uninsured, 76 percent of respondents said they didn’t understand the law and how it would affect them,” while “only 32 percent of the uninsured thought they were ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ likely to use the exchanges.” To place these numbers in context, Cutler estimates that Obamacare “will be phenomenally successful if we get [60 percent enrollment] or more,” but the law may not succeed with numbers substantially less than that. It is especially crucial that a sufficient number of young people sign up for health insurance. If young, healthy people decline insurance and the pool is composed primarily of older people with higher medical costs, premiums could skyrocket—a problem known as adverse selection. A September Reuters/Ipsos poll found that uninsured millennials tend to be more supportive of Obamacare than the general population, and many young adults who previously lack information regarding the exchanges are persuaded to sign up when presented with basic information. Millennials’ receptivity to the exchanges is a great source of hope for Obamacare proponents such as Enroll America. A nonprofit with ties to the Obama administration and the health care industry, Enroll America is conducting a campaign-style effort to reach uninsured Americans and persuade them to sign up. Enroll America’s leaders are no strangers to campaigning: its president, Anne Filipic, launched her career as Obama’s field director for the 2008 Iowa caucuses. Like a political campaign, Enroll America plans to spend millions on advertising and is launching a broad canvassing program to persuade uninsured Americans of the law’s benefits in Republican-controlled states. Outreach efforts received a boost in August, when HHS announced $67 million in grants to community groups, health care providers, and other organizations to hire “navigators,” tasked with educating the uninsured about the options available to them through the exchanges. Yet the navigators themselves are encountering resistance and interference from some states. Indiana has required navigators to pay a licensing fee of up to $175 and undergo a criminal background check, while Florida has banned navigators from local public health offices. Meanwhile, outside conservative organizations have launched campaigns of their own, with the goal of persuading uninsured Americans to “opt out” of Obamacare. Harkening back to the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, FreedomWorks is creating fake “Obamacare cards” and encouraging its supporters to burn them. According to The Washington Post, FreedomWorks Vice President Dean Clancy stated that the purpose of
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It is possible that the most daunting challenge facing Obamacare and its proponents is not the organized opposition, but the fact that many uninsured Americans remain skeptical of the law or unaware of its potential benefits.
this symbolic gesture is to “make it socially acceptable to skip the exchange and pay the fine.” Unsurprisingly, Obamacare’s opponents are tailoring their message to the young people whose participation is critical to the law’s success.
A PRESIDENTIAL LEGACY IN THE BALANCE Apart from the campaign-style efforts of each side, a variety of simple behavioral factors could determine whether uninsured Americans are persuaded to sign up. Kevin Volpp, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania, told American Public Media’s Marketplace that, in keeping with the theory of “loss aversion,” the penalty for failing to purchase insurance may motivate many Americans to sign up. However, Ginsburg contends that “the penalties are not substantial enough” to act as a serious motivator and “need to be stronger.” On the other hand, some uninsured Americans may buy insurance simply because it is the law. Ginsburg believes that the stigma associated with breaking the law “was a motivator in Massachusetts,” though he cautions that “the highly charged environment with active opposition to Obamacare could make this less of a factor.” Harvard behavioral economist David Laibson suggested to the HPR that in places where “not going along with Obamacare is being framed as doing the right thing,” people may be emboldened to disregard the requirement. In the end, Cutler stresses that “affordability and accessibility are the two most important” determinants of whether people will buy insurance. In an attempt to increase affordability, the law does offer subsidies to individuals and families with incomes up to four times the federal poverty level. However, familiar problems emerge: while almost 26 million Americans could be eligible for subsidies, many are unaware of the potential assistance. As a result, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 6 million will actually receive subsidized coverage through the exchanges in 2014. Enrollment will likely proceed in waves, rather than at a steady pace. There was an initial rush when the exchanges first opened on October 1, and likely a second spike in enrollment
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around the December 15 deadline to receive benefits starting on January 1, 2014. Finally, it is expected that some will sign up just before the March 31 deadline to avoid the penalty on their tax forms. Throughout this process, both proponents and opponents of Obamacare will be watching closely to gauge the pace of enrollment. Any sign of lagging enrollment will be pounced upon by opponents as proof that the law is failing, while robust early enrollment may spur further enrollment, laying all doubts to rest early on. Implementing a reform on the scale of Obamacare has never been easy. Logistical difficulties are inherent in such a massive undertaking. Nor is Obamacare the first social reform legislation to face sustained opposition after its passage. Skocpol observes that Social Security, now largely taken for granted, also faced “efforts to delay or fundamentally revise it” for the first 15 years of its existence. While Obamacare’s opponents could be fueled by any number of motives, it seems likely that they are animated at least in part by the recognition that the ACA’s success or failure will have profound implications for Obama’s legacy. Depending on how Obamacare fares in the coming years, Obama may yet be remembered as a transformative leader, or he may be derided as one with a grand vision but little ability to implement it. Moreover, the law’s foes surely realize that they face a closing window of opportunity to kill it. Skocpol predicts that by 2016, Obamacare will be firmly established. Once previously uninsured Americans have experienced two years of benefits and subsidies, “you can’t take it away,” she explained. Amidst all the opposition and uncertainty, there appears to be at least one silver lining for Obama and the proponents of health care reform: the greatest threat to the law’s success is likely not the organized opposition, but the simple fact that many uninsured Americans are not yet fully aware of its benefits. Unlike Obamacare’s most vehement opponents, they are likely persuadable, and more interested in securing affordable care than in waging partisan battles. If the proponents of Obamacare can effectively inform the uninsured, they will surely come.
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STRANGERS IN THE PROMISED LAND
Jacob Drucker
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blel was born and raised in Eritrea, but he knew he needed to leave. One of the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing a repressive dictatorship and ongoing economic crisis, Ablel managed to cross the northern border, past the Eritrean soldiers who jail anyone they capture. He made it through all of Sudan, only to be caught in Egypt by a tribe of Bedouins. They held him captive and forced him to collect several thousand U.S. dollars for his safe release. The price of freedom varies from victim to victim, but the alternative to paying the ransom is all too clear. Torture is routine, rape not uncommon. Organ theft and death, par for the course. But Ablel, like others, knew that the Bedouins were an inevitable part of his escape from Eritrea. After paying his ransom, he
was taken into the Sinai, near the border with Israel. No other nation in the region is much of a refugee draw, and so Israel, by a fluke of geography, has become a destination for Eritreans, Sudanese, Ethiopians, and other Africans. Ablel, though, did not quite reach the Promised Land. His journey was further complicated, as he was intercepted by the Egyptian military and imprisoned for a year. After living in Sudanese refugee camps for some time, he was captured again by the Bedouins, who took him once again to the Sinai. As the only captive who spoke any Arabic in addition to the Eritrean language Tigrinya, he became the communicator and de facto representative of the group. Unfortunately for him, there was a woman among them. “They tried to force me to
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f--- her,” he explained in broken English. He refused, and one of the Bedouins began to beat him. “I asked my people what to do, and they said fall down, and they can’t do anything after you’re on the ground. But he took a knife and beat me. Then he left me afterward, because I didn’t move.” The Bedouins now demanded payment of $15,000, and Ablel desperately needed medicine. But Ablel’s luck stayed with him. “I had a friend in Europe help me. I told him if I don’t take medicine I could die.” The friend collected the necessary money and Ablel managed to cross the border into Israel. Now he works at a jeans factory in a suburb just south of Tel Aviv. His knife wound healed, but he bears a large scar on his upper left arm—a reminder of his journey.
THE IMMIGRANTS OF TEL AVIV In Tel Aviv, I met two of Ablel’s friends, Sami and Haile. The three of them are all Christians in their early twenties who journeyed from Eritrea to Israel through Bedouin territory. There is very little love among them for the Bedouins of northern Africa, most of whom seem better suited to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights than the 21st century. The Eritreans paint them as voracious barbarians, kidnapping any travelers, including Europeans, and holding them for ransom. They do not hesitate to maim, rape, or set fire to their captives. “They are like crocodiles,” Ablel tells me. “They eat everything.” I asked them what the Bedouins could possibly buy with the ransom money they collect. Sami merely shrugged. “Drugs, weapons.” Ablel’s story is more or less typical of Eritrean migrants. Haile was luckier. He had little trouble with the Bedouins and has an uncle in Israel’s southernmost city, Eilat, who helped finance the journey. Others are not so fortunate. One man walks around the streets of southern Tel Aviv with a bullet in his head, a reminder of his tribulations escaping the war-torn Horn of Africa. And even he could be considered relatively lucky; Haile can name three acquaintances of his who had their kidneys taken by the Bedouins before they were left for dead in the Sinai. Once a textile worker in Eritrea, Haile now works eight to 10 hours a day as an assistant chef in a restaurant, cooking rice and chicken. He used to be a dishwasher, but moved up the ladder after a kind Israeli showed him how to help in the kitchen. Despite paying high rent, he manages to stash away some money every month and send it home to his family in Eritrea. “It’s very hard for Eritreans here. You can’t have a life here,” he told me. “You work like a donkey.” When asked how they are doing, though, Sami and his friends are far more likely to respond with an ironic, “Baruch Hashem.” They picked up the greeting, Hebrew for “Thank God,” from the ultra-Orthodox Jews. So why did they choose Tel Aviv as their destination? The answer is one all too familiar to most Israelis: there was no choice. In Hebrew, ein brera. Many, if not most, are economic immigrants seeking better opportunities, but others desert military posts or escape immediate persecution. Staying in Eritrea or Egypt is not much of an option. In some cases, runaways head
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to other destinations, but are kidnapped by Bedouin tribesmen and released in the Sinai desert, with no way out but Israel. And so immigrants who survive the journey through northern Africa must hit the ground running, navigating the nuances of a society with which they have no connection. How long does Haile plan to stay in Tel Aviv? Until he can find a better option. “Norway,” Haile tells me with a smile. Norway, where one of his friends lives well with much more government support. Ablel wants to move to Canada. He’s already begun filling out the paperwork. For the time being, though, Haile, Ablel, and their friends are grounded in Israel. Armed with only a high school education, they work in restaurants and retail stores. And they are in good company. An estimated 60,000 Africans have crossed into Israel since 2006, the majority from Eritrea. Their legal statuses vary. Hundreds of immigrants remain in a detention facility in the Negev Desert near the border with Egypt. Most Eritreans are technically classified as asylum seekers. Countless others from the region are officially off the books, with no government record of them at all. Many others, frequently Ethiopian job seekers, pretend to be Eritrean in order to be legally classified as asylum seekers. The center of this drama is southern Tel Aviv, a relatively poor part of the city that has become the de facto capital of African migrants. The city is a tease—it comes so tantalizingly close to being part of Europe or the United States. Sitting in a bustling, air conditioned coffee shop, sipping on a cappuccino and listening to Jay-Z rap about Brooklyn, it’s very easy to forget that Damascus is not quite 150 miles away and Cairo is 250 miles in the other direction. It’s easy to forget the slaughter, repression, and dictatorship taking place in neighboring nations. It’s easy to forget the asylum seekers washing the dishes in the coffee shop kitchen. But Florentin is somewhat different. A neighborhood in the southern part of the city, Florentin has long been noted for its unkempt nature and quasi-beatnik vibe. It’s a neighborhood in a constant state of flux, with young people moving in for several years before moving out to settle down. Many Eritrean and Sudanese migrants have settled either here or in adjacent communities. And while the influx of immigrants has changed the face of the neighborhood, its character, to some extent, remains untouched. And that character has a lot to do with drugs.
A COMMUNITY IN LIMBO I met a man named Gil, who has lived in the neighborhood for two decades, making him about as much of a mainstay as anyone. Before 10 minutes had elapsed, several drug addicts walked past us, one of whom stopped to chat with Gil. A frail, hollow woman, she was introduced to drugs by her ex-boyfriend, who left her high and dry when she became addicted. After she left, Gil pointed across Washington Street to another housing complex. “That building has a drug dealer.” He pointed to the next one. “That one does, too. And that one, and that one. That’s the only building with no drug dealers,” he told me, pointing to
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No other nation in the region is much of a refugee draw, and so Israel, by a fluke of geography, has become a destination for Eritreans, Sudanese, Ethiopians and other Africans.
the last complex on the block. “It’s abandoned.” Many of Israel’s African immigrants never experiment with drugs. Many others do. And their story becomes intractably tangled with that of Florentin, perched precariously between the glamour of northern Tel Aviv and the historically Arab Jaffa, a future and a past. Very few people live here as long as Gil, a man who moved his four-year-old daughter into a different school simply so her friends in kindergarten will still be around when she finishes middle school. But they all shape Tel Aviv’s story, for good or bad. The immigrants certainly bring to the neighborhood their fair share of troubles. The crime rate has risen significantly, especially thefts of cell phones and bicycles. In June, a Sudanese migrant stabbed six passersby, including three Israelis, with a large knife before being subdued by onlookers. One witness was quoted by the Jerusalem Post saying, “We see this violence all the time here, but usually it’s between them [Africans]; it’s not directed at us [Israelis].” Some blame the availability of alcohol. Others simply blame the African migrants. Regardless, the problems associated with the immigrants are very real. Nearly everyone agrees that the status quo is unsustainable, a political reality that might as well be the motto of the Middle East. The sheer scope of emigration from Africa is wide enough to prompt Danny Danon, Israel’s far-right deputy minister of defense, to declare, “Israel is at war. An enemy state of infiltrators was established in Israel, and its capital is south Tel Aviv.” Israel has pursued various policies to deal with the influx. A fence has been built along the border between Israel and Egypt, and some migrants have been offered financial rewards for leaving volun-
tarily. Deportation, though, is not necessarily an option. Under international law, a nation cannot deport an asylum seeker if their lives would be in danger. This certainly applies to Eritrea, a nation whose leader is sometimes compared to Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Admiral General Aladeen, the protagonist of The Dictator. However, Israel is beginning to deport South Sudanese migrants back to their homeland, a move prompted by the creation of the new nation of South Sudan. Furthermore, a more farreaching plan to deal with the influx involves deporting many to an undisclosed east African country, which would absorb them in exchange for military aid. Israel would not be alone in instituting this type of deportation policy; Australia recently announced a hardline policy deporting all asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea, ostensibly in an effort to undermine the smuggling of refugees by third parties. In the meantime, migrants remain in Israel, making a living as best they can. For many Israeli residents of Tel Aviv, though, the Africans can blend into the white noise of the city. One evening, I wandered into a coffee shop to escape the summer heat. I ordered an espresso and sat in the back, sipping my drink, checking BuzzFeed, and watching the New Yorkers to my left chat about their careers. A song by Israeli hip hop band Hadag Nahash was ending, replaced by the omnipresent Jay-Z. “Instead of treated we get tricked, instead of kisses we get kicked. It’s a hard knock life…” On my way back, I ran into Haile and asked how he was. He smiled wryly. “Baruch Hashem.”
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AFGHANISTAN ON THE RISE An Optimistic Outlook for a War-Torn Nation
Pooja Podugu
O
ur newsreel plays out in predictable fashion when covering Afghanistan. The headline might contain the death toll from the nation’s latest suicide bombing, perhaps accompanied by footage depicting a terrorist attack and shell-shocked streets. The stories often speak for themselves, and there is little left to say besides the notion that nothing has changed in the 12 years since the United States first intervened.
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But this narrative—though substantiated by compelling and serious realities—ignores the tremendous growth experienced by Afghanistan over the past decade. Perpetuating this mentality of pessimism does an enormous disservice to the very real progress that has been made and may ultimately undermine U.S.-Afghan cooperation in the future, with disastrous consequences for this fragile state.
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UNTOLD SUCCESSES While Afghanistan continues to face very real problems, the nation has vastly improved in a number of social welfare measures since 2001. “Over the past 12 years, Afghanistan has changed enormously, and for the better,” said William Byrd, senior expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, in an interview with the HPR. “When you consider social indicators like the number of children in school, life expectancy, reduced maternal and child mortality rates, economic growth, and per capita income, there’s just been a huge change.” Furthermore, in the same time period, Afghanistan’s GDP has more than tripled in size, with an annual growth rate matched only by China. The country has also been expanding access to basic necessities. Afghanistan has the fastest growing market for mobile phones, with the number of users growing from zero to 17 million, nearly half the nation’s population, in the last decade. Ninety percent of the nation now has access to paved roads, and 80 percent to full health care. And perhaps most strikingly, under Taliban rule 900,000 children were enrolled in school, all of them male, while today over six million children attend school, a third of them female. Meanwhile, the Taliban has dramatically fallen from grace in the eyes of Afghan citizens. Twelve years ago, the fundamentalist organization comprised 90 percent of the government. Afghanistan was a hardline conservative theocracy, with its official name being, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Today, the Taliban’s strongholds are largely outside Afghanistan, and nine in 10 Afghans view the organization unfavorably. A large part of the militant organization’s decline may be attributed to the efforts of U.S. and NATO-led forces, together known as ISAF, which have guided and supported the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) over the last decade. But as the 2014 withdrawal date for foreign troops approaches, ANSF has willingly accepted the mission to fight the Taliban under their own capacity. This past June, NATO officially handed over all of the protection duties to its ANSF counterparts and assumed a purely guidance-based role. This, too, is a form of progress.
CONFRONTING GENDER INEQUALITY Gender disparity is perhaps one of the deepest problems that Afghanistan faces. And while full gender equality has yet to occur, dramatic progress has been made in the past 10 years. An astounding two million girls are currently receiving an education in Afghanistan, as compared to zero under Taliban rule. Women are also being recruited and trained across the country to work as midwives. One of the largest problems women face in Afghanistan is lack of access to obstetrical care. Encouraging women to become midwives helps ameliorate this deficiency, while providing thousands of women with employment. Despite opposition, especially in rural areas, the mission has prevailed and been quite successful. Other trends tell a similar story regarding equalizing opportunities for women. Speaking with the HPR, Clare Lockhart, founder and CEO of the Institute for State Effectiveness and former UN advisor on Afghanistan, described increasing female involvement in politics. “More than 31,000 village councils, a majority, have been elected in Afghanistan over the past 12 years, and over 100,000 women have served on these councils,”
she said. This figure reveals a society moving not only toward gender inclusivity, but also toward democratic ideals. Lockhart challenges the conventional opinion about Afghanistan: “A lot of people think democracy can’t exist here and they have this picture of this country as backwards … but the truth is it’s a much more open and interconnected country than we think.”
THE LONG ROAD AHEAD These statistics are not meant to make the argument that Afghanistan is free of problems—such a view would be both naïve and dangerous. “If you consider the negative trends, you have an increase in corruption, a government that hasn’t been really able to win over the people, and a potential return of the Taliban,” explained Byrd. But while forgetting or overlooking such problems is dangerous, to take these aspects of Afghan society and treat them as the whole story is even more problematic. This thinking is simplistic, reductive, and harmful—not only because it is a misrepresentation of the truth, but also because Afghanistan’s continued stability and prosperity depend heavily on continued U.S. support and a robust partnership, even after our military presence in the country declines. Negotiations surrounding the drawdown have led the United States to propose and discuss numerous options for a post-2014 strategy. The common assumption is that even after the troops were withdrawn, a small contingent of U.S. military personnel would stay to continue providing ANSF with training, logistical, and tactical support. But talk of a “zero option,” a complete removal of U.S. presence from Afghanistan, has inspired fear among the nation’s security forces, who doubt their ability to quell what will surely be violent Taliban retaliation without international backing. The pessimism that infects our national consciousness on Afghanistan has real implications for the future. In an interview with the HPR, Caroline Wadhams, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, explained, “many Afghans are hopeful about their country’s future and seek long-term U.S. and international engagement and support to assist them as they continue to improve their country. They worry that in our pessimism, the United States will turn away entirely.” Such abandonment would not only give the Taliban an opportunity to regain power, but it would also signal to the youth of Afghanistan that they are alone in their fight. Only with lasting diplomatic ties and a strong partnership with the United States can Afghanistan continue on its path of progress. Withdrawing U.S. support would almost certainly unhinge the nation’s growth. “International support for Afghanistan is crucial not least to provide some kind of anchor for Afghanistan in a very turbulent region,” said Byrd. “Pessimism can then feed into the problem of not continuing our commitment to the nation.” Diplomatically, financially, and through the tentative Bilateral Security Agreement, the United States must remain committed to Afghanistan. But this commitment will only flourish if we disavow ourselves of the mentality that has plagued us for so long—of Afghanistan as an inferior and troubled nation doomed to fail. We must instead welcome the notion of Afghanistan as a nation actively working toward a brighter future.
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Europe’s Right Turn
Explaining the rise of far-right nationalism in the European Union
Francesca Annicchiarico
M
ore than half a century after the horrors of the Second World War, the words “fascism” and “nationalism” are no longer taboo in Europe. With support for farright movements and parties across the continent swelling at an unprecedented rate, radical ideas are creeping into everyday political discourse. In some cases, these ideas are alarmingly reminiscent of 20th century ethno-nationalism; for instance, the Hungarian nationalist party Jobbik has recently called for the creation of a list of Hungary’s Jews and the reinstatement of the death penalty to deal with “gypsy crime.” The party currently represents the third largest political bloc in the country. Some have blamed the fast-growing support for extremist groups on the dire financial conditions in Europe. Yet the recession cannot wholly explain the upsurge in nationalism, whose root cause is a deeper national identity crisis that governments have not been able nor willing to solve.
RECESSION AND SCAPEGOATING Economic historians such as Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman have argued that stagnating and declining economic conditions often give rise to intolerance. Although this certainly applies to the current European situation—and particularly to the southern and eastern countries that have suffered most—higher taxes and rampant unemployment have only provided the casus belli for
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the widespread escalation of nationalism. In an interview with the HPR, Huub van Baar, assistant professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, argued that the financial crisis has deepened a racialization process that has been under way in Europe for a few years now. The clearest example of the relationship between recession and support for neo-fascism is Greece. The rise of the far-right Golden Dawn party, which today represents around 11 percent of the voters, has coincided with the implementation of severe austerity measures and the dramatic rise of unemployment. The discontent of Golden Dawn followers and sympathizers has recently degenerated into overt racial violence, mainly against the long-settled Romani minority. On the other hand, considering the recession as the engine that set far-right movements in motion has questionable empirical grounding. Nationalist support comes disproportionately from the youth rather than the working class. Moreover, nationalist groups usually do not voice economic solutions to ameliorate the current situation.
THE CHALLENGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS The current situation instead seems to be rooted in much deeper questions of identity and culture. Speaking with the HPR, Clarence Lusane of American University cautioned against
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Unresponsiveness on the part of European governments to popular fears has contributed to converting a perceived threat to national identity into support for far-right movements. thinking of Europe’s resurgence of racism and extreme nationalism as an acute phenomenon due to the financial crisis. “There has been a continuity,” he said, due to European countries’ struggle to maintain their own identity in the face of the dramatic social and political changes since World War II. According to van Baar, the promise of a post-racial future inherent in the EU project caused a backlash in favor of nationalism. In some countries—particularly those more homogeneous like Italy and those on Europe’s periphery such as Hungary or Greece—the competition between national and communitarian identity results in a racialization process that victimizes minorities and newcomers. “In Europe, the notion of race is to be understood not as a biological or ethnical category, but as belonging to a particular nation state,” he said. Boston College Associate Professor Jonathan Lawrence added that the processes of globalization and EU membership have been eroding national identity from above, while migratory inflows threaten it from below. Moreover, unresponsiveness on the part of European governments to popular fears has contributed to converting a perceived threat to national identity into support for far-right movements. According to Liz Fekete, executive director of the Institute for Race Relations, European governments, “instead of educating ordinary citizens about the fact that we live in a globalized world,” are cutting back on social welfare, education, and wealth. In turn, leaders across the continent need to use “national identity and nationalism as a kind of glue to hold society together,” she said. In this sense, the governments themselves are incentivizing their citizens to sympathize with the far right. Finally, the war on Islamic terrorism that western European democracies endorsed in the aftermath of 9/11 has only added fuel to the fire. The Madrid and London bombings that took place in 2004 and 2005 respectively reinforced the EU commitment to counterterrorism not only abroad but also domestically. In this important struggle, not enough attention has been paid to making the due distinctions between the Islamic immigrant communities—which keep growing larger in Western Europe— and Islamic terrorist groups, thus giving rise to Islamophobia.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOBILIZATION The structural forces that have fomented far-right sympathies in Europe cannot explain how these movements have reorganized and in some cases turned violent, however. According to Lusane, the advent of social media has allowed for a form of
political organization that escapes any kind of government control; some EU countries have attempted to outlaw racist organizations, he added, but the world of social media is beyond the governments’ reach. Moreover, there has recently been a shift from virtual violence to “actual physical attacks” that target both historical minorities like the Roma and recently-settled Muslim and black migrant communities. Fekete added that social media platforms create an “interplay between people and leaders,” thus facilitating mobilization. The racist insults and threats that targeted the Italian Minister for Integration Cécile Kyenge, the first black minister in Italian history, are exemplary of the sociopolitical interplay that Fekete describes. Members of the Northern League, Italy’s extreme right party that currently occupies a total of 35 seats in the Parliament, have used Facebook and Twitter—in addition to conventional political venues—to post racist comments directed towards Kyenge. Some Northern League followers saw these posts as an invitation to act; days following the virtual insults, a group of radicals hurled bananas at the minister, echoing statements that offensively likened her to an orangutan. Similar episodes have occurred in the Czech Republic, where nationalist groups have been creating Facebook pages to organize outright violent mobilization against the Roma community.
COUNTERFORCES However, the social and civil conditions in Europe make a repeat of the 1930s and 1940s highly unlikely. Indeed, Germany and Italy of the mid-20th century lacked a strong, vocal, and organized anti-nationalist community, whereas today a vibrant European civil society provides a bulwark against rampant racism. Fekete observed that in 30 years of studying race relations, she has never witnessed such strong resistance against these movements, especially in Germany and Sweden. Not everybody, however, is so optimistic. Lusane thinks the solution should be a renewed dedication on the part of the governments to prepare their citizens to accept demographic changes, as well as a stronger commitment to enforcing antidiscrimination policies already in place. Some, including van Barr, argue that the situation must worsen before Europe can truly resolve its current cultural challenges. In the short-term he expects “more hostility towards both migrants and minorities” and an increase in stigmatization of these marginalized communities. A deeper social and political transformation may be necessary for Europe to finally bury the ghosts of its past.
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Letters from Turkey Cansu Colakoglu
Even before the Gezi Park uprisings this June, staff writer Cansu Colakoglu had been a vehement critic of Turkey’s turn away from secularism. In a brief, prescient article published in mid-May, she wrote of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the organization’s march toward political Islamism. When more than three million gathered in and around Taksim Square in the old quarter of Istanbul starting May 28, she was on the front lines, documenting the government’s violence and the eccentric dynamics of the protest movement. Below are a series of three texts written by Colakoglu. The first is the article from mid-May—originally published as part of an HPR “Religion in Politics” symposium. The second is a dispatch from the day of the uprisings, and the third documents the protests’ messy aftermath. We have printed edited selections of the articles—the full texts are available online at harvardpolitics.com. -Gram Slattery, Senior World Editor
MAY 21, 2013 — “UNDUE INFLUENCE IN TURKEY” Religion tends to be an essential component of the political scene in the Middle East, even if a given country isn’t officially an Islamic republic. I come from Turkey, and even though the Turkey government is secular, religion remains the primary decision-making factor in politics. An Islamist party, the AKP, rules the country. This is their second term. Not surprisingly, they use the religious arguments and images to earn the votes of the majority of the middle and lower classes. Due to funding they receive through a religious cult, they are able to remain economically stable. And Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, draws clear distinctions between people who support the party and those who do not. This distinction is shown as a difference in the level of religiosity and faith rather than plain political views. Anyone who criticizes government policy faces consequences as drastic as getting jailed. My understanding of how my religion contributes to my political beliefs can better be described as my politics interfering with my religious beliefs. In a country where religion is manipulated, it is very hard to establish an objective sense of religion for oneself.
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JUNE 1, 2013 — “TAKING BACK TURKEY” Turkey has awoken from its sleep during the AKP’s fascist regime. Five days ago, a group of protesters started a demonstration in Gezi Park, in the middle of Istanbul’s European center, Taksim. The AKP plans to destroy the park and build a shopping mall. Two days ago, the police attacked protesters who were trying to save the trees in the park. The people of Istanbul started to gather in the square, and the police occupied all of the streets that run to Taksim in the afternoon. My dad, a friend of mine, and I somehow made it to Taksim and started waiting for the larger group that was on Istiklal Avenue to enter the square. The group in Istiklal consisted of tens of thousands of people, and they managed to push the police back towards the square. The police attacked the protesters with gas bombs and water cannons. As of now, one man has been murdered by a water cannon while four others are dead due to gas bombs and panzers. This is not a story I heard and am telling secondhand; this is what happened to me yesterday. The battle in Taksim lasted until 3 p.m. At 3:30 p.m. the government announced that the police has been ordered to step back. They did not actually step back, but the gas fire ceased for a while. Around 4 p.m., millions gathered in Gezi Park. Taksim was filled with people. There were no policemen, but we suffered from gas bombs occasionally thrown from a helicopter. Pharmacies are giving out gas masks and medicine for free. Lawyers and doctors are offering their services for free, as well. Around 10 p.m., I heard that one of my high school friends was detained. He arrived home safely after spending around 14 hours in custody. We know that there are 939 people still under custody as of now. Their crime is having protested. Protest is our constitutional right, found in Article 34 of Turkey’s constitution. This is not happening because trees were being destroyed. This is because we have been stripped of the right to talk, to protest. This is because our journalists are in jail. This is because the Prime Minister still says his government does not care what we do and they will continue with the Gezi Project. This is because people are in custody because they used their right to protest. This is because the government made the police attack the Gezi protesters. This is what’s happening in Turkey. I would not call it a Turkish Spring—we don’t need revolution. This is Turkey, reclaiming its secular democracy.
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JUNE 7, 2013 — “GEZI PARK: THE AFTERMATH” Last Saturday, the day after the uprising, I left home to go to Besiktas around 1 p.m. My plan was to help the people who were cleaning up in Besiktas, walk to Taksim to join the protesters in the square, and then move on to Gezi Park. In my backpack I had two bottles of Talcid, or Rennie solution, which eases the pain in one’s eyes after being tear gassed. I also had swimming goggles, which had protected me relatively well on Friday night, two gas masks, two bottles of water, my raincoat, and a Turkish flag. I met another friend in Besiktas who had been there for the last 48 hours, helping people during the violent police attacks. He went around with a bottle of Talcid solution in his hand also carrying the injured on the streets into the university building. I saw his blood type written on his arm; he told us that we cannot walk around without that, just in case. I wrote O Rh+ on my left arm with thick black ink. We decided to walk through Dolmabahce Road and go up the hill through Gumussuyu to Taksim Square to see what Dolmabahce looked like after the previous night’s police violence. On the way, we saw a couple boys collecting the wasted gas bombs from the Dolmabahce Palace garden. Dolmabahce Palace is where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who started our Independence War after World War I in 1919 and founded the Republic of Turkey, lived in his last years. It is among Ataturk’s most important memorials. We decided to join the gas bomb clean up. Leaving the tourists, we entered the Dolmabahce Palace garden from its main gate, going through the security control. We proceeded to a little grass area and started collecting the wasted gas bombs. On one of the bombs it read, “Do not target anyone
The text on the tear gas casing reads: “Do not target anyone when firing.”
when firing,” which is exactly what the police had been doing for four days all around Turkey. We had collected about 30 bombshells in a bag by the time one middle-aged civil official came up to us and asked what we were doing. We said we were collecting bomb waste to keep Dolmabahce clean. He did not say anything, but he returned five minutes later with 10 more men demanding that we leave. The palaces are guarded by the police, so we figured these people were civil policemen. We said it does not say visitors are prohibited from that space; there truly were no signs. One of them said it was not our job to clean this place, and we were physically thrown out. Leaving the palace with rage, we walked up to Taksim Square from Gumussuyu along with hundreds of others. I had never seen a crowd so dense, and it was not just any crowd. I saw people with flags of a very conservative party (Saadet Partisi), people with headscarves, and people with LGBTQ flags. I saw artists, journalists, and people giving out bottles of water for free. So, to the contrary of what the media says, this was not a solely secular crowd. For days people cheered in Taksim, and the police started gas bombing and using their water cannons around 8 p.m. each evening. In Istanbul, everyone still gathered in Taksim, in Besiktas, on Bagdat Avenue, Kuzguncuk, Cengelkoy, and in many more areas of the city on the Asian side. People still protested by clashing pots together on their balconies, turning the lights on and off over and over again in their homes. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has left to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. He left the country when the whole nation was protesting against him. Were we surprised? Not really.
Protests against Prime Minister Erdogan were concentrated in Taksim Square and Gezi Park.
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BOOKS & ARTS
THE RADICAL REDEEMER: Reza Aslan’s Zealot and the Historical Jesus Samir Durrani
“B
eing Muslim was like being from Mars … Jesus, on the other hand, was America,” writes Dr. Reza Aslan in his #1 New York Times best seller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan (Harvard Divinity School MTS ’99), the subject of recent controversy surrounding his biography of Jesus, has been criticized by Fox News, Christian political groups, and even by The Washington Post for the “biases” that arise out of his personal religious beliefs. Aslan was most notably deprecated by Fox News’ Lauren Green in an interview that went viral within days. Green opens her interview with Aslan by asking, “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” Green’s torrent of inquiries, all aimed at Aslan’s personal beliefs, tow the line between criticism and bigotry. Ought we to seriously believe that Muslims cannot write about Christianity? Isn’t a Masters in Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School enough to outweigh private beliefs? Political biases aside, Fox News’ interest in Aslan’s personal beliefs raises important questions about academic discourse in 21st century America. How do we read works of historical inquiry written by “outsiders?” What is the role of subjectivity in academia? What is Jesus’ place in the American political arena?
JESUS AS A ZEALOT Why does Zealot spur so much controversy? Aslan’s biography argues that the “historical Jesus” was a zealot. It paints a picture of a viciously insurgent prophet, a religio-political revolutionary, and a theological figure working to certain political ends, notably the creation of a theocratic state in Roman Judea. Aslan’s arguments within the text create a Jesus foreign to most Americans. He postulates that Jesus was a social revolutionary, a challenger to conventional authority. In Aslan’s interview with the HPR, he explains, “When you’re talking about Jesus, you’re talking about a Middle Eastern socialist who advocates for welfare and free health care.” Aslan’s Jesus, frankly, does not
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BOOKS & ARTS
Being aware of where one is coming from, can one then be critical of what one says, and can one somehow be creative in trying to say something different?
conform to traditional conservative American values. Aslan’s argument, however, does not seem to be the point of contention. His sources are sound. His analysis is defensible, even unoriginal. Since the beginning of the search for the “historical Jesus” in 18th century Germany, academics have proposed the idea of a “politically engaged Jesus,” according to Dr. Giovanni Bazzana, associate professor of the New Testament at the Harvard Divinity School. In an interview with the HPR, he explains that Aslan uses the same reasoning as many prominent theological authorities on the historical Jesus. The search for the historical Jesus has always been plagued by political undertones. Bazzana explains that under the Nazi Regime, German academics tried to prove that Jesus was not a Jew. According to Aslan, “Ideas about the historical Jesus were deeply engaged, deeply connected to politics, culture, and society.” He adds that because of this, “[Jesus] is an infinitely malleable character. He is whatever a community sees in him, and he takes on the cultural, national, and ethnic identity of his worshippers.” Even though Aslan’s arguments are neither particularly novel nor unfounded in historical research, his religious practices, cultural heritage, and racial background jeopardize his legitimacy as a writer in the eyes of people like Lauren Green. An emigrant from "the axis of evil," Aslan’s background as an Iranian Muslim poses the greatest threat to his scholastic authority.
ON REFLEXIVITY In the words of Bazzana, “No one draws any objective data in historical research.” When asked if his book is objective, Aslan himself says, “No history can be objective.” Even academics are people—people who have cultural influences, beliefs, and unique identities. Perhaps it is fair then, to keep in mind Aslan’s perspective and cultural influences. He is, of course, Muslim. He
is also an Iranian-American man from California, a Harvard-educated scholar, and a former Christian. Aslan, like most Americans, belongs to a laundry list of cultural identities that cannot all be accounted for. Yet, according to Dr. Steve Caton, professor of Contemporary Arab Studies at Harvard University in an interview with the HPR, “The idea that one can speak from a pure cultural identity is a fantasy.” Caton writes extensively on the concept of reflexivity in the context of his work as an anthropologist. In regards to bias in academia, Caton poses a critical question: “Being aware of where one is coming from, can one then be critical of what one says, and can one somehow be creative in trying to say something different?” This is the crux of reflexivity. Aslan concedes his possible biases in the prologue of his text, an admission of positionality—even reflexivity—that reflects a genuine will to study Jesus from a neutral standpoint. Still, this concession poses a difficult problem in the academic world. Why does Aslan feel the need to justify himself as an authority on Jesus, when hundreds of Christian scholars before him felt no such need? How can American culture move away from skepticism towards the “outsider,” when his perspective is as plagued by subjectivity as any “insider’s?”
THE OUTSIDER EFFECT The historical Jesus has been studied from the Christian perspective almost exclusively. And to whose benefit? Certainly an “outsider” can provide no less subjectivity than a religious follower of Jesus. “The outsider’s perspective can be very valuable, very interesting,” Caton remarks. A diversity of perspectives, in Caton’s view, creates a fuller picture than the “insider” perspective alone. Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University, adds to Caton’s argument, tell-
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BOOKS & ARTS
Some believe that Aslan’s religious practices, heritage, and racial background jeopardize his legitimacy as a writer.
ing the HPR, “It’s really great when ‘outsiders’ study culture … Often an ‘outsider’ will bring a different perspective on things; they might even say things that make people mad, but I think it needs to be part of the dialogue.” Like Aslan, Monson resides in an academic realm as a sort of “outsider.” As a white person studying black culture, Monson has come to the conclusion that “Positionality does matter.” Defenders of Aslan contend that his personal beliefs are merely tangential to the academic matter at hand. Monson takes a more nuanced perspective, arguing, “It’s much more comfortable to say ‘Everyone is entitled to exactly say whatever they think.’” In other words, it does matter that Aslan is a Muslim man. It does matter that Monson is a white woman. These identities are by no means concrete, but they indicate the possibility of biases that—to a certain degree—threaten the neutrality of academic arguments. It is similarly comfortable to say that “outsiders” present subjective perspectives that must be questioned. They do of course, but so do the perspectives of “insiders.” When it comes to the study of Jesus, the distinction between “insider” and “outsider” is further complicated as Islam lays claim to Jesus as a key prophet in the Qur’an. Could Islamic Studies grow to include Jesus in the same way Jewish Studies have reclaimed Jesus as a central figure in the Jewish narrative? What significance do the terms “insider” and “outsider” hold if they may evolve in the progression of human society? And what of Aslan’s claims? Is Jesus the key political player, the zealot that Aslan projects?
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VOTE FOR JESUS When asked again, years later after cultivating a career in sociology, Aslan gave the same answer he once gave as a young immigrant in America. Is Jesus America? “Yes! Christianity has become a part of our national narrative. Indeed, I would go so far as to say the cross and the flag have bled into a single national icon. [Christianity] is a part of our culture, our consciousness, our history, our very sense of identity.” And back to Aslan’s original intent—the examination of Jesus as a political player. What role does Jesus play in American politics? It’s hard to say; Jesus is the founder of the religion that dominates the current political sphere, the key figure in Western sociopolitical thought, and the inspiration for the most influential piece of literature in world history, the Bible—which raises an equally important question. Who is Jesus as a strictly political player? Aslan says, “A man whose entire ministry is predicated on the reversal of the social order, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, that the hungry will be fed and the fed will go hungry—which of course is quite a threatening idea in any society—a man who confronted the political and religious powers of his time simply because they had put themselves in positions of power.” If we are to read Jesus as a politician, does he deserve our vote? Aslan thinks so. “Jesus of Nazareth … is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.”
INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW: RAHM EMANUEL with Andrew Ma
I can tell you that I’m glad to have had all those experiences before being mayor, and that I’m the mayor I am because I’ve had those experiences. I think I would have been a better chief of staff if I had been mayor first, because I would have had a better sense of how things roll out on the city level.
Since the mass shootings in Cornell Square Park, Chicago’s citizens have become increasingly concerned for public safety, and violence is once again a critical issue in the public eye. How will future attempts to reduce violence differ from past efforts? I don’t agree with you on the premise that crime is what Chicago is about; it’s an aspect of our city, but it’s not who we are. Look, our overall crime rate is down 24 percent, and I can give you the data. Shootings are down 23 percent. We’ve had a flood of guns, and I’d like to have the same type of gun laws that Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York enjoy, laws that you don’t have with Wisconsin and Indiana. We take more guns off the streets in the city of Chicago than either New York or Los Angeles do, and we’re working to get a safer city.
Rahm Emanuel is the Mayor of Chicago. Before becoming mayor, Emanuel served as Barack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, Congressman from Illinois, Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton administration Senior Advisor for Policy and Strategy.
What worries you most as a mayor? What are some of the toughest challenges Chicago faces in the foreseeable future?
You have worked as a congressman and in the White House, under both President Obama and President Clinton. How has your previous experience in the federal government informed the way you run Chicago?
The biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge is education. It’s the biggest opportunity because it offers the greatest gains. We’re making major gains on our test scores and gains on our graduation rate. More schools now than ever before are considered level one, and we added 53 this year alone to a total of over 170. On the other hand, our graduation rate is 65 percent, and when I ran, it was 53 percent. We’re really moving, but having only a high school education is equivalent of being unemployed. You need a college degree to be competitive in the job market. And getting our kids college-ready is my biggest goal.
I think I learned a tremendous amount from two great presidents, both on the policy and political side. Getting that experience was invaluable. The other thing [is that] as mayor, you also preside over the City Council. So you are also head of a legislative body. Being in the legislative branch has helped me figure out how to work with legislators, and working in the executive branch has helped me understand the role of the mayor: setting the goals and putting things back together.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW: DREW GILPIN FAUST with Colin Diersing
lives. But we also undertake research and teaching in a whole series of areas directly related to improving people’s lives in the world. The School of Public Health, for example, has an enormous impact on longevity and on quality of life. If we look at life expectancy in the last century, it improved 30 years. Twenty-five of those years can be attributed to innovations in public health. So dealing with air pollution, or maternal and child health, or approaches to child vaccination in countries around the world are such important interventions. And when we train professionals in public health and global health—global health being a campaign priority—this has an enormous impact on the world. Education is another example. The Graduate School of Education is bringing K-12 education and better approaches to teaching and learning to people around the country and world. So all of those kinds of ways in which research, and then the training of people who are going to work in the field in these areas, can make for better societies and have an impact are critical parts of the good that Harvard does.
Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th President of Harvard University. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and author of several books. Since assuming the presidency in 2007, she has overseen the expansion of financial aid, development of edX, and launch of the Harvard Campaign.
At the end of your speech outlining Harvard’s upcoming capital campaign, you said you hoped for a Harvard “as good as it is great.” Other than financial aid, what are some things Harvard does that are good as opposed to just great? A lot revolves around the kinds of ways that knowledge can make a difference to improve people’s lives. As you say, financial aid is part of that because we hope to bring people here who have talent, but may not have the wherewithal, to afford it. So we make possibilities available to them in their
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In striving to balance the “good” and the “great,” how do you reconcile tensions between the two, especially in the capital campaign? How do you think about research that isn’t as impactful on people’s lives? There’s a lot of knowledge that we want to develop and train people to know about that doesn’t have an immediate impact. For example, studying the classics. But it’s part of the heritage of who we are as human beings. It’s part of how we think in a long-term way. It’s part of learning to look beyond your own world, see its contingency, and understand that things have been different and could be different again. So even though we can’t say that someone who studies the liberal arts is going to immediately save lives or achieve something as measurable as longevity, these subjects are nevertheless extremely important to our heritage as human beings and to how we define what matters to us as a society.
You talked in the same speech about Harvard leading a revolution in pedagogy. If you were teaching undergraduates now, how would you
INTERVIEWS
organize your course differently to reflect or further that same revolution? One of the things I feel very aware of is how antiquated my teaching tools are and how—when and if I go back into the classroom—I’m going to have to revisit everything that I used to do. And partly that’s because so much is available now to enrich a class, from using visual materials and archival materials that are available online, to almost achieving time travel by bringing objects and other aspects of the past directly into the classroom. For example, the AfricaMap is a digital construction that takes a map of Africa and imposes all kinds of information on it. I taught a course on the history of the American South when I was on the faculty, and I would talk about the origins of the slave trade and where people came from. I could use the AfricaMap to show villages, population movements, artifacts associated with different peoples, and changes in population in Africa over the course of the slave trade. When I started teaching, I would talk to my students, use slides in a parcel slide projector, and occasionally bring in historical objects. Now think of what I can have in my classroom. So how would I redo everything based on that? I haven’t yet figured it all out, but I would certainly look forward to it.
If you were teaching a large videotaped lecture class, would it still be important to you that students attend lectures? I’d ask myself whether I would want a large lecture class in the first place, or whether I would have students watch videotaped materials beforehand, and then come to class and have group activities, discussions, or debates. So that would be a big question: “Should I have a flipped classroom?” But it’s so interesting you ask this question, because I was a pioneer of a very strange sort in videotaping lectures and delivering them to students. In the fall of 1981 when I became pregnant, there was no maternity leave at the University of Pennsylvania and I had to figure out what I was going to do in the spring term. Was I going to quit, stay home, and not get paid? So I videotaped eight weeks of my lectures in order to have three weeks of them available at whatever time my child was born. Videotaping these lectures was a real transition for me in terms of using more visual materials. Because as the camera was aimed at me I thought “Why me? Why is it looking at me?” I ought to have materials from books at the time and photographs and objects and so forth. I really began to think about how students learn visually in a classroom.
And one day when the baby was born, the students knew that this was the plan and came to class and instead of me they got the videotape for the next three weeks. So that was my MOOC.
There has been a lot of discussion about Jodi Kantor’s piece in the New York Times about shifting gender dynamics at Harvard Business School. Do you think there are lessons to be applied to the rest of the university? I think a really important thing that happened at the business school was that they articulated a concern and gave people permission to talk about their own perceptions of the challenges and potential solutions. They made it a matter of community attention, and I think that was fundamental to the kind of changes that took place. Often in an organization when there is a problem, people don’t want to talk about it. Just opening up a subject often has a really positive effect in and of itself. First of all, people can be honest and really look at the issue in a way that’s constructive rather than worrying about it in a way that doesn’t have any action associated with it.
What do you wish you had done more of as an undergraduate? I went down to the Yale inauguration and the new president plays in a bluegrass band. It’s a pretty fabulous band. The music is great and I’ve always loved bluegrass. I just loved the notion of the joy he gets out of playing with a group of musicians. And aside from piano lessons when I was ten years old, I just never played. So I would have liked to have spent time in college playing music. This interview has been edited and condensed.
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ENDPAPER
SURVIVING THE STORM Frank Mace
Just before this edition of the HPR went to press, the U.S. federal government remained shut down, a victim of allegedly irreconcilable differences between our political parties. The shutdown may be the stuff of history textbooks, but a few weeks earlier, there was another remarkable occurrence, this time a cross-continental op-ed submission. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, felt compelled to write a New York Times piece warning Americans not to feel exceptional. Putin said that he “would rather disagree with” President Obama’s case “on American exceptionalism,” and concluded with a warning: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” It’s easy to sound the alarm bell about national divisions, political and cultural, and to start using terms like Red America and Blue America. I have heard some prominent leaders do it. But it says something—something important—that Putin scolded a Democratic president for feeling exceptional. Flag-waving American exceptionalism, after all, was supposed to be the purview of the Republicans. Nostalgia for a romanticized past aside, the United States has always been divided. Elections as far back as the 1800 Jefferson v. Adams bout have been soaked in vitriol. In that contest, a couple of state militias were even watching the election proceedings closely, lest a march on Washington become necessary. Today’s
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partisanship alone doesn’t mean we’re blowing it. The blame for the shutdown has mostly fallen on Republicans, and that sounds about right. I left the Republican Party earlier this year; like many of my right-leaning peers, I still have basic conservative values, but the party platform had just drifted too far. To tweak a Reaganism, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, the party left me. So we arrive where we are now, with an increasingly radical GOP hemorrhaging its more moderate support, and the federal government running on life support. Yet we have to go somewhere from here. Lurching from crisis to crisis isn’t sustainable over the long term, and disunion along regional lines isn’t going to happen. We all want to know, what in the world is next? I’m not quite sure—nobody can be—but I’m not despairing. Psychologists have long suggested that superordinate goals, goals that transcend group boundaries, weaken antagonism between groups, and we have a few of those to strive for. We may not have salient policy objectives in common, but we do have that goad and goal that Putin thought so important: American exceptionalism. It means different things to different people, but seeking it out entails a commitment to this country. I look forward to, and expect to see, the day when the Republican Party regains its sanity. People aren’t simply born a D or R, type 1 or type 2. Political science may teach us that the parties tell the people what to believe, but on a macro scale, the parties are expressions of vast swaths of people. Looking ahead, I don’t see two Americas, Red and Blue, with little in common. The reason why is that shared commitment to whatever it is that makes this place exceptional.
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