Winter 2019: Girls Girls Girls

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

THE IVY PIPELINE

TOOTH AND NAIL

INTERVIEW: BOB COHN

VOLUME L NO. 4, WINTER 2019 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

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HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/REDLINE

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This issue’s cover topic was originally proposed by Marian Bothner and Savitri Fouda.

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The Nuanced Push for American Sex Education Rachel Janfaza

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More for Mormon Women Alexa Jordan

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The Rise of the Pynk Vote Kate Gundersen

CAMPUS 12 Mather is a Healthy House.

Are Others?

Winona Guo 14 Looking for Legitimacy JD Deal 23 The Third Party Mystery Libby Palanza

17 The Ivy Pipeline Fatima Taj

UNITED STATES 20 The Myth of Algae Biofuels Joseph Winters

32 From Selfies to Progress Kendrick Foster

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The Third Party Mystery Libby Palanza

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How Progressive Are American Cities?

Enrique Sanchez

WORLD

38 The Bollywood Dilemma Sarah Deonarain

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Protecting Cows and Persecuting People Ajay Sarma

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Tooth and Nail Ava Salzman

10 The Academic Edge Chloe Levine

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From Selfies to Progress in El Salvador Kendrick Foster

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How to Fail at Regime Change Sam Meyerson

CULTURE 38

The Bollywood Dilemma Sarah Deonarain

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The Factory of Words Aliénor Manteau

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Not So Black-and-White Srividya Maganti

INTERVIEWS 45

President of The Atlantic: Bob Cohn Mikael Tessema

ENDPAPER 48

To Make a Magazine Drew Pendergrass

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: Photographer: 12- Trina Lilja. Canva: 14. Flickr: 1,38- Paul K. The Noun Project: 29- Iconic; 31- Nada AlYafaei; 35- Luca Fruzza; 35- Tinashe Mugaye; 35- Lluisa Iborra; 41- Paul Aimé; 42,44- Eynav Raphael; 42,44- Nick Abrams. Pexels: 8,9- Element5 Digital; 25- Quintin Gellar. Pixabay: 10- Michael Jamro.

Public Domain Pictures: 19- George Hodan. PxHere: 45. Unsplash: 1- Ian Dooley; 1,23- Sunyu; 3- Sincerely Media; 3- Scott Sanker; 5- Sylvie Tittel; 6- Umberto; 27- Ryan Song; 48- Bank Phrom. USDOD Archive: 37Lewis Hunsaker. Wikimedia Commons: 1,34- Idea SV; 17- Kjetil Ree; 20- Mykola Swarnick; 32- Rafael Fernandez; 32- Thommy; 40- Guillaume Armantier; 45- Anna Bross. Design by: Tosca Langbert, Madeleine LaPuerta, Trina Lilja, Will Polster, Kendall Rideout, Matthew Rossi, and Fatima Taj.

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FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

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A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. L, No. 4

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Russell Reed PUBLISHER: Wyatt Hurt ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Katie Weiner ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Jessica Boutchie STAFF DIRECTOR: Alexis Mealey SENIOR COVERS EDITOR: Sarah Shamoon ASSOCIATE COVERS EDITOR: Kendrick Foster SENIOR U.S. EDITOR: Amir Siraj ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Ilana Cohen ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Clay Oxford SENIOR WORLD EDITOR: Keshav Rastogi ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Kelsey Chen ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Corbin Duncan SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR: Savitri Fouda ASSOCIATE CULTURE EDITOR: Marian Bothner SENIOR CAMPUS EDITOR: Will Imbrie-Moore ASSOCIATE CAMPUS EDITOR: May Wang INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gordon Kamer BUSINESS MANAGER: Cate Brock ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Cathy Yin SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Matthew Rossi ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Madeleine LaPuerta ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Trina Lilja SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Jacob Heberle ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Nicolas Medrano SENIOR TECH DIRECTOR: Jason Huang ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Natea Eshetu Bashada ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Max Snyder COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR: Alexandra Diggs

STAFF Alienor Manteau, Alisha Ukani, Alison Chen, Allison Piper, Amy Danoff, Amy Wang, Annelisa Kingsbury Lee, Audrey Sheehy, Benjamin Firester, Bridger Gordon, Byron Hurlbut, Campbell Erickson , Carter Nakamoto, Chloe Lemmel-Hay, Chris Sun, Clara Bates, Colton Carpenter, Connor Brown, Connor Schoen, Daniel Friedman, DJ Kranchalk, Eleonore Evans, Eli Berlin, Emily Malpass, Emily Moss, Esha Chaudhuri, Ethan Schultz, Gabrielle Landry, Graham Walter, Hadley DeBello, Hafso Muse, Hope Kudo, Isabel Cole, Isabel Isselbacher, Jacob Blair, Jacob Kern, Jace McIntyre, James Blanchfield, Jamie Bikales, Jamie Weisenberg, Jay Gopalan, Jerry Huang, Johannes Lang, Jon Riege, Jose Larios, Joseph Minatel, Josh Berry, Katherine Ho, Katie Miao, Kendall Rideout, Kevin Bi, Lainey Newman, Lauren Fadiman, Lindsey Bouldin, Lu Shao, Manuel Abecasis, Marcus Trenfield, Matthew Hatfield, Matthew Shaw, Max Snyder, Meena Venkataramanan, Mfundo Radebe, Michael Montella, Michael Wornow, Mikael Tessema, Mimi Alphonsus, Natalie Dabkowski, Nick Danby, Nikole Naloy, Noah Knopf, Noah Redlich, Pawel Rybacki, Peyton Dunham, Roger Cawdette, Rumi Khan, Ryan Chung, Samantha FrenkelPopell, Sandy Koenig, Sanika Mahajan, Sarah Tisdall, Satish Wasti, Sophie Dicara, Tamara Shamir, Tom Slack, Trina Lilja, Vanessa Ruales, Will Finigan, William Boggs, Winona Guo, Yash Kumbhat, Yashaar Hafizka, Yuri-Grace Ohashi, Zachary Buttenwieser, Zehan Zhou SENIOR WRITERS: Akshaya Annapragada, Alicia Zhang, Andrew Zucker, Anirudh Suresh, Beverly Brown, Chad Borgman, Darwin Peng, Drew Pendergrass, Eve Driver, Hank Sparks, Nicolas Yan, Perry Arrasmith

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke E.J. Dionne, Jr. Ron Fournier

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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It is a groan-worthy platitude that American politics is dominated by old men. The United States ranks 75th in the world for women’s representation in government, with women comprising only 25 percent of the Senate and 23 percent of the House. But increasingly, candidates from outside the “Old Boys’ Club” are challenging outdated notions of what an American leader should look like. The power of young women, and the obstacles they face to actualizing that power, remain under-evaluated and unresolved in a country that has yet to elect a woman president. In “GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS,” we explore the potential of young women to shape American and global politics, giving them the analytical attention popular media often fails to.

In the final issue published by the HPR’s 51st editorial board, four writers consider the role of young women in American politics. In “The Nuanced Push for American Sex Education,” Rachel Janfaza investigates the roadblocks to comprehensive sex ed in the United States, despite its far-reaching and widely accepted benefits for adolescents.

Alexa Jordan calls for a more inclusive Mormonism in “More for Mormon Women,” warning that current doctrine may drive young women out of the religion. In “The Rise of the Pynk Vote,” Kate Gundersen considers the increasing influence of young female voters, who are pushing for action on climate change, gun control, and the right to choose.

Chloe Levine uses high school Quiz Bowl tournaments as a lens into early gendered discrimination in “The Academic Edge,” arguing that women’s educational disadvantages begin long before college.

At the Harvard Political Review, we are no strangers to these challenges.

When I joined the magazine in 2016, less than one third of our leadership positions were filled by women. There were infrastructural barriers to women’s success, the gravest being the absence of reporting infrastructure for cases of sexual harassment and assault. But beyond these tangible infrastructural failures, our magazine faced challenges common across academia, politics, and journalism alike: In male-dominated

fields, women are less likely to see themselves in leadership, a form of disenfranchisement that perpetuates male dominance. This year, we have worked tirelessly to combat gendered barriers in our content and our community, as well as those affecting ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities. We have done this not only because it is the ‘right thing to do,’ but also because we fail in our mission to serve as a platform for Harvard students when we fail to represent our campus’s many voices.

It is with both happiness and nostalgia that I write my final note to you, our readers, as president of this magazine.

It has been an honor to work alongside the 200-plus editors, writers, designers, tech wizzes, photographers, and business gurus who together create the content you see, in print and online. I am most proud of the progress we have made this year toward becoming an accessible, inclusive, and welcoming platform for Harvard students of all identities, not just those who historically see themselves in politics and journalism.

Our progress became clear to me during our early November election, a cacophonous and exhausting 10-hour process that resulted in the magazine’s first-ever majority-female masthead, and likely the most ethnically and racially diverse team in our history. These women have long been vital to our success yet chronically underrepresented in our leadership. It is with great pride and confidence that I pass the reins to our first female president in five years, Alexis Mealey, whose vision for the magazine has been pivotal to my own. I hope you continue to enjoy our magazine for many years to come, and thank you for being part of our extended family.

Russell Reed President

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Rachel Janfaza

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ccording to the Sexuality and Information Council of the United States, only 38 percent of high schools and 14 percent of middle schools across the country teach all 19 topics identified as critical for sex education by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite research demonstrating the health benefits of comprehensive sex education that dates back to the 1980s and even earlier, abstinence-only curricula have historically been the federal go-to, establishing a dichotomy between what the science reveals and what American classrooms have the funds to teach. While federal barriers may complicate the conversation around sex education, many advocates and legislators are working tirelessly to ensure comprehensive sex education. When the need for comprehensive sex education is explained, especially by young people who feel its impact the most, the public tends to listen, even in areas where resistance to sex ed is strong.

In truth, sex education in America is not as controversial as it seems. In fact, public opinion overwhelmingly supports sex education. But while most Americans believe in sex education, Americans do not all agree on the best way to do it. And, as far as experts are concerned, sex education is not practiced across the country the way it should be.

At the federal level, certain initiatives and politicians have tried and failed to regulate sex education. Given the variety of opinions and sensitivities around the once taboo topic of sex, sex-ed legislation works best when approached at the state or local level, as demonstrated in states such as Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington.

BY THE NUMBERS The fight for sex ed gets complicated because sex is complicated. But while sex may be complicated, the American desire for education is not. When America argues over sex ed, the disagreement is never really about the need to educate our children, but rather about the topics of politics, religion, sexuality, and gender that are all inherently linked to sex.

For this reason, as Jennifer Driver, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at SIECUS told the HPR, successful advocates for sex ed provide a nuanced, gradual, “half-baked approach” to sex education.

Historically, there has been a major gap between public opinion and public policy with regard to sex education. According to a study by NARAL Pro-Choice America, “the public overwhelmingly supports age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education, yet anti-choice policymakers promote restrictive abstinenceonly programs that censor information about contraception and STD/HIV prevention strategies.”

“Sex education is incredibly popular,” explained Sara Flowers, vice president of education at Planned Parenthood. “Whether looking at political beliefs, geographics, socioeconomic status, or demographics, we have seen through likely voter surveys that there’s resounding support for sex education across the country.

There’s this stereotype that sex ed is controversial, but it really isn’t. There’s resounding support for sex ed.”

And, according to NARAL, a 2012 survey demonstrated that 93 percent of adults and 87 percent of teens deem it important to receive information about both abstinence and contraception.

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For Americans, it cannot just be one or the other.

A Planned Parenthood study from 2014 also demonstrates that Americans overwhelmingly support sex education, with over 90 percent of parents reporting that it is important to have sex ed in middle and high school. These parents advocated for comprehensive sex ed, saying that sex ed should incoporate topics including birth control, STDs, healthy versus unhealthy relationships, abstinence, and sexual orientation. According to these statistics, abstinence-only sex ed is insufficient.

ABSTINENCE-ONLY AND A LOOK AT THE RESISTANCE Abstinence-Only, and a Look at the Resistance But as mentioned, federal policies have historically favored abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula, and these programs have been popular across the aisle. The federal government has allocated over $2 billion to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1982. In particular, the Clinton administration heavily supported these programs, and even allocated $250 million for them. Although they came to an intermittent pause in 2010, abstinence-only programs have again seen the light of day with the Trump-Pence administration.

Beyond the aforementioned abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, it is critical to note that there has always been and still is a resistance movement to sex education in general. Across time, resistance to sex education has arisen in communities with a tradition of little sex education, and which thus become shocked at the introduction of comprehensive sex ed.

“There’s a very strong-but-small movement against sex and sexuality. That movement is very well-funded and has done a successful job of getting people to have doubts about sexual education and [believe] that if you provide sexuality education, young people are more likely to be sexually active. But that is inaccurate info,” Tamara Kreanin, director of the Population and Reproductive Health Program from the Packard Foundation and former executive director of Women and Population at the United Nations Foundation, told the HPR. From Kreanin’s experience, when advocating for sex education in school districts where sex education had previously faltered — for example, a community on the border in Texas — “ultimately what had the major impact was the young people from the school themselves speaking out and talking about how important comprehensive sex education is. They talked about their peers getting pregnant and syphilis and HIV, and I think what ended up having the biggest impact was the voice of the students,” she said.

THE ROLE OF THIRD-PARTY ORGANIZATIONS There is no denying that it has been difficult to implement comprehensive sex ed in American schools. As a result, thirdparty organizations and groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Unitarian Church have stepped in to offer comphrensive sex education outside of the classroom while simultaneously advocating for better sex ed within schools.

For example, Planned Parenthood, the largest sex-ed provider in the country, not only delivers its own sex-ed workshops and online information, but also develops relationships with

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sex-ed curricula. The Unitarian Church’s comprehensive sex-ed curriculum, Our Whole Lives, is one of the most well-regarded in the country.

These third-party organizations that supplement and foster sex ed in America’s schools have made major headway in the push for comprehensive sexual education. “We recognize sex ed in schools as an incredible opportunity because young people are in schools,” Flowers told the HPR. “But it’s important to understand that sex ed in schools is not the only place where sex education happens neither historically nor currently. It’s always been a partnership in schools and out-of-school spaces where sex education happens.”

Kreanin agreed with Flowers. “It’s important to think of sex education from three different lenses,” she told the HPR. “In schools, out of the school setting, whether that’s an afterschool setting or a safe community, and online. In an ideal world, you have all three,” she said.

KEEPING IT CLOSE TO HOME: STATE LEVEL AND LOCAL POLICIES While it may be easy to keep after-school and online curricula similar across state lines, it proves much harder to do so in public schools. When it comes to sex ed in schools, individual states, and often even individual districts, have the ability to implement their own curricula — or not incorporate sex ed at all. In recent years, many advocacy groups and state level governments have made concerted pushes to improve their commitment to comprehensive sex-ed curricula in public schools.

“There’s definitely a pathway to legislation for sex ed at the state level,” Driver told the HPR. “We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to improve the education system and sex ed is a component. In science classes, there’s a foundation you need … The same thing needs to happen with sex ed. There needs to be a focused foundation setting in K-5 that introduces what it means to be a good friend and how to have strong friendships and family relationships.” Driver emphasized that students can move into much stronger conversations about sex ed after, and only after, that foundation is set. Comphrensive sex-ed curriculums are lauded by experts because they incorporate foundation setting and a focus on relationship building before launching into higher-level material.

State legislators are latching on to the push for comprehensive sex ed too. Successful campaigns for state-level comprehensive sex-ed legislation have happened across the country, with notable crusades in Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington.

Although Colorado public schools are still not required to teach sex ed, Colorado abides by local control laws. This means that if districts decide to teach sex ed at all, they have the ability to choose their own sex-ed curriculum. Experts praise Colorado’s local efforts and commend a new state law signed by Governor Jared Polis last May, which mandates that if schools are to teach sex ed, they must teach a comprehensive curriculum that includes conversations around consent. The bill also gives $1 million to fund sex-ed grants in schools and districts; these grants will be overseen by a parent representative and a youth representative, as well as someone to represent students of color.

Illinois has followed a very similar path and also now

requires that when sex ed is taught, it is comprehensive. This means it must include conversations around healthy relationships and consent. Meanwhile, policymakers in Texas, a state where abstinence-only sex ed has been a prescribed norm for the past 20 years and the fervent anti-sex-ed movement has a strong foothold, have suggested reworking state law to incorporate conversations about contraceptives, healthy relationships, and consent as well. And in Washington, while a proposed mandatory sex-ed bill failed last April, policymakers continue to fight for comprehensive state-wide sexual education. The bill’s passage through the state senate demonstrates the progress made by Washington’s sex-ed advocates.

AND AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL ...

In addition to advocating for policy at the state level, Driver told the HPR that her organization continues to push for two priority bills at the federal level. One of these bills is the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), which “would be the first ever comprehensive sex-ed bill,” Driver said. The other is the Youth Access to Sexual Health Services Act, sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), which would ensure access to services particularly for LGBTQ youth and communities of color.

In prioritizing sex ed at the federal level, Driver said that society must recognize sex ed’s impact on many other social issues: “Sex ed links to overall education. It links to reducing transphobia and homophobia and reducing sexual assault. If we were to prioritize and recognize the connection to so many other social issues it would be easier. Our downfall is that people see sex ed and see a six-to-12-week curriculum and then we’re done, but that’s not sex ed. It may be a curriculum and more.”

When discussing sex education in America in 2019, advocates need to make clear that sex education has support across party and geographic lines, and that sex education is, after all, just education. All in all, sex education is just “responding to an inextricable part of our humanity,” said Driver. “There are real opportunities in this field to think about how we scaffold and integrate sex ed into adulthood. The knowledge and skills of sex ed provide and support relationships with others.” 

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More for Mormon Women Alexa Jordan

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ll eyes fell upon me at Young Women Sunday School when it was my turn to answer the question about what I wanted to be when I grew up. “I plan to attend law school, and later possibly run for public office,” I answered. By the time I had given my response, the temperature in the room of my Sunday school class had risen. Some students looked away, while others exchanged uncomfortable glances.

My Sunday school teacher had asked about our future plans, and my answer was clearly out of place. Most of my female peers had responded with desires of motherhood and marriage; I wanted these things too, but they were not my primary goals even though I am a Mormon woman. The painful silence stretched over a few seconds until it was broken when the teacher asked the next student to respond. Motherhood should be revered, but it should never preclude the realization of a woman’s full academic, physical, and individual potential.

Latter-day Saints women can do more, be more, and accomplish more.

WHO ARE THE MORMONS? Today when Mormons are mentioned, most think of Utah, Mitt Romney, polygamy, or the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon.” But as of April 2019, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — or the Mormon Church — is the fastest growing religious group in America and makes up approximately 2 percent of the total U.S. population. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was officially organized in 1830 in New York by Joseph Smith Jr. With Smith’s celebrated “First Vision,” publication of The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, and restoration of the Priesthood, members claim

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that it is the only true, restored church upon the earth.

I was born and raised in this uniquely American religious tradition. Like every other young Mormon woman before me, I attended church for three hours each Sunday, early-morning “Seminary” before high school daily, and Church youth activities weekly. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the center and lifeblood of my community and culture. Culture is supposed to give people meaning, connection, and a deeper understanding of how they fit into the patchwork of humanity.

In my life, however, my culture and community seemed to do just the opposite. They made me feel conflicted. They confused me. They filled me with uncertainty and, at times, even heartwrenching despair. The very culture that I was raised in also confined me into a tight, glass box of expectations that was suffocating. But I feared if I pushed against this fragile box, my world would shatter.

This box was supposed to define my purpose and identity as a Mormon woman. My culture told me that my primary purpose and divine role was to find a husband and raise a family. “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” is official LDS Church doctrine that was published in 1995 by the “First Presidency,” the all-male central leadership committee in Salt Lake City, Utah. This document reinforces the role of families in the LDS religion as “central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” It relays the idea that gender is an “essential characteristic” that defines “identity” and “purpose.” This doctrine outlines that men are to “preside over their families” while women are “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children,” but still act as “equal partners.” But as Laurel Ulrich, a Harvard University history professor emerita and active member of the LDS Church, pointed out in an interview with the HPR, there is an inherent tension between “simultaneously

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women as nurturers” contained within the Proclamation.

In an interview with the HPR, an anonymous active LDS female political leader said, “In contrast to the ambiguities of scripture, written down thousands of years ago by and for an entirely different people, the Proclamation’s clear, concise language and near-canon status make it very difficult to argue an alternate interpretation.” As a result, she said, “women in the Church are often discouraged explicitly and implicitly from pursuing anything, leadership or otherwise, that would take away their time, energy, or attention from their responsibility to nurture their children.”

Ann Braude, director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and senior lecturer on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School, expressed similar sentiments. In an interview with the HPR, Braude said, “The Proclamation says that men and women are equals, but it’s not. If you look at the Presidency of the Church, the Quorum, the Seventy, it’s not equal.” According to LDS religious doctrine, only men can be ordained to the Priesthood, which offers the ability to hold the literal power and authority of God on earth. The Priesthood is required to legitimize all ordinances, like baptisms or marriages in an LDS temple, and only members of the Priesthood can hold most leadership positions in local congregations and regional areas. The all-male central leadership in Salt Lake City consists of the President of the Church or prophet, the First Presidency, and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Below these men are the all-male General Authority Seventies, who preside over large geographical areas; regional Stake Presidents; and local Bishops for each congregation. Braude says that excluding women from “the most important role in the church” because they are “unconstitutionally capable of fulfilling it by their very nature — that is not equality.”

In an interview with the HPR, a professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, Taylor Petrey, agreed with Braude, postulating that the primary impediment to women’s equality in the LDS community “is the prohibition of women from being ordained to the priesthood, which prevents them from holding certain offices of authority.” It is for this reason that Kate Kelly founded Ordain Women, an organization that advocates for Mormon women to have the ability to be given the Priesthood. Kelly said in an interview with the HPR that it is important to combat the “idea that only men should hold positions of power” because that is a “dangerous, toxic mentality for those in leadership positions to have.” There are a few notable local and Church-wide presidencies for women, but these are primarily for all-female organizations and young children. This male leadership structure, as well as the doctrine that a woman’s primary purpose is to “strengthen home and family,” reinforce the idea that the normative female identity is a wife and mother.

And this notion is fundamental to how LDS culture and community relations have formed. In an interview with the HPR, Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Richard Parker said that religion “provides a bridge between [individual] identity and community as young people grow” and thus actively “reinforces the normative ideas of what women [and men] are expected to do, and be, and think” — what Petrey referred to as “training grounds for gender roles outside the community.”

Given these strong cultural and community expectations, it should not come as a surprise that relatively few LDS females have public roles. Parker posited that the Church’s doctrines

are “retrograde in that they structurally seek to deny women’s ability to explore potential within themselves.” LDS women are not pushed to achieve their full leadership, professional, and academic potential, which “may explain [a] leadership gap between LDS women and men,” according to Petrey. Kelly also relayed that “Utah is consistently ranked the worst state in the U.S. for women ... it has the largest wage gap, the fewest women on boards of directors, the fewest women in politics, the lowest college graduation rate, and in almost every measurable category, women have fared worse in a place where 93 percent of the legislature is Mormon.” Thus Kelly and Braude both assert that Utah’s gender-equity underperformance is directly tied to the current LDS structure and predominant culture.

SHATTERED GLASS I did not grow up in Utah. Nevertheless, I was a part of a “Ward,” or local congregation of about 150 active members, in the Midwest. My community was incredibly tight-knit. I constantly received messaging about my normative place in society from this group, growing up with a stay-at-home mother myself and only a scattering of working female role models. My community made it clear that my place was not in the workforce, nor in leadership. Even the attainment of higher education was not considered as an end in itself, nor a means of pure self-betterment: The aquisition of knowledge was to teach my children and to provide for my family if my husband was somehow incapacitated.

LDS women have the opportunity to shatter the glass box and redefine female leadership, strength, and ambition. LDS women can shift the narrative, catalyzing and inspiring meaningful action among our peers. Recognizing that not every woman takes the same path is the first step in realizing the full potential of women and ultimately achieving greater equality in the Church. Motherhood, the pursuit of personal ambition, and participation in community leadership are not mutually exclusive.

Braude cautioned that, if nothing changes, the Church risks loosing a “whole generation of young women.” According to a 2016 survey of active LDS members, 60 percent of millennials do not approve of the status of women in the Church. Petrey further cited recent survey data that showed “that LDS women with higher educations tend to leave the church at higher rates, while the inverse is true for LDS men” — perhaps because women do not appreciate their low status within the Church or its male-dominated leadership.

Braude believes that LDS officials recognize this pressing reality and are working to make changes. In the past decade, the LDS Church has changed the age for female missionary service to 19, changed key terminology in essential rituals, and allowed women to act as witnesses to baptisms. However, more strong female role models must emerge within the LDS community and demonstrate that women have more than one correct path.

A divine role as a mother should be revered, but not preclude the realization of her full academic, physical, and individual potential. Mormon women world-wide have the potential to put the “more” in “Mormon” — to make history, one shattered box at a time. 

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THE RISE OF THE PYNK VOTE Kate Gundersen

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hen asked whether there was a candidate in the Democratic primary race that she particularly liked, Devin Hoffman, a freshman at Boston College, told the HPR, “Honestly, I’ve been a little disappointed by all of them.” Grace Stewart, a freshman at Providence College, said that she “did[n’t] love any of them.” Jayna Robatham, a freshman at Bowdoin College, said she supported Beto O’Rourke, but will now support “whichever candidate ends up winning the [Democratic] nomination.” All three disclosed that they did not support President Trump.

As the 2020 presidential race gets underway, new polls stream out to the public at a daily pace. While we are still a year out from November 3, 2020, these preliminary polls serve to illustrate current national sentiments and inform the candidates about the issues that matter to the American public. However, young women such as Hoffman, Stewart, and Robatham represent a group largely ignored by mainstream polling: female voters aged 18 to 24, members of what I define as the Pynk Vote.

This must change: Both the country as a whole and those in power must hear and evaluate the opinions of those that make up the Pynk Vote. The Pew Research Center found that 2020 will mark the first time that millennials will constitute a larger portion of the electorate than baby boomers, presenting an opportunity for the Pynk Voters to flex their political muscles — that is, if they decide to show up.

THE YOUTH AND FEMALE VOTE IN THE UNITED STATES A large number of Americans do not exercise their right to vote; voter turnout among the voting age population has fallen somewhere between 59.5 percent and 63.8 percent over the last 20 years. Eighteen-to-24-year-olds voted at an even lower rate: Their highest turnout rate in these years — 48.5 percent — fell well short of the general population’s lowest, with a general trend of decreasing turnout between 2000 and 2016. As a result of this low turnout, young people’s voices are going unheard in elections.

However, this trend has started to change. According to the

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U.S. Census Bureau, turnout among 18-to-24-year-olds essentially doubled between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections. Significantly, even though 2018 saw the highest midterm turnout rate since 1966, youth turnout increased much more than the turnout rate as a whole. Additionally, turnout rates of young women and men differed; in 2018, women in the 18-to-24-year-old cohort voted by almost 6 percentage points more than men of the same age. In 2014, that gap was only two percentage points, indicating that young women increased their turnout more than young men between 2014 and 2018.

This data reflects an important trend: The young vote, especially the Pynk Vote, is becoming more active and thus more impactful. Looking into the future, top pollsters believe that this activity will continue into the 2020 election. John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, told the HPR that he is “very optimistic that [the nation] ... will likely crack the 50 percent threshold” of young voter turnout in 2020.

Bolstering this assertion, the extensive Spring 2019 Harvard IOP Youth Poll found that the number of young Americans aged 18 to 29 likely to vote in their party’s primary or caucus rose 7 percentage points in 2019, reaching 43 percent; turnout in the general election will likely be higher, since primary elections typically attract only the most committed voters. Looking at the big picture, “interest in voting in the 2020 election is 18 months ahead,” Peter Hart, founder of the polling firm Hart Research, told the HPR. “The stakes are so high, people care so much, the interest is way up.” The point? The Pynk Vote will show up.

WHAT IS BEHIND THIS PYNK RUSH? This trend of increasing youth participation makes sense given that young people have created impactful social movements worldwide, with young female leaders specifically galvanizing the Pynk voice. The rise of movements such as March for Our Lives and of young leaders like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg attests to the fact that young women have begun to assert their dominance and raise their voices over the last five years. At the Thanksgiving dinner of American politics, young

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Americans refuse to sit any longer at the kids’ table, and now demand to sit with the adults, where the issues that affect their lives are discussed in hushed tones. “We’re showing up because we are angry and we want people to make changes so that we can lead the lives we want to lead,” Kenyatta Thomas, co-president of the Women’s March Youth Program, told the HPR. “[As] young women, we’re beginning to realize the power that we have,” she concluded.

Furthermore, women have led the charge in changing the political and social landscape of the United States since the 2016 election. The #MeToo movement has swept the nation and allowed women to share the abuse and discrimination they have suffered, shedding light on a massive problem in the country.

One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, three million women attended the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, which the movement notes was “the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.” The Brookings Institute deemed 2018 the “Year of the Woman,” as women won 106 seats in the House and Senate. Hart presented the bottom line for these phenomena, saying that “women feel as though their voice and their stake in society is that much greater than it used to be” on issues ranging from “the right to choose to the #MeToo movement.” It is this increase in stakes that is leading to increased participation amongst the Pynk Voters.

WHAT ARE THE STAKES? In order to make predictions about who the Pynk Vote might turn out for, it is crucial to evaluate those stakes and determine what these young women care about.

The Spring 2019 Harvard IOP Poll found that the youth surveyed cared most about the moral direction of the country — 61 percent — gun violence — 58 percent — and climate change — 46 percent. Given that the percentage of people who felt these issues were important grew from 2015 to 2019, it is clear that these concerns have moved to the forefront of young voters’ minds. Further, Della Volpe said that “views related to guns were most predictive of whether or not someone was going to turnout in the 2018 midterm elections,” and that youth “see the issues of climate and gun violence … as frankly matters of life or death.” Since young voters take these issues so seriously, their civic engagement is likely rising as a result.

Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, director of community engagement for the Women’s March, has other insights thanks to a survey that the Women’s March conducted among its members.

According to that survey, “immigration rights, climate change, and reproductive justice” impacted Women’s March members the most and “would be driving them to the polls in 2020,” she explained to the HPR. Anusha Chinthalapale, the other Women’s March Youth Program co-president, added that “reproductive justice is not even a partisan issue, it’s about who’s going to … help [women] to maintain those rights.” Chinthalapale continued that gun violence and racial equity also topped the priority lists of the young women she had spoken to. Della Volpe noted that when women vote, they also “[take] the identity of others, often times more marginalized people within society” into consideration, possibly underscoring the notion that many of the issues that young women care about do not only affect themselves, but many others in society. Thus, there are many issues that are important to young women; however, the ones

noted thus far are those which any candidate they support for 2020 will have to get behind.

MOVING FORWARD: THE PYNK VOTE IN 2020 Given the issues that young millennial women care about, they will likely affiliate with the Democratic Party. The current administration has not made progress on issues such as climate change, gun violence, or reproductive rights, while the Democrats have placed such issues at the core of their campaigns.

“I think that young women recognize that [Democrats] have a track record in achieving equity for all,” Thomas said to further explain young women’s support for the Party. Bolstering this assertion, a 2018 Pew Research study found that millennials lean Democratic; on this point Hart added that “if the share of the total electorate that young people make increases, it’s, one, great for democracy, and, two, it’s going to be great for the Democratic Party.” More generally, Pew also found that women lean Democratic, especially when compared to men. As a result, the Pynk Vote likely leans Democratic, perhaps by even larger margins than women or young people by themselves.

Clearly, young women are ready to raise their voices in the next election, compelling the current Democratic candidates to seek out their voices and their votes. In terms of specific candidates the Pynk Voters are currently supporting, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that Warren, Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg lead the Democratic polls within the female and youth demographics nationally. Warren in particular gained over 30 percentage points of support in both demographics. Thus, in the Venn diagram of youth and femininity that is the Pynk Vote, Warren seems to be the most popular candidate amongst the cohort today; however, until polls start looking at the Pynk Vote explicitly, that cannot be said definitively.

It is also important to evaluate how these candidates would fare against President Trump in the general election. An October 23 CNN/SSRS poll found that when looking at the youth — 18-to-34-year-olds — and female votes separately, Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg would all beat Trump by at least 25 points if the general election were to take place today. Once again, while the Pynk Vote was not evaluated, due to the similarity of responses between the young and female respondents in this poll, it can be assumed that Pynk Voters feel the same.

While these polls are compelling, it is crucial to remember that the nation is still a year out from election night 2020, and that in today’s political climate, a year might as well be a millenium. On this topic, Hart told the HPR that in the primaries, “people’s attitudes are exceptionally fluid … it’s a discovery process.” However, in the general election, changing across partisan borders is “a big deal.” To an extent, this analysis makes the first data set less salient than the second data set, which shows Trump losing to any leading Democratic candidate among the Pynk Voters.

Nevertheless, no matter how young women vote in 2020, it is imperative to recognize that they have been laying the groundwork to raise their voices in the next election. As Jennifer Mandelblatt, the Women’s March youth coordinator, told the HPR, “Where we are today is because of the young people who have been leading.” Now, all they have to do is continue. 

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Chloe Levine

THE ACADEMIC EDGE

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ven if Hari Parameswaran, captain of the 2018-2019 Beavercreek High School Quiz Bowl team, had not known who the prime minister of New Zealand was — Jacinda Ardern — he would have still led his sunglasses-clad trivia squad to a soaring victory at the High School National Championship Tournament in May. “We were expecting to do well, but none of us expected to … close it out,” Parameswaran, now a first-year at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the HPR. As much as he achieved personally with the win, it was an even greater milestone for the community: Two of Beavercreek’s four players were women, making their team the first ever HSNCT winner with gender parity.

The community’s response to Beavercreek’s victory revealed elements of Quiz Bowl culture that might explain why this landmark accomplishment only happened this year. As current junior Abby Cohen, Beavercreek’s second-highest scoring player, remembered, the tournament’s Instagram almost immediately bore comments delegitimizing her role in the victory because she answered fewer questions than Parameswaran. “They didn’t say a thing about our third scorer [out of four], who was a male, whom I outscored,” Cohen told the HPR. These comments are the most recent additions to a litany of attacks on elite female Quiz Bowl players. The last time a girl played for a national champion team, in 2017, comments on a Periscope live stream ridiculed both her appearance and her incorrect answers.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Quiz Bowl has difficulty attracting and retaining female and nonbinary players. Many other high school academic competitions, from speech and debate to Model U.N., suffer from similar gender-based inequity.

When students of some gender identities do not feel comfortable participating or fully engaging in these competitions, those students lose access to their much-lauded pedagogical benefits — and the boost they provide to many college applications. As such, this imbalance is not just an inconvenience but an issue of educational access.

THE VALUE OF ACADEMIC COMPETITIONS Even at schools with rigorous academic curricula, academic competitions stretch students in ways a classroom environment cannot. “I think it hits different parts of the brain,” commented Sarah Angelo, president of the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence, in an interview with the HPR. On a basic level, competitors are afforded some degree of agency in determining their own course of extracurricular study; no one uninterested in law need join Mock Trial in order to earn a high school diploma, for example. Further, in Quiz Bowl specifically, specialization allows players to focus on whichever topics appeal to them most.

“It makes learning fun, right?” added Parameswaran.

Beyond that element of choice, competitions also test for different skills than classroom environments, allowing students

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whose strengths are not always celebrated to shine. Model U.N. emphasizes strategic thinking. Debate emphasizes public speaking. Quiz Bowl emphasizes expansive, long-term memorization; it is impossible to cram for a tournament encompassing the entire academic canon the way students can cram for a unit exam. And all of them simply change the forum for intellectual engagement, which can prove liberating. “A lot of students struggle with the traditional talking out loud in a classroom full of people,” Megha Prasad, a first-year debater at American University and co-founder of the Girls in Quiz Bowl Committee, remarked to the HPR. “Being able to speak in a smaller setting is helpful.”

Such activities also develop new skills in students. According to a Forbes article, the communication and research skills necessary for debate, not to mention the tenacity and pressure it develops, are “excellent predictors of success,” and thus good reason to hire former debaters. Mock Trial helped Davis TylerDudley, a head delegate for the Harvard intercollegiate Model U.N. team, learn how to craft convincing arguments. “[That] has influenced how I talk to people, how I deal with people, how I negotiate with people even today in my life,” he explained to the HPR. The knowledge accrued through Quiz Bowl has the potential to broaden players’ perspectives. “I used to be a bit judgmental,” admitted Parameswaran, “but now I can sit down and talk with people … I can understand where they’re coming from.”

These skills are then instrumental in competitors’ approaches to the college admissions process. Tyler-Dudley noted his sales pitch to fellow high-schoolers for academic competitions: “It will make you a better candidate.” He is certainly a data point in that pitch’s favor; Mock Trial clearly helped him get into Harvard. “It made me a much more effective communicator in the interviews … I had become more skilled in the art of presenting yourself a certain way, convincing people of a certain point, and that point for me was ‘I should be admitted to this college,’” he reflected.

On a more statistical level, these competitions are widely acknowledged to be strong additions to an applicant’s extracurricular list in the eyes of admissions officers. Former Yale professor Minh A. Luong wrote in PBS that “college admissions directors are relying less on grade point averages and standardized test scores, and are relying more on success in academically related extracurricular activities” due to the “distorting” effects of grade inflation and standardized test prep. To whatever extent standardized test scores do still inform admissions, though, the argumentative skills associated especially with debate map neatly to the format of the new SAT, and on average, high school debaters perform better than their non-debater counterparts on each ACT section.

Luong also argues that admitting competitors makes financial sense, as conventional wisdom suggests that their acquired skills will fuel successful careers which enable substantial alumni

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donations. Due to the currency academic competitions thus hold with admissions offices, students need not waste precious application space outlining them in order to make their accomplishments understood, while success within a school-specific club might hold less water without significant explanation. All these factors conspire to make such competitions helpful in earning critical scholarships as well.

A dangerous result of these benefits, however, is that some students stay on teams they find unfulfilling or even threatening in order to gain admission to top colleges and universities.

Luong’s article emphasizes the importance of high schoolers picking their activities young and sticking to them. Such advice from experts now permeates the public consciousness for college-minded students. “I was at a point my junior year where I wanted to quit both Quiz Bowl and debate,” Prasad confessed. “[Something] which I think a lot of girls in particular experience is you start an activity, and then it becomes really toxic for you, but you’re like, ‘Well, if I quit now, I’m kind of screwed for college.’”

UNDERREPRESENTED GENDERS Such activities remain male-dominated precisely because the few female competitors in them often feel trapped in them, yet many pieces of the puzzle are still unknown. Players, coaches, administrators, and observers alike generally accept underrepresentation of other gender identities as a truism, but though personal testimonies abound, academic research into the problem is shockingly scant.

As such, efforts to address inequities are often trial and error, informed by the personal experiences of their architects.

For example, Cohen’s own frustration about trivia’s focus on male achievements influenced her assertion that ATHENA, a Quiz Bowl tournament Prasad founded to focus on women’s accomplishments and interests, does important work to make the activity more welcoming. She remembered a list of notable authors she was given to study: “[Jhumpa] Lahiri was on it, Flannery O’Connor was on it, Anne Bradstreet was on it. And I just remember thinking, you know, ‘Is that it? Is that everybody?’”

Cohen hopes that broadening the canon will increase equity in Quiz Bowl and ease the pressure she feels as a nationally competitive player: “I feel like I have to do better than a male teammate would because … if I don’t, then I’m letting down my entire gender,” she explained. Such sentiments are hardly new.

In a 2012 Slate article, former Quiz Bowl player Lauren O’Neal wrote, “When women mess up, it reflects badly on their entire gender.” This eerily similar language starkly illustrates just how little progress toward inclusivity Quiz Bowl has made, despite Beavercreek’s success.

Unique gender-based problems plague high school debate, too. Female and nonbinary students report — often anonymously, for fear of backlash — that judges allow misogynistic slurs from their male opponents, factor their appearances into their scores, and apply a double standard. “Judges would critique you for being bitchy or argumentative when you were literally just doing the same thing as male debaters,” Prasad recalled. Unequally distributed attention from coaches and a lack of diversity among tournament judges only make matters worse.

Even as Model U.N. seems to maintain something closer to gender parity, students of marginalized genders still face chal-

lenges. As with debate, some competitors claim that judges take female delegates’ fashion and perceived attractiveness into account when scoring them. More subtly, gender affects which committees students join: more boys on International Security, more girls in Human Rights. Some female delegates also describe peers who take their arguments and stances less seriously than those of their male counterparts.

No competition seems devoid of inequity. Thus, in Prasad’s words, “female novice retention becomes hard.” She elaborated, “Okay, if I’m going to spend the resources to go to this tournament for a weekend, I’m not going to get that much sleep, I’m probably going to be depressed or anxious for most of it because of the atmosphere — it just makes it really discouraging to continue to compete.” The problem then becomes self-perpetuating: Students of underrepresented genders leave academic competitions because they do not find role models of their identity, so they never have the chance to become such role models. In Cohen’s eyes, representation is a necessary first step to further change. “The number one thing is we have to keep [girls] involved,” she insisted.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS Making competitors of underrepresented genders more visible in competition communities helps break these old patterns.

“We have a responsibility to open those channels of communication and help underrepresented players see themselves in older players and know that they can do this,” explained Angelo regarding her work with the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence. To that end, PACE is developing a mentorship program which will pair younger female and nonbinary Quiz Bowl players with competition veterans. Prasad saw evidence for success in the recent example of PACE’s efforts to publicize the women behind ATHENA. “That also probably helped some girls out who may have been thinking of quitting but then were also like, ‘Oh, maybe there is a community of strong … women that I can stick around with,” she suggested.

Prasad also commended National Academic Quiz Tournaments and collegiate debate organizations for their appointment of equity officers to staff tournaments as resources for any players suffering from bias, discrimination, or harassment, and argued that such officers should be made more present for high school competitors. In her view, because younger players are more impressionable, they are more prone to internalizing the prejudice they experience. “I don’t understand why they haven’t done it,” she remarked. “Why did this start in college [debate] where people are more self-actualized, and not in high school when this discrimination actually hurts more?”

Ultimately, though, people cannot possibly know how best to address this inequity without adequate attention from researchers and administrators. Activists within high school academic competitions have made impressive strides, but with more information to propel those efforts, gains might be less few and far between. “It really heartens me to see how far things have come, seeing things like [a] Women in Quiz Bowl panel that happened at [nationals] last year … I think back to my day, and I’m like, ‘Well if we’d have had that, who would have been on it?’” reflected Angelo. “But I think it’s important to remember … we can’t be satisfied with where we are. We have to keep going.” 

WINTER 2019 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 11

CAMPUS

Mather Is a Healthy House.

Are Others?

Winona Guo

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hen Najya Williams ’20 got to Dunster House, she felt she had hit a wall.

“Here I am, someone who thrived in high school, juggling a lot of different pressures. Here I am, at a place where I am deemed one of the best in the world and country,” she said.

“And I can’t handle it. What does that say about me? How are people looking at me? I’m embarrassed to ask for help, ashamed to say that I’m struggling. Not only the expectations I felt were being placed on me externally, but also the expectations that I set for myself were just crushing.”

According to Williams, there has not been a “large concerted effort” to talk about mental health in Dunster. At the time, House administrators had already emailed with offers of support. Tutors continued to host weekly study breaks.

Resources existed, but Williams still described feeling that her support system had cut in half between her first and second years. “And I’m still supposed to smile and show up,” she said.

Meanwhile, at neighboring Mather House this past October, faculty deans Amala and L. Mahadevan declared mental health their first priority — launching, among other initiatives, weekly visits from Counseling and Mental Health Services, extensive programming for a second annual Mental Health and Well-being Week, and other responses to a comprehensive house-wide survey. When the HPR asked Williams how these efforts would have impacted her experience, she said, “I definitely feel like I wouldn’t have felt as alone.”

The 12 Houses are the communities in which most Harvard College sophomores, juniors, and seniors live. Purportedly, the randomized housing assignment each student receives should not determine the quality of their Harvard experience. However, on student issues as important as mental health, the Houses are unequal; being assigned to Dunster or Mather or any other House could significantly impact a student’s well-being. It is time for all of our House leaders to choose to step up — and if they do not, Harvard’s administration should require them to change.

HARVARD’S MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS For many students, mental health is a clinical matter, and the stakes are high. Globally, depression is the leading cause of disability. In the United States, where suicide is the second leading cause of death among students, 39 percent of college students experience a significant mental health issue and two thirds of students with anxiety or depression do not seek treatment. Wil-

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liams’ feeling also is not uncommon at Harvard. “[People] worry that who they are — as people, as academicians — don’t actually rise to the honor that they have been given,” Ramona Dvorak, a psychiatrist in behavioral health at Harvard University Health Services, explained to the HPR. “We see a fair amount of imposter syndrome … and then that becomes problematic with their psychological state.”

For what Dvorak termed a “crisis,” Harvard is not treating it like one. According to Dvorak, there is a “devastating stigma that prevents many people from accessing the help that they need.”

The association of therapy with being “crazy,” a fear that medication will turn students “into another person, a zombie,” the perception that depression is a matter of “moral failing” rather than “a serious mind-body illness,” and the treatment of mental health as an issue separate from our cultural and political experiences all impede student access to mental health care. “That [stigma] couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Dvorak said.

Back at Dunster House, identity matters, too. “My experience is not isolated from my identity as a Black woman on this campus. The expectations are very different,” Williams said.

“One person who has been so instrumental for me is one of my pre-med tutors. She is a Black woman, and being able to talk to her ... [with] that connection, I don’t feel as alone.”

QUESTIONING THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE HOUSES As co-chair of the Office of the Provost’s task force on mental health, sociology professor Mario Small was struck by one initial finding: “There’s a lot of heterogeneity across the University,” he told the HPR. “We have some units doing things that work for their unit, and that’s wonderful for students there, but we still don’t know what to do for students everywhere.”

At Harvard College, heterogeneity is significant among the Houses, where students congregate not only to sleep, but also to eat, study, and socialize. “With mental health, we saw last semester the ripple effects of the Winthrop situation across the House and broader community,” said Sanika Mahajan ’21, referring to months of student protest against Ronald Sullivan’s leadership as Winthrop House faculty dean. Mahajan is chair of the Undergraduate Council’s Committee on Health, Safety, and Wellness. “We can’t ignore that the different Houses provide students with vastly different support systems.”

Why do these differences exist? According to Dean of Students Katherine O’Dair, the onus is on the faculty deans.

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“Within the Houses, the faculty deans set the tone and priorities for the year within the House,” she said in an interview with the HPR. “Each House has the autonomy to focus on specific issues within their community.” This structure is unlike the first-year residential communities — 17 dorms divided into four Yards that are each directed by a resident dean within the First-Year Experience Office. The FYE falls within the purview of the Dean of Students Office; House faculty deans do not. Instead, issues currently centralized across the Houses include risk management protocols, protocols for health and safety response, and annual training for tutors and specialty roles, according to O’Dair.

This administrative structure does not reflect the recognition that faculty leadership beyond the classroom requires an understanding of student life beyond academics. “The deans are in a uniquely positioned place where they encounter daily the experiences of their students, and also understand that the academic culture is set by faculty,” said Mahajan. “That’s a very important reason for us to be thinking critically about faculty and who is hired at the House, including the role of non-resident or resident tutors in that system.”

Led by the faculty deans, other House roles which directly affect mental health also retain a relatively high degree of autonomy. As Nina Bryce from Mather House said, her role — wellness tutor — “is really about what that individual is knowledgeable about and interested in … Super-scripted roles would be very limiting, but it’s also limiting when some people have just one angle of wellness, and don’t take a more holistic stance.”

Bryce proposed increased quality control, which she said would balance existing creativity with more standardization across the Houses.

MATHER HOUSE: A CASE STUDY “At the end of our first year [as faculty deans], we wanted to ask what we can do to make the House a home,” said L. Mahadevan, sitting next to Amala Mahadevan on the floor of their Mather residence during an interview with the HPR. “Two obvious things were to first try improving our inner lives, and second, our outer lives.”

With a goal in place, the Mahadevans sought data about their community’s current state of well-being. “CAMHS had done a survey just prior,” said Amala Mahadevan, “but we felt it didn’t address a lot of the things we were looking for. A House survey would allow us to create actionable items within the House.”

The next step: mobilizing a team that included over a dozen student leaders, Mather House Resident Dean Luke Leafgren, administrators, tutors, CAMHS clinicians for consultations, and resident scholar Anas El Turabi, whose academic background helped establish “very good survey principles,” according to Amala Mahadevan. After significant outreach to build participation, the anonymous 2018 survey received a 72 percent response rate. Among other results, 63 percent of those students reported that emotional well-being negatively impacted their ability to enjoy college life, and 85.5 percent said they do not get enough sleep. The Mahadevans believed this called for urgent change.

Part of Mather’s response was an annual Mental Health and Well-being Week, first conducted over five days in 2018, then expanded to seven this past October. Daily themes included “Eat,” “Sleep,” “Move,” and “Connect,” while 15 total events ranged from Dogs of Mather office hours to gratitude letter writing to

a “Be-In,” which offered “a chance to be yourself, be seen, be heard, and be real,” according to the Mahadevans’ October 13 email. Daily update emails included, often, a personal anecdote from Leafgren. “Dance like no one’s watching!” Leafgren wrote on “Create,” Day six. “It makes me sad the number of times I didn’t dance because I didn’t know the moves to do it ‘right’! If that’s something you can relate to, give me a fist bump sometime.”

Levity aside, Bryce cautioned against misunderstanding what wellness means to Mather. “Wellness is very trendy right now, but in a way that’s kind of cheapened or commodified,” she said, “like this image of a white lady in yoga pants with a kale smoothie. That’s a really damaging kind of archetype, because I think every human being has the birthright to access deep wellbeing and connect with their bodies, hearts, and minds in more substantive ways.”

Beyond that week, Mather is currently the only House to bring a CAMHS clinician onsite weekly for no-appointment “Let’s Talk” meetings with students. The survey found that sophomores struggle with mental health more than juniors or seniors, so House leaders increased annual sophomore and incoming-sophomore programming. In the Mather lobby, alongside profiles of well-known figures who have faced challenges, a large green poster offers student responses to the question, “How do you take care of your mental health?” Tutors also pointed to hiring processes in which mental health is explicitly valued and check-in practices which actively prioritize each student’s well-being as crucial components of Mather’s proactive mental health culture. As of now, students like student mental health liaison Yashaar Hafizka ’20 call Mather “a real role model among all the Houses,” though in the future, Bryce hopes to further institutionalize events like the Be-In beyond Mather too. “When I say institutionalized, I mean formalize and embed in ways that aren’t just relying on individual thoughtful, caring people to make care happen,” she explained. The Mahadevans plan to measure their impact in a few years with a second House-wide survey.

On the 2018 survey, 78 percent of students “somewhat agreed” or “strongly agreed” that Mather was a supportive environment for students’ mental health and wellbeing. “Mather may be a tired house, but it’s a happy house,” said L. Mahadevan.

Now a senior, Williams told the HPR that things have changed since her sophomore year. “I feel like I’m in such a great space,” she said. “I’m so happy that I can look back on my experiences and be like, yes, I feel like I have the tools that I need in order to navigate systems that would have made me crumble two years ago. It’s taken a lot of conversations with trusted people in my life who were pushing me to prioritize myself. It definitely came with community support.”

The House is a golden opportunity for the “community support” that Williams describes. Without diminishing the responsibility of central administration or undermining the pursuit of other solutions, mental health care needs to meet students where they are — which, for Harvard College students, is where they live. If student mental health remains a widespread concern, House communities significantly impact that health, and faculty deans lead those communities, then among the many stakeholders who must address this crisis on campus, we should look to our faculty deans to take the lead within each House. 

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CAMPUS

Looking for Legitimacy JD Deal

14 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2019

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S

hopping week (n): a free-for-all course selection perquisite simultaneously enjoyed and reviled by Harvard students that has come under recent review by the Harvard faculty.

In March 2018, the Harvard faculty started discussions to change from shopping week to a preregistration structure. Faculty members say that the term “shopping” itself inspires consumerist behavior, that they are not sure how many students to expect in class, and that teaching fellows experience unpredictable assignment patterns. A committee was established to further investigate alternatives to course registration at Harvard.

Students responded strongly to these proposed changes: In October 2018, the Harvard Undergraduate Council, dedicated to representing and supporting the Harvard College undergraduate student population, conducted a survey to collect data on student opinions about shopping week. The results were striking, garnering 1,883 student responses and an overwhelming show of support for shopping week. Around the same time, Amanda Claybaugh announced that the committee would host three listening sessions throughout October. In December, Claybaugh questioned her understanding of the issue, now unsure if the committee would vote to get rid of shopping week.

This is an example of student agency at its finest. While there is no set definition for student agency, experts generally agree that the term refers to students setting and initiating progress toward goals. In the case of shopping week, the UC was able to rally a considerable student response to the faculty’s proposal to change registration by speaking out in support of the current system. Almost one third of students responded to the survey put out by the Undergraduate Council, and students provided anecdotes at the listening sessions. Claybaugh’s initial proposal would have been implemented in the fall of 2020, but has now been postponed until 2022.

When student agency is done right, the impact can be broad and influential. This is an issue that affects all students directly, and many students had strong feelings about it. However, this is not true for all student movements on campus, and many struggle to be heard by the administration. Further, administrators find it hard to make time to listen to everyone who needs their attention. The UC functions as an intermediary between students and administrators, and given its role in the shopping week controversy, is important for student agency on campus.

Harvard administrators need to develop systems that encourage more student agency, and the UC can play a vital role in this process.

REPRESENTATION IN PRACTICE “Harvard is a very disorganized place,” said Sruthi Palaniappan, president of the Harvard UC, in an interview with the HPR. “It’s such a fragmented institution where you might not always know who to go to with what or who controls what, and I think that from a student perspective, it can be especially challenging to understand who the key decision makers are.”

It is no secret that Harvard is a bureaucratic institution.

In an earlier HPR article, “Bureaucracy Meets Controversy,” Jacob Blair explored the implications of this complex system for students trying to navigate conversations with the administration. Palaniappan echoed the article’s concerns about students’ widespread confusion over which administrators they should be talking to.

“Things are done very slowly and meticulously, and sometimes I understand it; other times it just seems frustrating because you don’t get any response. They keep redirecting you to other people who supposedly control these areas, but they redirect you to somewhere else. It’s a chase. It’s a bureaucratic place to navigate.”

Palaniappan finds it especially difficult for members of the UC to enact change that will impact students in the long term.

She acknowledged that students and administrators have a relationship that is on a four-year timer, so it can be hard to push for meaningful change in that time. She said that the UC struggles with institutional memory, and that it is hard to inform newly elected representatives about past conversations with the administration. However, Palaniappan said that “admin will often cite conversations that happened five years ago as reason for not being able to push something forth now.”

Palaniappan said that students do not have the structures in place to pass on information between student generations.

Institutional memory is an issue for almost all student groups, but especially damages student government. Members of the UC build relationships with administrators directly which, because of committee shuffling and high turnover rates, can be shortlived. The result is that representatives may repeat meetings on topics that administrators have already had conversations about with a previous student.

The UC has also struggled to be viewed as a legitimate voice for the student body. “[Students] might believe that certain people in the UC were elected with only one vote, or whatever it might be, that doesn’t help the case of the organization as being representative of the entire student body,” recounted Palaniappan.

However, she also said that “in order for the UC to be a very legitimate body, both students and admin need to start taking the UC more legitimately, because they reinforce each other … Students need to treat the UC as the legitimate body that it is, because otherwise we’re unable to advocate for things that groups come to us about, because students haven’t been a part of lending us this type of legitimacy.”

In order for the UC to obtain legitimacy, the student body must also leverage the organization’s agency. For the UC to make change on campus, a greater number of students have to believe in its ability to do so. The abolition of shopping week was postponed until 2022 in part because a large number of students participated in the UC’s survey, as well as the Harvard-sponsored listening sessions. The shopping week controversy modeled what UC and administrative collaboration could potentially look like, yet also highlighted the existing shortcomings of current administrative practices.

AN ADMINISTRATIVE PERSPECTIVE The Harvard College administration has often had a hard time addressing the issues that students face. Students often assume that the administration and faculty act in their own interest, but in reality students are at the forethought of every decision. In an interview with the HPR, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that “when you look at the most contentious issues that come before the faculty, it’s often arguments about what’s best for students.”

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Claybaugh also described the structure of Harvard’s administration, putting President Bacow at the top and then branching off to the deans of Harvard College, who each oversee different responsibilities for the College. Claybaugh said that due to this model, “there is no person in this system who has the final power. It can be confusing trying to figure out who has the leverage.” This echoes Palaniappan’s point that it can be hard to navigate Harvard’s bureaucratic structure. Moreover, in addition to delegation among the College deans, responsibilities are also distributed to student-faculty committees.

Students sit on many of the committees at the College, including the Standing Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Education Policy Committee. The most important issues at the College are delegated to these committees, which research and propose solutions. However, Claybaugh noted that “it takes a year to get [an issue] through one of these committees.” The slowness of the committees is intentional, and Claybaugh described it as a “mixed blessing,” noting that it “enables deliberation” because “you can’t immediately change things.”

But another side effect of this slow-moving governance process is that students feel like they are being excluded from the process. Claybaugh noted that because the administration takes longer to make decisions than it takes students to graduate, students feel as though they are not being consulted. She said that “a process will start while a student is here, will end when they graduate, and then affect a student who was not here when the process started.”

When it comes to presenting issues to the administration, Claybaugh sees a discrepancy between what the UC feels strongly about and what the student body feels strongly about.

She said that she was interested in hearing about more of these issues, and that she sent a survey at the start of the term, which “brought back a whole set of issues that are not being represented by the UC.” This mismatch is inherent to the design of the UC, which tends to attract students who gravitate towards government or activist work. Claybaugh mentioned that there are very few STEM concentrators on the UC, and that she would like to hear more about the changes these students want to institute.

Claybaugh also said that it can be hard to work on projects that the UC presents because administrators and UC representatives work during different seasons. “The UC is on a different schedule than we are. We do our planning and strategizing work during the breaks, but students are gone. What will happen is that new students [from the UC] will come in and say, ‘We have priorities.’ But the priorities that we’ve set came from earlier generations of UC reps.” This is especially true when it comes to projects that require funding from the administration. Administrators typically fill out their budgets during November when the UC changes leadership; when new representatives come back after winter break with fresh ideas, they find that the budget is already set.

There are institutional barriers and patterns that both the UC and the administration experience when it comes to improving the College. Because of this, students often feel like they are being ignored by the administration. The real dynamic, though, is more complex: The administration is working behind-thescenes to improve student life at the college, but its greatest challenge is keeping students in the loop.

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CONDITIONS FOR CHANGE So what can be done to streamline the process? How can students and faculty improve systems of communication so that student agency becomes part of the institutional process? In an interview with the HPR, Manja Klemencic, a lecturer and researcher of student politics in higher institutions at Harvard, outlined a few solutions.

Klemencic described a simple way for the administration to gauge the feelings and opinions of the student body — what she called “direct voice.” She said this would be similar to what administrators did for shopping week, which was posting a survey in Canvas — Harvard’s management system for course websites — for all undergraduate students to participate in.

While the idea itself is simple, Klemencic outlined certain conditions that are required for this method. “One [condition] is a simple question on a deliberated or expected policy change.

[Another is] a brief explanation of the issue at stake, not assuming the students will actually know what this issue is all about. And [then] ensuring that in due course, that students are informed of what happened to that particular decision, and how their input has been taken into consideration or not.”

Klemencic also noted that students should be a part of the process as well, and she said that “this is something that should be agreed together with the UC.” By involving the UC in every step of the process, administrators would work directly with students to develop the questions. However, she noted that this solution should be used as a complement to other methods, and should be used primarily to find out the opinion of the student body.

Klemencic noted that students do not have expertise on some topics, but not necessarily by their own fault. She said that “we [at Harvard] are lacking more transparency,” and noted that students are unable to fully form opinions without all of the available information. When students are left out of the conversation entirely, it does not make sense to blame them for being uninformed.

Finally, Klemencic said that the UC could serve as an “intermediary” between students and the administration. UC members have a better understanding of how Harvard is organized than regular students and can find the correct path to voice an issue. Using the UC to bring student issues to the administration cuts down on the time wasted by trying to find the right person to hear a specific issue. In this way, Klemencic said, the UC has a “special role” in administrative relationships.

While all of these solutions can serve to ease the issues experienced by both students and administrators, if Harvard is really going to experience change, it needs an engaged student body.

Without students who speak out and exert pressure, no one will want to fix the poor institutional memory within the UC or make the administration easier to navigate. To increase transparency at Harvard, the student body needs to be engaged and ready to share its opinions. At the very least, students need to legitimize the UC so that its representatives have the leverage they need to enact meaningful change at Harvard. Instead of attaching blame to one group or another, students can do more to achieve change by working together to reform Harvard’s ineffective systems for listening to student perspectives. 

The Ivy Pipeline Fatima Taj

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Law Review. In 2013, the publication decided to expand affirmative action policies to include gender in selecting the staff of editors. In 2016, it saw its most diverse class ever, with record-high percentages of students of color and women. The following year, the HLR inducted its first female-majority class, with 24 female editors and 22 male editors. The first black president of the Harvard Law Review, former President Barack Obama, was named 29 years ago. The first black woman to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review was named only two years ago, in 2017.

The diversity of the publication staff is particularly important to acknowledge, as it has boasted numerous notable alumni in its 133-year history, four of whom currently sit on the Supreme Court. Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Roberts, and Kagan all served as editors for the publication during their respective tenures at HLS. Ginsburg and Kagan are two of only four women to have ever served on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg was one of eight women at Harvard Law School during her time there, and was the first woman to ever serve as an editor on the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review.

The rising number of female and minority students serving on the HLR points to a positive trajectory in the court’s future, given that nearly all recent Supreme Court nominees have hailed from Ivy League schools where publications like the HLR have kickstarted the career route to their nomination.

IVY LEAGUE IMPLICATIONS? As the overseer of Congress, the body that keeps the executive and legislative branches of government in check, and the guarantor of citizens’ rights, the Supreme Court holds immense power, making monumental decisions that impact people’s everyday lives. The power of the Court heightens the importance of the Harvard-Yale Supreme Court takeover, in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. In the early 20th century, many justices appointed to the Supreme Court had not gone to elite institutions like Yale or Harvard; others had never even gone to law school.

Dan Glickman, a former congressman, elaborated on the adverse effects of the Court’s lack of educational diversity in a 2016 Bloomberg Government blog post, lamenting that justices hailing from Harvard and Yale, who lack the life experiences of most Americans, are making monumental decisions in the judicial sphere where these experiences are most relevant.

An ideal Supreme Court for the people should be filled with justices that represent Americans. This includes diversity of race, religion, gender, and socioeconomic background. But what is often overlooked in appointees is diversity in educational background and experience. This phenomenon is perfectly represented in Obama’s 2009 appointment of Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Though Sotomayor’s appointment was groundbreaking from the perspective of ethnic diversity, it did little to change the Court’s diversity in terms of educational background and experience. Obama made history by appointing a Latina woman to the Supreme Court, but in doing so, he cemented the Harvard-Yale monopoly of the Supreme Court. Most Americans are not affiliated with elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale, and the elite educational backgrounds of the justices distance them from the citizens they make decisions about.

Arguments centered around the push for educational diversity cite that it creates a disparity between the American public and the American judiciary, positioning people with homoge-

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neous experiences to make the most important decisions for this country. In an interview with the New York Times, Linda L. Addison, a partner at Fulbright & Jaworski, argued that educational diversity would be just as beneficial as racial, ethnic, gender, and religious diversity have been on the Supreme Court.

Jack Jaehyuk You, a second-year student at HLS, agreed with this argument in an interview with the HPR. “I don’t think the diversity within the school is enough to justify all of the justices having gone to these two schools only.” He mentioned that law school influences one’s understanding of the law and legal practice, and the Supreme Court justices’ shared training may be consequential. In essence, the lack of representation of other law schools on the Court can lead it to lack the diversity of thought that is so essential.

Richard Fallon, a long-time professor at Harvard Law School and an established legal scholar, holds a different perspective.

“There are so many criteria that would be possible to use to assess the richness of people’s life experience and the diversity of their life experience, and certainly where they go to law school is one,” Fallon told the HPR in an interview. He maintained that the law school that a justice attended, however, is only a small part of their larger life experience, and other factors carry a heavier weight, especially justices’ lives after law school, most notably their legal and public service careers.

“I think it may be significant that all, or nearly all, of the current justices’ primary experiences in public service has come in being judges rather than elected politicians, and it may have given them a slightly different perspective on the nature of the constitution and legal problems,” Fallon explained.

Indeed, many of the current Supreme Court justices spent their lives prior to appointment as judges at various levels. Most of these justices have held high, “elite” positions in law, namely in the U.S. Department of Justice, appellate courts, or established private practices rather than in positions working with law on the ground as, for example, a public defender. Although there are variations in “elite” law positions, a lot of these positions lack diversity and have limited interactions with Americans whom Supreme Court decisions affect most. The disconnect between Americans and these elite spheres of law amplify the consequences of justices coming from these backgrounds.

THE CYCLE OF ELITISM Some of the arguments that criticize the Harvard-Yale duopoly on the Court center around the “elitism” that is said to be perpetuated at HLS and YLS. Spencer Livingstone is a thirdyear law student at Harvard who disagrees with this perception of elitism. In an interview with the HPR, when asked whether the law school perpetuates an “elitist” atmosphere, Livingstone mentioned that the environment is as it would be at any other law school: “I don’t think necessarily so. To the extent that there is that [elitist] viewpoint, I find it more among the students than what is fostered among the professors.” He clarified: “It’s only a few, vocal students.”

Livingstone also discussed the streamlining effect that HLS and YLS have on their law students, pushing graduates to pursue careers that would provide for a worrisome group of justices on the Supreme Court. They tend to funnel graduates towards particular career paths: “Yale is unbelievably oriented towards

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producing academics and Harvard is unbelievably oriented towards producing corporate lawyers.”

Indeed for most HLS students, corporate law is the default path, and Yale produces a great number of academics. In 2015, only 14.5 percent of HLS graduates pursued public interest or government jobs post-graduation, positions that are typically pathways to jobs as public defenders or in non-profits. However, upwards of 65 percent of HLS graduates entered private practice, most of them in corporate law.

As Livingstone explained, “One of the effects of that is that you have justices who just come through those pathways, and don’t have experiences with criminal defendants … [or] of what law is like on the ground.” This streamlining effect resonates with Fallon’s point that postgraduate experiences substantially shape justices’ perceptions of the issues that come to the Court.

Only one member of the current Supreme Court has had experiences “on the ground” like those that Livingstone described. Ginsburg served as general counsel at the ACLU for a number of years, where she established the Women’s Rights Project. It is clear that this experience has shaped her years on the Supreme Court. Others on the Court, however, have followed more conventional paths, serving as circuit-court judges or holding positions in the DOJ. It is also important to recognize that almost 60 percent of the United States’ 175 circuit-court judges

once served as corporate law partners. Circuit Court judges, who serve at the level just below the Supreme Court, are most often considered as nominees to the Supreme Court.

EXPERIENCE MATTERS There are many aspects to take into consideration when a new justice is nominated to the Supreme Court. But while HLS and YLS have changed substantially over the years and are continually becoming more inclusive and diverse, it is imperative to recognize the career pipelines they promote in considering the consequences of their duopoly over the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the question of the lack of educational diversity is not just about how the institutions affected future justices while in law school, but also where they have taken, and how they have shaped, their students.

“All they know are books and abstract arguments … and thinking about things in terms of wealth rather than in terms of personal life,” Livingstone said, referring to the corporatelaw pipeline that Harvard and Yale perpetuate. “And that will increasingly bear itself out in decisions from the Court that just seem divorced from the realities of life.” 

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MYTH OF ALGAE BIOFUELS Joseph Winters

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n 2017, ExxonMobil announced an intriguing energy innovation: In partnership with biotech company Synthetic Genomics, it had used CRISPR gene-editing technology to produce a strain of algae that ExxonMobil claimed could pave the way toward a sustainable future and “reduce the risk of climate change.”

Ever since then, the company has used numerous social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — to share its “Miniature Science” video campaign, promoting the idea that algae could “fuel the trucks, ships and planes of tomorrow.”

Algae biofuels, a form of renewable energy that converts seagrowing algae into liquid fuel, have been intensely studied since the oil crisis of the 1970s. Since then, most fossil fuel companies have pursued algae biofuel research ventures, fiddling with production processes to make these sea vegetables a viable alternative energy. In recent years, however, many of these companies have abandoned their algae biofuel partnerships and projects due to the biological and economic limitations of this work. ExxonMobil

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remains largely alone in maintaining that a clean energy future powered by algae biofuels is just around the corner.

However, this is the same company that, not too long ago, was actively discrediting legitimate climate science. Since the 1960s, ExxonMobil has known from its in-house climate scientists and climate modeling program that climate change is human-caused and driven by fossil fuel use. It subsequently conducted one of the “most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign[s]” ever, on par with the tobacco industry’s campaign to discredit links between smoking and lung cancer. Considering this problematic history of obfuscating climate science, combined with the disappointing outcomes of algae biofuel research, ExxonMobil’s efforts to promote algae biofuels as a climate solution seem disingenuous — more of a public relations strategy than a serious effort to mitigate climate change.

THE LOST PROMISE OF ALGAE BIOFUEL INNOVATION Many industry projections for algae biofuels remain highly optimistic. The algae company Algatech, for instance, states that algae biofuels are “100 percent beneficial to the people and the planet.” This inflated enthusiasm has been prevalent since the early days of algae research.

Beginning with the launch of the U.S.-funded Aquatic Species Program in the 1970s, millions of dollars in public and private funds have been directed toward algae research. The Department of Energy has been a major driver of algae research since 2007, with significant funding also coming from the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The algae that has received the most attention is known as “microalgae” — mostly single-celled photosynthetic organisms that live on the water’s surface. Microalgae are one of the most abundant and important organisms on the planet. Numbering some 70,000 species, microalgae play an outsize role in balancing marine ecosystems and regulating global nutrient cycles.

To transform these tiny plants into fuel, researchers typically grow microalgae in large, open ponds or in enclosed photobioreactors, although at scale they would likely need to be grown in the open air. Scientists harvest the algae, break down the plants’ cell walls using a chemical solvent, and then extract their inner lipids, proteins, and carbs, which undergo a final processing step that turns them into biofuel. Most research funding has been shuttled into improving these processes, minimizing inputs and maximizing outputs with the aim of making large-scale algae production commercially viable.

ExxonMobil claimed to have made a big step toward this goal in 2017. Working with biotech company Synthetic Genomics — which ExxonMobil helped to found in 2009 — ExxonMobil announced it had created a genetically modified strain of microalgae that could produce double the lipids without significantly inhibiting growth. This innovation could theoretically allow the company to afford an enormous scale-up of its biofuel production. In fact, ExxonMobil was confident enough in its breakthrough that it claimed gene editing could allow the production of a startling 10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day by 2025.

Yet while ExxonMobil celebrates these supposed breakthroughs in genetic engineering, other energy companies have

long since given up on algae biofuels. By 2012, Shell had ended its algae biofuel research and development program, news had dried up of BP’s $10 million deal with bioscience firm Martek, and Chevron’s five-year partnership with the governmentfunded National Renewable Energy Laboratory had produced no significant breakthroughs. By early 2018, Chevron’s website had gone from promising that algae biofuel development was “still in the research stage” to openly admitting its work was unsuccessful. Algae companies around the world have also announced intentions to “shift” or diversify their research aims, usually to producing algae for food or nutritional supplements. For example, Algenol shifted to carbon capture and fresh water creation in 2015, and Chevron-backed Solazyme announced in 2016 that it would discontinue its biofuels program altogether.

It seems that only ExxonMobil retains the dizzied excitement over algae biofuels of decades past. Although the company has not promoted many specific breakthroughs in its algae biofuel research since 2017, ExxonMobil’s social media presence suggests continued optimism for the future of this renewable energy.

“If you look on ExxonMobil’s Facebook or Instagram, you’d think that algae is all they’re thinking about all the time,” Zoya Teirstein, a reporter for Grist, told the HPR. Yet according to Teirstein, the company seems uneager to actually communicate this work to the mainstream media: “When you call their offices there’s no algae unit, there’s no gaggle of scientists working on this — their major product is still oil.” When Teirstein called the company, none of the three representatives she spoke with had any idea what she was referring to when she asked about algae biofuels.

THE COSTS OF CONTINUED INVESTMENT Despite industry optimism, decades of research seem to have converged upon a disappointing reality: The economic and biological limitations of algae make it an unrealistic fuel alternative for the future. It requires too much fertilizer, too much water, and too much energy to produce at scale. To grow enough algae to meet 5 percent of the U.S. transportation sector’s energy demand would require exorbitant fertilizer inputs of up to 107 percent of the country’s nitrogen use and half of its phosphorous. And the industrial processes needed to convert microalgae into fuel could actually cause a net energy loss: Algae could take up to 53 percent more energy to produce than it would offer as a biofuel.

With these considerations in mind, think tanks and research bodies around the world are advising governments against intensifying algae biofuel research, especially when funding could compete with more promising research into renewables like solar and wind. EnAlgae, an EU-funded coalition of 19 research bodies, concluded in 2015 that it was “highly unlikely” that microalgae would play a large role in Europe’s sustainable energy future. Similarly, in 2017, the International Energy Agency reiterated that algae was “not foreseen to be economically viable in the near to intermediate term.”

Yet as these predictions proliferate, ExxonMobil remains convinced that — with the help of some genetically engineered traits — algae production can be made profitable at scale, overcoming the biological limitations that have frustrated previous

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efforts. These genetic modifications introduce new reasons for caution: specifically, the troubling possibility that genetically engineered algae strains could easily escape into the environment.

At present, many researchers grow their algae in indoor enclosures, but to scale them up would likely require growing algae in open-air systems, where the potential for escape increases exponentially.

“You only need one bird to get it on its feet and fly off,” explained Kevin Flynn, a top algae researcher at Swansea University, in an interview with the HPR. That single bird could take algae wherever it landed, accidentally helping to establish algae colonies potentially hundreds of miles from the original site.

Flynn’s research finds that once in nature, it would be alarmingly easy for microalgae to spread “around the planet,” where it could overwhelm native species, particularly if the algae had speciallyengineered traits to help them outcompete other wildlife. “The spread of genetically modified microalgae … would be effectively impossible to halt,” Flynn warned in a 2012 study.

Scientists can only guess how genetically engineered algae would behave in nature, but many experts have warned of disastrous consequences. Harmful algae blooms could cause “massive fish kills, and death to marine birds and mammals as well as illness or even death to humans,” or create oxygen-depleted oceanic dead zones, where most life simply cannot exist. Horizontal gene transfer, whereby microalgae transfer genes asexually and take up “naked DNA” in the environment, poses another concern. By this process, genetically engineered algae could confer their own DNA to wild algae. Because these genes are broadly growth-enhancing, they could proliferate rapidly, drastically increasing the risk of harmful algae blooms.

Most researchers do not question whether microalgae would find its way into the wild; rather, they operate under the assumption that it would escape. There is a chance that international contamination could be benign, but according to Flynn, there is an equally likely — if not higher — chance that it could devastate ecosystems. He compares an algae escape scenario to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, only with algae’s ability to propagate rapidly, “this could be much, much worse.” Unlike a relatively localized oil spill, if a dangerous algae species were released into the wild, even well-funded, long-term cleanup efforts could prove futile.

A SHIFT TOWARD REAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS Inefficient biology, economic constraints, and ecological hazards undermine ExxonMobil’s insistence that commercially viable algae biofuels are just over the horizon. Even ExxonMobil’s former CEO Rex Tillerson has acknowledged that a future powered by algae biofuels is not close at hand, saying in 2013 that it could take 25 years to develop a commercially viable product. The myth of this future promise is perhaps algae biofuels’ most pernicious feature: They siphon attention and resources away from more realistic climate solutions. “[Algae biofuels] distract us from more promising resources like solar and wind,” Dana Perls, senior food and agriculture campaigner for Friends of the Earth, told the HPR. For Perls, each dollar invested in algae biofuel research represents funding that could have helped install more promising solar or wind infrastructure.

However, even if algae biofuels are a “dead end and a dangerous distraction” in terms of climate solutions, they have im-

mense value as a marketing tool. ExxonMobil’s algae biofuel ad campaign paints it as a “green” company, creating the outward impression that environmentalism is one of its core concerns.

This green veneer helps diminish public pressure to act more aggressively on climate change. It “keeps people stringing along, thinking we’re almost there,” Rachel Smolker, co-director of Biofuelwatch, told the HPR. If they believe there is a meaningful push for more algae biofuel research, and that full-scale deployment is just around the corner, people may be more complacent about demanding immediate change in companies’ practices and government policy.

Furthermore, ExxonMobil’s decades-long history of sowing climate misinformation raises serious questions about its motivations in promoting algae biofuels as a climate solution.

ExxonMobil stands to gain from climate delayism — the longer the company can impede a transition to renewable energies, the longer it can continue to profit off of an economy dependent on fossil fuels. As climate skepticism becomes less common, climate distraction — focusing on unrealistic and not-yet-deployable green technology — may work in similar ways, breeding a comparable complacency around climate action.

Meanwhile, some of the language used by algae biofuel proponents raises the suspicion that even if algae entrepreneurs are serious about creating a large-scale renewable fuel source, they are less interested in addressing the climate crisis than they are in profiting from it. The Algae Biomass Organization, for example, claims that “a new crop of microalgae technologies can [convert] CO2 into valuable commodities for trillion dollar industries, thus turning a problem ... into an opportunity – an ongoing revenue stream.”

In order to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius by mid-century, as called for in the Paris Agreement, and avoid the irreversible, catastrophic effects of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has implored countries to radically decarbonize the global economy by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050. To reach these goals will require net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions every year. Instead of promoting false optimism about algae biofuels, Biofuelwatch calls for an end to all federally-funded research in this area and for redirecting resources toward solutions that can more meaningfully advance a low-carbon energy future.

Looking to the future, it seems that ExxonMobil could better support global climate goals by allocating some of its $285 billion net worth toward already-proven technologies and renewable energy infrastructure, as opposed to continuing its algae biofuels projects. Some exhort the company to go even further in order to compensate for its historical contribution to climate inaction. As Friends of the Earth’s Senior Fossil Fuels Program Manager Nicole Ghio told the HPR, “If Exxon wants to be a climate leader, [it] can get out of fossils altogether, clean up the toxic legacy at [its] facilities, and pay reparations to the communities whose health and safety has been compromised in the name of Exxon profits.” Barring such radical action, Ghio and her colleagues remain unimpressed with ExxonMobil’s rhetoric about climate solutions; it would take momentous change — not another algae innovation — to convince them that ExxonMobil is more than a fox in the henhouse. For now, it looks to them that the company is only ostensibly focusing on research into renewables, while it projects continuing fossil fuel growth detrimental to the wellbeing of the planet for years and years into the future. 

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THE THIRD PARTY MYSTERY Libby Palanza

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n November 8, 2016, Americans were glued to their televisions, watching as the election results rolled in and waiting to find out who their next president would be.

No matter which news station they turned on, they undoubtedly heard news anchors going back and forth about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s respective chances of winning the election.

But there was something missing from the coverage that night.

Two names were left out of the conversation: Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.

Although 22 percent of Americans do not identify with either of the two major parties, the third-party option is rarely taken seriously. Outsiders have occasionally managed to gain traction on the national stage, but more often than not, they struggle to gain even a percentage point or two in national elections. Since the beginning of the 20th century, only four third-party candidates have managed to win any electoral votes in a presidential election; the last time was in 1968, over 50 years ago.

Instead, third parties typically receive little attention on the national stage. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, 2016’s third-party presidential candidates, only managed to scrape together a combined 6 percent of the popular vote. Furthermore, there are currently only two senators and two representatives from third parties serving in Congress.

Third-party candidates struggle to gain traction in American elections for a variety of reasons, but they are not out of the game altogether. These outsiders work tirelessly to challenge the ways in which people think about the problems facing our country, and they have not given up the hope that one day one of them will sit in the Oval Office.

LOGISTICAL STRUGGLES Ironically, it is during presidential election years that Americans hear the most about third-party candidates, as the media rushes to cover anyone who even vaguely hints at the possibility of a third-party run. These outside bids, however, are usually short-lived. In the 2020 cycle, one potential third-party candidate, Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, entered the race only to drop out about nine months later.

Third-party candidates often find themselves falling behind in the race for the presidency due to logistical struggles. Running a political campaign, especially on the presidential level, is difficult and complicated. In an interview with the HPR, Alice Stewart, the communications director for a number of Republican presidential campaigns, explained that “the party system is critical for campaigns because of the infrastructure that [the parties] provide, the network of people, and the resources … If you are running in an independent or a third-party campaign … the many years of built up infrastructure is just not there.”

The two major parties have established such significant campaign infrastructures and funding bases that it is nearly impossible for a third party to be competitive in a national election.

Stewart explained that “all the money in the world is still not going to help you with the logistical challenges that any candidate will have to do what needs to be done to run for president.”

Another significant barrier to success for third-party candidates that Stewart identified was ballot access. “One of the biggest challenges that these third-party candidates face is in regards to ballot access, which is so hard. It is a state-by-state process

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… Sometimes it is about money, sometimes it is about polling, sometimes it is about getting names on a list to support you.

These third-party candidates … rarely make it on the ballot in all 50 states … It is impossible to get the delegates if you are not even on the ballot.”

He explained that third parties’ efforts are focused on “affecting policy on the part of one or both of the current major parties or on being on the right side of history and eventually being able to win office.” While Democrats and Republicans work towards short-term goals, third parties are focused on making gains — both ideologically and practically — in the long term.

SEARCHING FOR ACCEPTANCE PATHS TO VICTORY Despite their electoral shortcomings, third parties provide a space for those who have alternative worldviews to collaborate and align themselves with like-minded individuals. Marc Mercier, current chairman of the Massachusetts Libertarain Party and former Libertarian candidate for the Massachusetts Governor’s Council, recounted his own journey towards becoming a Libertarian in an interview with the HPR. “For a long time I was always part of one of the major parties, one or the other, and I probably joined the Libertarian party … maybe five years ago. I was just tired of … interacting with people who were not aligned with my vision of how society should be,” explained Mercier. “At some point I just decided that if I was going to continue to be politically involved, I was going to have to be politically committed.”

Although third parties can be a great space for those with unique worldviews to find community, there are many people who have a hard time taking them seriously simply because they lie outside of the mainstream. Americans are so used to the two-party system that it becomes difficult for many to accept an alternative.

Mercier explained that “the biggest challenge [for third parties] is that … as an instinct or by nature, humans are not accepting of anything different or out of the ordinary because it introduces uncertainty into their life. Any third party who expresses views that are not … of the broad accepted norm … on a physiological level, on an emotional level, their message will be rejected.” Thus, simply because third-party candidates do not identify themselves within the established two-party system, human psychology hinders their ability to win elections.

AN IDEOLOGICAL MISSION According to Mercier, running as a third-party candidate is less about winning the race than getting out the party’s message and representing its principles. “I went into [my campaign for the Governor’s Council] with eyes wide, knowing that it was not very likely that I was going to convert voters to my view and … win that race,” he recounted. “The purpose of my race was to spread the message of Libertarianism and to offer an alternative point of view and to best represent the principles … so that the people who heard them might consider an alternative sometime down the road.” Although third-party candidates do not currently have a realistic chance of winning major elections, the mere act of running helps the party’s message reach audiences that they otherwise might not.

In an interview with the HPR, John Aldrich, a professor of political science at Pfizer-Pratt University, identified messaging as one of the major goals of third-party campaigns. He explained that if third-party candidates “keep plugging away,” they will lose over and over again, but their message will get across — and they will “slowly build support, and in the long run [they will] be able to win. And for that, you need people who are effective campaigners who do not mind losing and never holding office.”

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Although the electoral landscape often seems bleak, third parties have not yet given up hope, and Mercier discussed strategies that would help the Libertarian party to get ahead politically. One idea for immediate results is to “get somebody that people already trust and are already familiar with, somebody who does not present all that much uncertainty because their views are already known … And what I think that would do is get people comfortable with the candidate to the point where they … can ignore the unfamiliarity of the party and just focus on … that one candidate so that they trust that person rather [than] the party they are affiliated with.”

But this is not the only way for the Libertarian party, or any third party, to secure a foothold. By running candidates in local elections, third parties are able to build a strong foundation of support. Mercier explained that in local elections, voters are more focused on who the person on the ballot is than what letter is next to their name.

Mercier said that the Libertarian party encourages candidates to “run for the local level offices … so that you are running and winning based off of your personal relationships in your community, and people trust you for who you are … And then the fact that you happen to be Libertarian might just be an introduction to them to that party … and their comfort level allows them to be more accepting of what you have to say … from the Libertarian perspective.” By using those personal relationships as a foundation, third-party candidates are able to gain the traction they need to win on a small scale. If enough third-party candidates are able to do this, then there is potential for them to seek office at a higher level and actually have a chance of succeeding in the future.

POLITICAL OUTSIDERS IN AMERICA Third-party candidates are some of the country’s most visible political outsiders. Almost everyone knows that they exist, but they face a variety of electoral challenges — from a lack of party infrastructure and a struggle for ballot access to a need to battle the electorate’s aversion to someone outside the accepted twoparty system. Any effort by a third-party candidate to run for a major office is almost inevitably futile at this point in time. This is not to say, however, that the efforts of these outside parties are without merit.

Winning is not their main goal, at least for the time being.

Spreading their messaging, raising awareness about issues that are important to them, and affecting the policies adopted by the two major parties are all far more significant and realistic goals that third parties aim to achieve. By slowly acclimating the American public to their views and their existence, they hope to one day break into the system and succeed electorally. Third parties are playing the long game. 

UNITED STATES

HOW PROGRESSIVE ARE AMERICAN CITIES?

T

his past August, the presidential candidates and Congressional leaders of the Democratic Party met in San Francisco for the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) laid out her bold legislative agenda, while candidates vying for the nomination shared their own progressive policy platforms. They spoke of the need to transition to a universal health care system and advocated for the rights of marginalized communities.

They pushed for reform of a society that, to them, is heavily skewed toward the wealthy and touted the importance of a more progressive tax code and other measures to promote greater equality.

San Francisco, in particular, seems like a fitting place for this convention. Part of Pelosi’s district, San Francisco has developed a reputation as one of the liberal hubs of the country. The city last had a Republican mayor in 1964 and has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1956. This Democratic dominance was evident in 2016, as Hillary Clinton received 85 percent of the vote in San Francisco County compared to the 9 percent that went to President Donald Trump.

However, outside the walls of the Hilton Hotel in Union Square, where the DNC meeting was held, the ugly reality of living conditions in San Francisco becomes apparent. Even in the tourism center of the city, some of the nearly 10,000 homeless residents of San Francisco dwell on the streets. Despite being one of the most liberal cities in America, San Francisco has fallen victim to the growing socio-economic inequality that is strongly condemned by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Housing prices have become too expensive for working people to afford, forcing them to reside on the sidewalks. The result is a city that functions only for the wealthy — the antithesis of the progressive agenda.

This disconnect, however, is not limited to San Francisco.

Other traditionally liberal cities, such as New York and Boston, have also been unable to contain the accelerating divide between the very rich and the very poor. While inequality continues to impact the underprivileged communities of these cities, local governments have made efforts to make their cities more inclusive, just, and reflective of progressive values. With these contrasting perspectives, the question remains: Just how progressive are American cities?

HISTORY OF URBAN POLITICS San Francisco is a prominent example, but most of the country’s urban centers have liberal political tendencies. Major coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia all generally support Democratic candidates and progressive policies. The urban-rural political divide has been exacerbated in recent years, particularly in the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterm elections. In 2016, Clinton decisively won metro areas with over one million residents, while Trump took all other metro areas with smaller populations. In 2018, the Democrats obliterated the Republicans in urban areas but found little success in the conservative strongholds in rural regions.

Democrats also have overwhelming success in the local politics of cities, as 15 of the 20 biggest American cities currently have Democratic mayors. This trend has been the urban reality

Enrique Sanchez

for much of the latter half of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, Boston, New York, and San Francisco combined have elected just three Republican mayors, two of whom switched their party affiliation during their mayorship.

Still, the histories of these urban areas are not one long list of progressive victories, and one significant deviation can be found in New York. Rudy Giulani, the former mayor of New York City, instituted a controversial tough-on-crime approach aimed at decreasing violent crime by placing a heavy emphasis on petty crimes as well. His “stop and frisk” policy, which allowed police to stop and search pedestrians if they had “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, was particularly contentious and was recently rolled back by the current mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio.

THE PROBLEM OF INEQUALITY The most serious problem afflicting many of the country’s biggest cities is the rampant inequality between affluent areas and neighborhoods that are predominantly populated by minority and low-income residents. In San Francisco, this divide is especially evident. Coupled with incredible wealth, San Francisco also suffers from a staggering level of poverty and poor living conditions. As more start-ups and innovative tech companies set up shop in the city, bringing high paying jobs and educated young people, real estate prices continue to skyrocket.

The incredible growth has come with a significant cost to working people who cannot afford to pay astronomically high rents or purchase houses in the city with the highest national median housing cost.

The clearest consequence of this inequality is the growth of the homeless population. In just the past two years, San Francisco has seen a breathtaking 30 percent increase in its homeless population. The Bay Area now has the highest number of unsheltered homeless people per capita in America, while also having the highest number of billionaires per capita in the world. In response to this problem, a 2018 United Nations report condemned the living conditions of the homeless population as “inhumane” and a “violation of multiple human rights.” The situation has reached such a troubling point that San Francisco established a “poop patrol” last year to clean the alarming amount of human feces on the streets.

People are now forced to leave San Francisco in search of more affordable housing. The city has transformed into a largely homogeneous area, predominantly white, wealthy, and relatively old, as San Francisco has the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any major American city.

New York and Boston, two prominent progressive hubs on the East Coast, suffer from similar problems of inequality.

Manhattan, an area of incredible wealth and the most expensive place to live in the country, bears little similarity to the lowerincome inner city of Brooklyn.

In an interview with the HPR, Alissa Quart, author and executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, spoke of the decline of the middle class in America: “[The middle class] once was synonymous with stability, and now it gets the instability that the working class and poorer classes have long dealt with. It’s looking like other classes now.”

Boston has also been plagued by significant inequity in the public education system and the socio-economic makeup of

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neighborhoods. Boston schools are more racially segregated today than they were two decades ago, exacerbating the lack of equal opportunity provided by the educational system and the achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Boston neighborhoods have suffered from a similar trend, as areas of the city have significant inequality. Communities primarily composed of minorities, such as Roxbury and Mattapan, have significantly lower average household incomes than neighborhoods just a short drive away.

For these underprivileged communities, inequality can be most clearly seen through the lens of the criminal justice system.

Adam Foss, former prosecutor and executive director of the nonprofit Prosecutor Impact, spoke to the HPR about the connections between the criminal justice system and other drivers of inequality: “[The main ways local government has failed to create a just criminal justice system are] number one, access to stable housing. They need to create systems of housing that can keep people there even when they mess up … Number two is all about behavioral health and understanding and recognizing trauma. Every person who is working or connecting with people living in poverty need to be adept at dealing with people who are struggling with trauma. [The] last thing is access to education from early childhood education to college.”

It is no secret that mass incarceration and injustice in the criminal justice system have had devastating effects on these inner-city communities. Giulani’s policing tactics are just one example of an unjust policy that disproportionately impacts low-income individuals and people of color. The War on Drugs, started by the Reagan administration and still present in urban criminal justice policy, continues to ravage communities in cities across the United States. Policies such as these have perpetuated the cycle of poverty that keeps these communities in an unequal position.

PROGRESSIVE SOLUTIONS The problems plaguing the country’s urban hubs are well documented, but fortunately, some local governments have made strides to make their cities more just, inclusive, and progressive.

In San Francisco, the election of Mayor London Breed in 2018 spurred hope that solutions to the city’s inequality could be found, as she has emphasized affordable housing and combatting homelessness in her campaign and during her time as mayor.

While it is still too early to see how effective her policies will be in the long term, she has undertaken efforts to address these issues, investing in housing units, temporary shelters, and streetcleaning measures.

To address educational inequity, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York created a universal pre-kindergarten program, the first of its kind in the nation. The program has been overwhelmingly well-received and successful to this point. In 2013, de Blasio’s first year in office, 19,000 kids were enrolled in pre-K education, but now approximately 70,000 kids are enrolled due to de Blasio’s program. According to an evaluative scale developed by education experts, 94 percent of the city’s pre-K programs predict positive outcomes for the students. New York is now looking to create a similar universal education program for three-yearolds.

Similarly, in Boston, City Council President Andrea Campbell recently unveiled a plan to combat educational inequity and the racial achievement gap that pervades Boston public schools.

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In an interview with the HPR, Campbell said, “As the city councilor representing Mattapan and Dorchester, families are still struggling to find a school that they think can be excellent to serve the needs of their family.” She added, “I wanted to put forth a plan that would move the system forward to deliver more quality education for our students.”

Strides have also been made to reform the criminal justice system. In Boston, the election of District Attorney Rachael Rollins represented a significant shift in the city’s attitude toward criminal justice policy, as Rollins campaigned heavily on the need for reform. Among Rollins’s cornerstone policies is her decision not to bring criminal charges for many nonviolent crimes, instead opting for a system that prioritizes addressing root causes such as poverty, addiction, and mental illness. Rollins also has established a protocol that calls for an independent investigation into any police officer-involved shooting.

Foss told the HPR, “The most efficient and quickest lever to create change and sustain it is changing the culture within DAs’ offices.” With the election of progressive DAs such as Rollins and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, it seems as if the movement to alter the culture for prosecutors is beginning to take shape.

Finally, many cities have also implemented progressive immigration policies, often contradicting the rhetoric and policy handed down by the White House.

Campbell told the HPR, “My job as councilor is to make sure that we maintain the trust we have built with the people in the immigrant community in my district, documented or undocumented.” Campbell’s sentiments ring true for many of America’s biggest cities. Boston, New York, and San Francisco, among others, are all sanctuary cities and refuse to comply with federal directives that would impose harsher regulations on immigration. This defiance toward the federal government has drawn Trump’s ire of on multiple occasions, as he has attempted, but failed, to cut federal funding for all sanctuary cities.

THE VERDICT So how progressive are American cities? The problems of inequality are still far too prevalent and are not able to be solved quickly or easily. City life still predominantly caters to the wealthy, far from a progressive ideal. Still, the progressive strides being made in certain cities suggest a concerted effort to correct these major issues. The elections of more progressive, reformminded public officials implies a trend toward a more equitable future in these cities.

However, the current situation for underprivileged communities in these cities cannot be overlooked. Until the housing crises can be resolved, the criminal justice system reformed, and educational and socio-economic inequality reduced, American cities fall short of their progressive standards.

Looking forward, politicians must address the root causes of these issues if the big cities are to live up to their progressive reputations. Problems such as educational and socio-economic inequality cannot be addressed with a single piece of legislation, so public officials must find long-term, sustainable solutions that can make a real impact for underprivileged families. These issues are often results of fundamental, systemic flaws in political institutions, and only bold, direct action can effectively solve them. 

WORLD

Protecting Cows, Persecuting People

Ajay Sarma

S

o far in 2019, six people have been killed in incidents linked to a backlash against cow slaughter in India. One recent incident occurred on September 23 in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Suspected of selling beef, Kalantus Barla was beaten to death by a mob of vigilantes. While there have still been no arrests or convictions in the case, the alleged culprits were members of Bajrang Dal, a Hindu militant organization that espouses Hindutva, the philosophy that India ought to be a Hindu homeland, governed according to the principles of that religion.

Jharkhand, like many other states, has strict laws prohibiting the slaughter of cows or calves, and only allows the slaughter of bulls or bullocks in very specific situations. Like in some other states, the slaughter of cows is a cognizable offense in Jharkhand, meaning that the police can make an arrest without a warrant. The punishment for cow slaughter can include fines or jail time, but it is not regarded as a capital crime and Indian law certainly does not condone lynching. Even so, between May 2015 and December 2018, 44 people were killed in retaliatory attacks for the slaughter of cows, often through mob violence.

The majority of these victims have been either Muslims, for whom the consumption or slaughter of bovines does not violate religious law, or Dalits — one of the “lowest” groups of the caste system who are known for trading in cattle and consuming beef.

THE BJP’S BOVINE AGENDA Hinduism, like other Dharmic faiths, highly values the lives of animals. But Divya Cherian, a historian at Princeton University studying early modern South Asia, noted in an interview with the HPR that “in the pre-colonial period, there really are no precedents for the singling out of the cow” for legal protection.

Cow slaughter was seen as problematic among Hindus, but “it

would remain a problem at the level of the caste group.” Until the rise of Hindu nationalist movements in the late 19th century, movements to protect cows and punish cow slaughter on a subcontinent-wide scale were few and far between.

Even during the colonial period and in the period immediately following independence, cow protection movements were not exceedingly popular. A lecturer and researcher of the history of modern South Asia at the University of London, Shabnum Tejani, explained to the HPR that cow protection movements have tended to emerge as byproducts of surges in Hindu nationalism.

She added that these moments are generally accompanied by spikes in communal violence. Tejani described one such moment in the 1960s, when cow-protective legislation was instituted across the subcontinent. But the next few decades, she said, marked a period without “any real [new] cow protection movements, any violence, any legislation.” This period lasted until the recent national rise of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. After Modi’s election, Tejani described a “sudden and manyfold increase” in violence relating to cow protection.

In 2014 — and again in 2019 — the BJP won the Indian general election and formed a government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP platform was extensive, but its social policies in particular featured elements of Hindutva. The enumeration of the principles of Hindutva in their present form are often credited to Vinayak Savarkar, an Indian independence activist who criticized the Indian National Congress’s perceived appeasement of Muslims. Tejani said that in the 20th century, Savarkar had “looked to European fascism and incorporated it within his ideas.” But Radhika Govindrajan, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, traces the development of ideologies “targeted at the production of a nation that is Hindu in its essence” to before Savarkar. Regardless of the source from which Hindutva derives its theoretical underpinnings, the consensus is

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that it is a distinctly majoritarian ideology rooted in the equation of being Hindu with being Indian, something that inherently excludes those of other faiths. While the BJP itself rejects the notion that it has any ideological interest in the exclusion of members of other faith communities, it has backed policies seen as being deferential towards India’s Hindu majority.

In the past, Hindutva has manifested in the BJP’s support for the demolition of certain mosques built on Hindu holy sites or the end of India’s “personal law” system, which applies a different set of civil laws to members of different faith backgrounds.

The personal law system is often seen as necessary to protect the identities of India’s various religious minorities, especially its significant Muslim minority. In past elections, the BJP has notably taken a stance supporting more strict enforcement of cow protection laws, going so far as to establish a national commission for cow protection in February 2019.

BJP leaders have also been dismissive of the violence caused by lynching mobs. The BJP chief minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh trivialized a riot that occurred when two cow carcasses were found in the city of Bulandshahr. The resultant death of a police officer was framed as accidental and used as an opportunity to warn of the illegal nature of cow slaughter. The police department of the city stated that its primary purpose was to catch the people who slaughtered the cows, not the people responsible for killing the police officer. Modi himself has been slow to condemn the violence across India; when he has, he has focused largely on violence against Hindu Dalits, failing to acknowledge the Muslims who have also suffered. He qualified his condemnation of lynch mobs by reaffirming his support for the cow protection policies that have become increasingly emblematic of the BJP’s Hindutva agenda.

INCREASED SECTARIAN TENSIONS It is somewhat difficult to connect this increased focus on the enforcement of cow protection laws and the mob violence that has escalated in recent years. In theory, cow protection laws should restrict cow protection to the domain of law enforcement. However, the rise in communal violence has clearly accompanied the rise of the BJP — 90 percent of the incidents targeting religious minorities between January 2009 and October 2018 occurred after the BJP’s rise to power in May 2014.

Increased support for cow-protection legislation and other key parts of the BJP’s Hindutva-oriented legislative plan have also been accompanied by a marked increase in hate speech.

Following an analysis of 1,300 articles and 1,000 tweets, A New Delhi TV study concluded that hate speech had increased among Indian politicians by 500 percent between 2014 — when the BJP first gained control of the national government and many state governments — and 2018, with most of the perpetrators being members of the BJP. Perhaps the increase in communal tensions is a cause of the BJP’s popularity and not a consequence, but the cow protection laws have steadily fomented communal violence.

And why has the BJP chosen cow protection measures as a policy objective? Tejani argued that cow-protection laws and movements channel a “long-standing hurt.” They serve to connect contemporary Indian Hindus to a “deep sense of loss and anger” by using “language that carries this emotion across time.”

Saying, for instance, that “the cow is our mother,” Indian legal and political authorities dismiss concerns around violence relat-

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ing to cow protection. This language echoes the pain Hindus experienced during periods of both Muslim and colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent; now that Hindus have social, political, and legal power in India, it further emboldens them to retaliate.

Of course, most of India’s over 800 million Hindus do not engage in this violence. The connection to feelings of historical pain, however, helps “polite society to … look away from” and dismiss incidents of cow violence.

The cow-protection movement, it should be noted, involves more than just mob violence. It certainly includes the violent lynchings of those who trade in cattle, but there is also a broader movement that is attempting to create a more general rallying point for Hindus around cow protection. Govindrajan cautioned that a “focus on lynching takes us away from some of this groundwork that’s happening, that’s drawing in a much wider range of people.” This “groundwork” takes the form of a growing grassroots movement that is engaging Hindus in a variety of ways around the idea of the sanctity of a cow’s life. Govindrajan pointed to groups devoted to tending to cattle, which have attracted more women to a movement that was typically perceived as “very masculine.” Focusing exclusively on mob violence obscures the greater political mobilization of Hindus that the cowprotection movement represents. Sectarian tensions need not always manifest themselves through violence, and it is certainly possible that these less explosive movements represent a slowly building, but equally important, source of tensions.

DEVOLUTION OF JUSTICE The mob violence that has characterized this movement also indicates another pattern in Indian justice: the power of the mob. Mob violence has become a solution for issues beyond cow protection. The spread of WhatsApp and social media in India has allowed for the propagation of “fake news” stories, a phenomenon that has amplified and informed patterns of mob violence. 2018 saw a spate of viral WhatsApp news stories about child kidnappings. These stories called on Indians to be vigilant, and the result was a series of incidents in which mobs lynched or attacked those suspected of kidnapping children.

In these cases as well as in the cow protection incidents, the police have been fairly lax in their approach to investigating and punishing. Communities are often unwilling to collaborate with the police as they perceive the vigilantes to be justified in their actions. This devolution in perceived judicial authority from the justice system to the vigilante population is a concerning trend for the people most affected by vigilante justice, who tend to be members of minority religions or castes.

In the case of cow-protection-related violence, Tejani pointed to the slow pace and corruption associated with the Indian justice system as a partial explanation for this trend. Minorities being persecuted have little reason to believe that institutions dominated by those sympathetic to the cause of cow protection will act with their interests in mind. Majority populations have taken the government’s silence and inaction as a signal empowering them to take justice into their own hands. And with Modi’s recent reelection affirming Hindutva and everything it represents, these patterns of mob violence and official inaction show no signs of abating. 

WORLD

Tooth

&

Nail

Ava Salzman

T

he sight of burning elephant ivory stock is a spectacle of pyrrhic defeat. Above, there are pillars of smoke and flecks of red embers; below, pyramids of elephant tusks blackening in flames — hollow, charred remnants of slain icons.

Destruction of ivory stock is but one of many measures that governments, law enforcement agencies, and anti-poaching organizations have adopted to combat the illegal trade of wildlife goods, following the guidance of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species and other international wildlife policies. They work to manage poaching where species decline has been severe over the last several decades. But on the ground, poaching draws entire communities into rings of organized crime that exact pernicious environmental tolls. It can feel like one is fighting a never-ebbing blaze.

Two years have passed since China’s momentous ivory ban.

Its effectiveness — and its shortcomings — speak to the current and future status of wildlife crime, and call for an investigation of all of the links in its twisted supply chain. Taking ivory and several other illicit wildlife goods as examples, we can understand the source of the flames.

ORIGINS OF DEMAND The social origins of the demand for wildlife goods weave together strands of class, culture, and tradition, skewed by an abrupt transition into a modern context. In an interview with the HPR, Wander Meijer, director of GlobeScan, explained: “Ivory has always been used everywhere in the world by rich people as a sign of status. Why it has become such a big issue now is because it has been democratized. A lot more people are

actually buying the products because they can afford it.”

Some goods are believed to have additional medicinal or curative properties. Rhino horn’s speculated medicinal properties are loosely defined, its appeal coming from a combination of social allure — wealthy buyers may choose to display or carve rhino horn rather than consume it — and erroneous traditional beliefs. Another victim is the totoaba, a large, endangered fish inhabiting Mexico’s Sea of Cortés: Its swim bladder, a fleshy organ falsely attributed curative powers, is valuable enough to earn it the nickname “la cocaine del mar” — cocaine of the sea.

As the ivory ban and awareness campaigns have been enacted across China, opinions do seem to be shifting, according to GlobeScan’s September survey. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said they would not purchase ivory. What is troubling, though, is the 14 percent who said they would. Both demand and consumption have risen over the past year within a small yet persistent demographic of patrons who evade Chinese wildlife trade laws by buying in countries with less stringent policies, such as Thailand, Hong Kong, and Cambodia. “If I walk across the Hong Kong-China border, and bring a few small ivory artifacts with me, like trinkets, nobody will check me, and nobody will notice it,” Meijer said. “The enforcement is not as stringent as people thought.”

China is the world’s biggest travel market — next year, two million Chinese people will go abroad. “The only demographic which showed an increase in both the demand for ivory and the purchase of ivory are travellers,” Meijer said. “If they go abroad to countries around China, people may not even have the intention to buy ivory, but what happens in practice is that they go to souvenir shops and it is offered to them.”

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There is also the prospect of speculation. Stockpilers in Africa, China, and Southeast Asia “are betting on either elephants going extinct ... or one day, for whatever reason, the market reopening in China. Again, in both cases you will have ivory there already, stockpiled like gold,” explained Andrea Crosta, a wildlife crime investigator, in an interview with the HPR. Furthermore, even if demand does not increase, poachers may kill more in anticipation of rising prices, hoping to make elephants even more rare so that each tusk might fetch a higher price as elephant tusks grow sparse. The same phenomenon allegedly occurs with totoaba bladders, which are often traded and used as a sort of currency, a gold standard.

THE SUPPLY CHAIN Organized wildlife crime drastically transforms the societies in which it operates. With its many links, it is the most tenacious part of the chain. The trade of coveted wildlife goods provides an enticing source of income for communities. A single totoaba bladder can generate thousands of dollars for a fisherman, and tens of thousands of dollars for a trafficker in the Chinese black market. This source of income is conditional: Fishermen provide the goods in exchange for a small percentage of the market value as well as weapons and ammunition, fishing nets, and other appliances loaned with the understanding that the poachers are responsible for them, thus creating a vicious system of economic and social reliance.

The 2019 documentary “Sea of Shadows” revealed the degree to which crime organizations exploiting the totoaba trade have infiltrated the lives of fishermen on the Sea of Cortés. Traffickers have not simply drawn fishermen into fishing illegal totoaba.

They have monopolized the waters so that legal fishermen cannot compete, thus causing even more fishermen to turn to poaching. Once fishermen are enveloped in the trade, syndicates lend them expensive equipment, such as fishing nets and weapons, controlling them through debt as well as through profit.

The documentarian Richard Ladkani, who directed the film, recounted the consequences he witnessed firsthand in an interview with the HPR: “They are being extorted … One fisherman we interviewed in the film lost 16 nets, worth about $54,000.

Then he went public with it, and started to rebel against the cartel, saying he couldn’t pay them back, so they killed him.”

The role of traffickers and mafias is often overlooked. No one knows the nature of these players better than Andrea Crosta. As the world’s leading wildlife crime investigator and head of Earth League International, he described the difference between the arrests of a key poacher — in this example, the Tanzanian poacher “Shetani” — and a key trafficker, the Chinese kingpin Yang Fenlan, known as the “Ivory Queen.”

“Shetani was one of the most important players in the first part of the supply chain. Someone like him still needs a trader to sell what he has and continue the supply chain,” Crosta said.

“It’s not easy to replace someone like Shetani, but it’s not impossible. To replace someone like the Ivory Queen is a lot more difficult. This is why we have been advocating for years asking law enforcement and governments to go upstream in the supply chain and focus on people like the Ivory Queen … who know how to buy, how to smuggle, how to put together containers or shipments, avoid Chinese customs, and keep in contact with the buyers.”

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It is important not to exaggerate the role poverty plays in causing poaching. “You have many, many cases [like San Felipe] around the world: They are not rich, but they do survive, they are not poor … what changes the equation are traffickers,” Crosta explained. “One must understand the disturbance and temptation factor that the traffickers bring into communities … If, tomorrow, you were to give jobs to [the whole population] of San Felipe, you would still have totoaba trafficking. Already, now, fishermen come not from the area, but from all around Mexico.

It’s like a gold rush.”

Mafias, of course, impede justice. Paying off border and customs officials, according to investigators, allows elephant ivory to pour out of ports such as Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa. In a recent crackdown on the Shuidong syndicate, shipments of ivory smuggled with mixed lower-quality goods were checked by customs at a rate of only one in 20 shipments on their journey from mainland Tanzania to Zanzibar and eventually to Asia.

Corruption taints the legal arena as well. A recent case in Thailand against a powerful Vietnamese rhino horn smuggler, Boonchai Bach, was dropped due to the sudden recantation of a key testimony. Experts believe that the witness had been financially incentivized or threatened. This is one of many wildlife criminal cases that have been abandoned under suspicious circumstances; a similar case against nine Chinese pangolin traffickers arrested in Mozambique was dropped just this past month.

Even rebel militias like the Lord’s Resistance Army fund and operate using ivory profit. The challenge is thus political as well. Poachers in many sites oppose conservation measures that would endanger the crime syndicates that control them, or endanger their ability to poach, as observed in protests in response to fishing net bans in San Felipe.

STEMMING THE DEMAND GlobeScan’s September survey on the demand for ivory after the ban found that the majority of people in China, excluding the die-hard buyer group, have been significantly discouraged from buying ivory due to the ban itself as well as the social awareness campaigns accompanying it. Respondents report that the most effective deterrent is the fear of elephants’ extinction.

Additional bans and more broadly disseminated social awareness campaigns reaching a wider audience can further change social norms around buying wildlife goods in China.

Yet while awareness campaigns and legal deterrents are essential drivers for generational change, Crosta argued that we may not be able to buy enough time for such measures alone to succeed. “Awareness campaigns are a very long-term strategy in China. But the majority of the species, the environmental emergencies that we have right now — we are talking about five, 10 years max. There is no time for awareness campaigns of this kind to solve these problems. The strategy must be different.”

BREAKING THE CHAIN Crosta is the co-founder and executive director of Earth League International and WildLeaks, organizations of wildlife crime investigators that perform undercover work to gather incriminating data on wildlife crime syndicates. He argued in The Daily Beast that the role of intelligence in disrupting the

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connection between poachers and final buyers is a key method for dismantling the trade altogether, but one many conservationists and policymakers have ignored.

“It’s in our mission to help law enforcement and inform the public, but we want to do it only with firsthand facts — information collected by our people, analyzed by our crime analysts, double-checked with our cyber experts. With these firsthand facts, you can hold governments accountable,” he told the HPR. Through undercover investigations using sophisticated intelligence techniques, ELI and WildLeaks have been able to gather data on ivory dealers, totoaba dealers, and players at many levels of supply chains worldwide, providing them at no cost to authorities who are able to use such data for arrest warrants and prosecutions. This, Crosta said, is an invaluable tool in keeping governments informed. “In the case of totoaba, for example, when we share information with [the Mexican authorities], we make it clear that we are sharing the exact same information with U.S. and Chinese authorities.”

Usually such authorities are responsive. “A year and a half ago, the Thai authorities arrested two of the most important wildlife traffickers in the region thanks to our work. Since environmental crime is not a big priority, they don’t have a lot of resources. But when we give them the information to do what they have to do, they like it — this is the best way to establish relations with law enforcement agencies.” Still, data alone cannot fix the entire problem.

that the Mexican government is intending to send 600 additional troops to the area — soldiers, observers, monitors, analysts — to help save the vaquita. The Mexican president has talked about the vaquita for the first time. The incoming governor of Baja California wants additional screenings there so it can become more of a public discussion. The media response was the biggest ever for a documentary in Mexico. But totoaba season is about to begin in November. We will see, starting then, how effective the government crackdown will be. We’re afraid it’s just for show.

If they don’t really … make poachers suffer, then nothing will change.”

The solution may lie directly with us, the millions of viewers and social media users with media platforms at our disposal.

When it comes to saving our species and communities, incriminating data on wildlife crime is the key, the lighter fluid with which we can douse those in power. But data alone, Ladkani said, is not enough. “People need to understand that the traditional way of conservation is game over. We are losing the war almost everywhere, and the criminals are laughing. And I want outrage.” Clearly, Ladkani’s efforts and the efforts of the fighters he documents cannot exist in a void. Public outrage is the catalyst — it is the spark. 

A POLITICAL SOLUTION Meijer, Crosta, and Ladkani agree on one fundamental truth: as Andrea Crosta put it, “a political solution is everything.”

Ladkani confirmed: “Frontline anti-poaching efforts will always only buy us time.” But what exactly does a political solution look like?

The 2017 ban is an example of sound wildlife policy. But its enforcement is another story. “What happened in China is that all of a sudden, it is way more difficult to launder illegal ivory into the system. It became a problem of law enforcement. Take rhino horn — rhino has been illegal in China for years. It’s not a legal problem,” Crosta said of the ban.

Fortunately, hope is dawning at the intersection of art, media, and journalism. Take Richard Ladkani’s environmental documentaries. In 2017, his film documenting the illicit ivory trade, “The Ivory Game,” was released in theaters and to millions of viewers on Netflix. The subsequent impact was drastic. “Two months after the film came out, China announced they would ban the trade of ivory ... the day they announced the ban, they invited us to the Beijing Film Festival, where we opened the festival and won for best documentary.”

Last summer, Ladkani’s “Sea of Shadows” was released. It was distributed through National Geographic, shared by powerful partners such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jane Goodall, and screened worldwide, putting significant pressure on the Chinese, Mexican, and U.S. governments to crack down on totoaba trafficking and save the vaquitas. The documentary’s poster animal, the vaquita is the world’s smallest whale species, reduced to dwindling populations as they are caught and drowned in totoaba nets.

The film has made a positive impact so far, but Ladkani is keeping vigilant. “There were some very big announcements

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FROM SELFIES TO PROGRESS IN EL SALVADOR Kendrick Foster

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he world has taken more than 350 million selfies. Selfietaking hordes have invaded popular tourist destinations, while the bathroom mirror selfie has not yet gone out of vogue on Instagram. Amidst this growing popular trend, one place seemed sacrosanct: the United Nations General Assembly.

It is sacrosanct no longer. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador made headlines when he took a selfie at this formerly august forum for diplomats and world leaders to discuss and declaim, marking another conquest in the selfie’s inexorable quest for world domination. “Believe me, many more people will see this selfie than will hear this speech,” Bukele proclaimed to the audience of baffled politicians. Nonetheless, his statement proved true, as more than 7,000 excited Salvadorans quickly liked the photo on Twitter.

The selfie fits right in with Bukele’s image as El Salvador’s “social media president.” Formally sworn in on June 1, 2019, the 38-year-old defeated candidates from the two main parties, the left-wing FMLN and the right-wing Arena, with an unconventional campaign which shunned debates and media appearances in favor of Facebook and Twitter posts.

Just as a selfie is taken, liked, and quickly forgotten, the world clicked “like” on Bukele’s presidency and then quickly turned its attention to other issues. In El Salvador, though, Bukele has quickly sparked controversy, especially as the first 100 days of his presidency came and went on September 8. Proponents argue that Bukele has succeeded in his first 100 days, successfully fighting corruption, poverty, and gang violence. Critics charge that Bukele’s presidency is little more than a social media stunt: full of optics but light on any actual substance.

Bukele’s supporters and detractors both make valid points.

However, the first 100 days is a rather meaningless yardstick to evaluate his performance, and one man alone cannot solve El Salvador’s problems, however popular he may seem. El Salvador needs improved institutions, not selfies and social media rhetoric, to begin this process.

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FIGHTING CORRUPTION With three former presidents under indictment for corruption, the issue unsurprisingly featured heavily in the presidential campaign. Bukele had distanced himself from the political establishment, building on his youth; the mantra “there’s enough money if no one steals” played a significant part in winning Bukele the election. Once Bukele actually won office, the Twitter gears launched into action: In August, Bukele promised to launch a new anti-corruption commission within the first 100 days of his presidency.

With two days to spare, Bukele announced an agreement with the Organization of American States to launch the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en El Salvador — the International Commission against Impunity in El Salvador — on September 6. CICIES would supposedly ensure impartial investigations, aid the country’s Public Ministry in carrying out investigations, and develop institutional policies to combat corruption. So far, this announcement has been Bukele’s landmark achievement — he has also fired many bureaucrats and officials associated with the old regime on charges of corruption or nepotism.

However, the body has yet to actually spring into existence.

“In order to fit into [Bukele’s] promise to create such an organization within 100 days, they were able to credibly claim in early September an agreement had been reached to launch a commission, but none of the details have been ironed out,” Charles Blake, a professor of political science at James Madison University and an expert on corruption in Latin America, told the HPR. “Right now, we don’t know enough about that new body to make a good prediction on how successful it will be.”

El Salvador’s burgeoning investigative journalism scene quickly picked up on this fact. “Bukele opted for dramatic effects and ambiguous words, for empty shells and narcissism” instead of revitalized institutions, the newspaper El Faro charged. Investigators will not arrive in El Salvador until 2021, it pointed out,

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comparing CICIES to a previous anti-corruption organization, the Secretariat for Transparency. That body largely focused on past allegations of corruption, doing little to investigate contemporaneous corruption within the government then in power.

If the same thing happens with the current body, it could spell trouble for Bukele. “The more that the new commission focuses on past acts, the more likely it is to be viewed as a political organization,” Blake noted.

Furthermore, CICIES will operate under the executive branch, raising two major concerns. First, both inside and outside observers have raised questions about the body’s operational autonomy, fearing that it would hesitate to investigate questions surrounding Bukele’s administration, especially considering Bukele’s prior backlash against investigations involving his own presidency. Second, limiting the body’s authority to the executive branch also limits its ability to investigate other cases of corruption. “Corruption might take place in any of the three branches [of government] and levels of government beyond the national government” as well, Blake explained.

And then there are the worries that Bukele is a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. El Faro and another independent Salvadoran publication, Revista Factum, conducted separate investigations into Bukele’s finances, alleging that Bukele had illegally received money from the Venezuelan state oil company, participated in a bribery ring while mayor of San Salvador, and involved himself with a group of crooked ex-politicians linked to drug traffickers.

To make matters worse, Bukele’s main parliamentary ally, Guillermo Gallegos, has also been accused of giving state money to a company owned by his wife. Such allegations, if true, would dramatically impede Bukele’s credibility in regards to corruption.

The key to solving corruption lies not in creating new institutions, but rather in shoring up existing ones. Since CICIES lies within the executive branch, it will remain susceptible to influence from the incumbent administration to mount politicallycharged investigations — or, more importantly, to ignore abuses of power within the administration currently in power. Instead, El Salvador should invest its anti-corruption momentum in an institution such as the fiscalía, the attorney general’s office, with officials appointed independently from the president’s influence. The country should also invest more money in this office to ensure it has the appropriate manpower to prosecute corruption cases. “It’s this capacity-building at the fiscalía level or at other institutions that [enables us] to fight against crime and corruption in a sustainable way,” Maria Eugenia Brizuela de Avila, a former Salvadoran minister of foreign affairs, told the HPR. Brizuela de Avila also pointed out civil society’s impact, especially in the realm of transparency. A law passed under the Bukele administration “allows any citizen to go up and request the information in regards to any type of transaction, any type of salaries,” which would clamp down on corruption by publicizing state-run information. El Salvador’s vibrant investigative journalism scene also provides a “civil audit” to accompany the anti-corruption fight, as she put it. Shoring up existing civil society groups such as FUSADES provides another independent way to hold El Salvador’s leaders accountable.

ENDING GANG VIOLENCE

impacts them more on a day-to-day basis. More than 20,000 Salvadorans died in a three-year period at the hands of gangs, and gangs routinely extort money from businesses and individual citizens. Obviously, improving security and combating gangs lay at the top of Bukele’s agenda.

This agenda revolves around the Territorial Control Plan, which would replace the mano dura — iron fist — strategy used by his predecessors. Announced in June 2019, the plan revolves around denying gangs the ability to control territory, whether in jails or in city centers, with heightened police and military presence in areas with a significant gang presence. Bukele has also cut off communication between jailed gang members and the outside, reduced the number of businesses paying extortion money, and refused continued negotiations with gang members.

The plan “has had a very positive impact on the psyche of the people,” Brizuela de Avila asserted. “People are optimistic.”

Indeed, El Salvador reported its first homicide-free day in over two years on July 31, the homicide rate has started decreasing steadily, and people have begun conducting their daily business more openly.

Yet the policy smacks of the previously repressive policies.

“There’s absolutely no question” that Bukele is continuing mano dura, Geoff Thale, who oversees Central American programs at the Washington Office on Latin America, told the HPR. “He’s basically continuing the very tough approach to the most conflictive and gang-ridden neighborhoods … it’s always accompanied by serious human rights abuses and violations of due process that are not good for the institutional character of the police.”

Bukele also has appointed several security officials with “problematic records on due process and human rights concerns,” as Thale charitably put it.

And once again, El Salvador’s newspapers went after Bukele’s policy of “governing via Twitter.” In an impassioned June article, the independent outlet Revista Factum pointed out that Bukele had promised to launch a “comprehensive proposal” to combat gang violence by June 1, which had yet to materialize two weeks later. It did emerge on June 20, but it serves as an example of Bukele’s relatively lax attitude towards converting campaign promises into actual plans. “I’m nervous about where his anticrime strategy is going and what it will mean for human rights and due process concerns,” Thale said. “And, frankly, about how effective it will be in reducing crime rates.”

Viewing the police as an institution helps explain the appropriate path forward for El Salvador. Instead of investing the police with new powers, which only makes the agency more empowered to commit human rights abuses, El Salvador should work to build trust between local communities and the police through community-based policing efforts and improved accountability measures, rather than harsh, one-size-fits-all policing. Institutionalizing these reforms would go a long way to improve the country’s policing effectiveness.

Bukele should also work to introduce a holistic approach to reducing gang violence by tackling its roots. Brizuela de Avila noted that Bukele has already introduced technical and vocational schools to gang-ridden areas while promoting sports programs as an outlet for young people. Such a longterm approach, if institutionalized, will eventually pay security dividends.

While the Salvadoran people may have strong feelings about government corruption, the country’s rampant gang violence

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PROMOTING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Economic development will also pay dividends, both in terms of gang violence and corruption. In a poor economy, gangs provide poor men an outlet to prove their masculinity, especially in a heavily patriarchal society. They also act as economic agents, providing otherwise jobless men with an income and a sense of community. As a result, improving economic opportunities could help to tamp down gang violence.

Likewise, substantial inequality throughout Latin America “creates stressors and opportunities for the emergence of political corruption,” Blake said. When unemployment is high and jobs are scarce, many people “pursue their economic ambitions by becoming government officials. That doesn’t provide the best of breeding grounds for a public service orientation towards government work.” If he succeeds in promoting economic development, the incentives for corruption would likewise decrease.

But Bukele faces challenges in securing foreign investment without first improving El Salvador’s security situation. “High levels of crime and insecurity don’t make the place attractive to foreign investors,” Thale said. “Even with a serious commitment and the best of intentions, persuading people you’re not the [previous administration] and you’re a friend of the Trump administration, that’s a tough one to do.”

Finally, Bukele’s economic reforms could maintain or even worsen inequality if firms already owned by Salvadoran elites get big construction jobs, for instance, or if foreign investment favors these already-established firms. “Will the market-oriented reforms create more opportunities for entrepreneurship [and] small- and medium-sized businesses, or will the benefits of

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the reforms that eventually get adopted go to relatively few Salvadorans or relatively few Salvadoran firms?” Blake asked.

FROM 100 DAYS TO THE LONG TERM On issues such as corruption, gang violence, and economic development, Bukele still has a long way to go in fully implementing his promises and making sure his administration does not repeat previous mistakes. However, both Blake and Thale emphasized that the international community should not be too quick to judge Bukele’s government. “I think it’s hard to argue that any government can make very much progress in three months,” Blake opined.

Whatever his merits or demerits, Bukele’s story offers many lessons in the age of the social-media populists. For starters, Twitter promises and selfies are not policy proposals, bills, or laws, and nothing will change if Salvadorans mistake tweets for action. Likewise, Twitter likes are not votes. “Bukele’s a big believer in the power of the Internet and social media more generally,” Thale said. “That’s clearly enough to get the attention of young people looking at their phones, but whether that’s enough to ... turn people out to vote, that’s a whole other question.”

How to create institutions that achieve long-term change is also a distinct question, and one that governing by Twitter cannot answer. With trending hashtags coming and going, social media populism is short-term pandering rather than long-term planning. Across the board, strong governmental and economic institutions are necessary to enact long-term change, whether on corruption, gang violence, or economic development. Selfies will not create the institutions that El Salvador so desperately needs. 

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Sam Meyerson

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ince 2001, the United States has led three military inventions with the explicit goal of toppling foreign governments. In October 2001, less than one month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government, which was sheltering and refusing to extradite leaders of Al-Qaeda. In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to overthrow Sadam Hussein’s regime, which President Bush accused of building weapons of mass destruction. In March 2011, with heavy American involvement, NATO attacked the military forces of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in order to prevent an impending massacre of anti-government protesters. The United States justified its military interventions by arguing that removing the political leaders of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya would improve prospects for stability and security in each country. However, looking back on each of these conflicts, it is difficult to conclude that these American-led interventions actually improved the situation on the ground.

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN In Afghanistan, the Taliban government retreated after two months of heavy fighting with American and American-allied forces. After the fall of the Taliban regime, American soldiers remained in the country to continue fighting Taliban and AlQaeda insurgents, but their continued presence did not lead to an enduring peace. In 2006, the violence of the Taliban insurgency increased dramatically and the number of suicide bombings quadrupled. This pattern of sporadic violence and terrorism

continues today. In 2018, the Taliban killed more than 115 people in Kabul in a series of terror attacks. According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, at least 147,000 people have died due to the War in Afghanistan. With the Taliban controlling more Afghan territory today than it has at any point since losing power in December 2001, this immense loss of human life makes it difficult to view the United States’ military operations in Afghanistan as successful.

FAILED STATE BUILDING IN AFGHANISTAN While the United States succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban government in Afghanistan, it failed in its efforts to create a stable and united Afghan state due to a series of strategic errors.

Jack Segal, who served as the chief political adviser to NATO’s operational commander from 2002 to 2010, discussed the successes and failures of the war in Afghanistan with the HPR. Segal noted that the United States achieved its goal of deposing the Taliban regime relatively quickly. However, he also emphasized that American efforts to transform Afghan society following the fall of the Taliban were unrealistic. Segal said that the American “objective was to create a democratic, gender-sensitive, unified national government in Afghanistan. And I would say none of those were possible, but it took us a long time to figure that out.”

He emphasized the difficulty of imposing American values on a foreign population with a blunt allusion to the atomic bombing of Imperial Japan during World War II: “[Many Afghan villagers] are suspicious of any outsiders, not just Americans … We’re trying to impose a system that is alien and unwanted. And so if

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that’s your goal, you can do something like we did in World War II. We imposed a government on Japan and turned them into democratic people who love democracy. But it took awhile. And it took two atomic bombs.” According to Segal, the United States cannot transform Afghan society without an overwhelming military effort and long-term commitment, the scale of which would likely be politically unacceptable.

Segal discussed two other mistakes that doomed the statebuilding effort in Afghanistan. He noted that “less than 6 percent of our investment was nonmilitary,” which he criticized as “a very important deficiency.” Drawing on his State Department background, Segal argued that “political development was neglected” in Afghanistan, largely because the United States “undervalue[d] diplomatic efforts when they probably were the solution.” Segal also labeled the effort to transform the Afghan security forces into a high-tech military as misguided. He described how the United States worked to replace the Afghan military’s aging Russian jeeps with Humvees. However, while the Russian jeeps were relatively simple to maintain, the United States Army admits that a “12th grade education” is necessary to service a Humvee. According to Segal, “this [eliminated] 99 percent of all Afghan officers, not just enlisted men.” Rather than strengthening the Afghan army, the United States created a technologically advanced military force that the Afghan soldiers themselves could not plausibly maintain. Overall, a combination of unrealistic goals and misguided strategies led to the failure to transform Afghanistan into a stable, united, democratic country.

THE IRAQ WAR Like the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq has had grim, long-term consequences. American forces achieved a quick military victory against Saddam Hussein’s army. In April 2003, one month into the invasion, the United States seized Baghdad.

In May, President Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech. As in Afghanistan, United States forces remained in Iraq to continue fighting insurgents loyal to Saddam’s regime. However, the violence did not abate. In 2004, Al-Qaeda committed a series of deadly suicide bombings accross Iraq. In 2006, sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites erupted into violence. And in 2011, with the country still plagued by terrorism and sectarian violence, American forces withdrew from Iraq. According to a 2006 Lancet study, 2.4 million Iraqis died during the course of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. And shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq, the terrorist group ISIS began to gain power and support, winning a string of battles against the Iraqi security forces. By 2014, ISIS controlled over 100,000 square kilometers of territory in Iraq and Syria in which nearly 12 million people lived. The American intervention succeeded in deposing Saddam’s regime, but it led to a massive loss of life and set the stage for the country to devolve into violence and chaos.

THE NATO INTERVENTION IN LIBYA In March 2011, after Muammar Gaddafi refused to step down and escalated violence against citizens protesting his dictatorial regime, NATO declared a no-fly zone over Libya, enforcing it with air strikes. In October 2011, anti-government rebels captured and killed Gaddafi. However, Libya failed to stabilize

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even after Gaddafi’s death. The rebel groups that had united against Gaddafi remained deeply divided by ideology, religion, and ethnicity, and began to fight each other for sole control over Libya. President Barack Obama said in 2016 that the worst mistake of his presidency was “failing to plan for the day after” the intervention in Libya. Today, the violence in Libya shows no sign of abating; between April and July 2019, over 1,000 people died in Tripoli as two rival rebel groups fought for control of the city. The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya may have facilitated Gaddafi’s removal from power, preventing him from committing future massacres, but it left a power vacuum in which Libya has become a failed state.

PARALLEL PROBLEMS: FALSE INTELLIGENCE AND FAILED STATE BUILDING In an interview with the HPR, Alan Kuperman, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, emphasized that the American interventions in both Iraq and Libya “were based on incorrect information.” He explained that in Iraq, “the people who wanted to overthrow Saddam put out false information that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons,” when he in fact “had halted his nuclear weapons program.” Similarly, Kuperman stated that in Libya, “the people … who wanted us to intervene against Gaddafi put out false information that he … was using planes to bomb civilians areas and was threatening to kill all the civilians.” In reality, “there was no threat by the regime to civilians … beyond a few dozen people … and there was no looming targeting of civilians of the regime.” Because the United States invoked demonstrably false information to justify its interventions in Iraq and Libya, Kuperman maintained that the military operations should have never been approved in the first place.

Additionally, due to a series of major strategic errors, the United States failed to build viable states in Iraq and Libya after deposing Saddam and Gaddafi, respectively. According to Kuperman, the Bush Administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi army “motivated an insurgency and ignited people who had been thrown out of their jobs with other folks who were religious insurgents.” While the United States succeeded in quickly toppling Saddam’s regime, the suspension of the Iraqi military directly led to the deadly insurgency that brought instability and violence to the country. Kuperman claimed that strategic errors also account for the failure to bring safety and security to Libya following the 2011 NATO intervention. He explained that “it would have been very hard to stabilize Libya without a large occupation force because the country was so atomized among hundreds of militias.” Since “no countries had [the] political will” to support a large-scale military occupation, Kuperman suggested that the Obama administration made a critical mistake in supporting intervention in Libya. By overthrowing the Gaddafi government without committing to a long-term peacebuilding plan, the United States created a power vacuum, in which rebel groups and terrorist organizations continue to fight for power.

NO PEACEBUILDING, NO PEACE In an interview with the HPR, Stephen Gent, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, emphasized the importance of peacebuilding after military

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interventions. He drew a distinction between “overthrowing a regime,” which “can be done through military action,” and fostering stability, which “is a political process that must involve several domestic actors.” Gent highlighted that while the United States succeeded in toppling the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, it was “less successful” in its goal of stabilizing the countries. As Segal explained, the United States critically underfunded diplomacy and political development in Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban government. In Iraq, meanwhile, the deadly insurgency was a direct consequence of the Bush Administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi army. And in Libya, the refusal of the American-led coalition to commit to a peacebuilding effort after intervening against Gaddafi’s regime created a power vacuum that allowed the country to spiral into chaos.

To avoid repeating the mistakes that led to instability and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the United States should only pursue regime change if it is willing to embrace the challenges of peacebuilding. According to Gent, for the peacebuilding process to succeed, “domestic actors need to build institutions that allow all societal groups to meaningfully participate in political life.” In any future interventions, the United States must strongly and consistently support these efforts after the guns fall silent. If it fails to do so, as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, future regime-change wars will similarly fail to produce meaningful peace and stability. The United States must understand that victory on the battlefield by no means guarantees the success of an intervention.

ANTI-INTERVENTIONISM: A FALSE PANACEA The United States military interventions in Afghanistan,

Iraq, and Libya are three examples of regime-change wars that failed to lead to greater stability. Given this, it is tempting — but ultimately incorrect — to draw the conclusion that pursuing regime change is inherently wrong. Today, anti-interventionism is ascendent in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump campaigned sharply against regime-change wars. Throughout the 2020 Democratic primaries, Tulsi Gabbard has built her candidacy around her opposition to military interventions resulting in regime change. Given the costly debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the appeal of pursuing an anti-interventionist foreign policy is understandable. While it may be both tempting and politically advantageous to do so, politicians should not completely disavow military interventions abroad. Nuance, not blanket statements, should characterize American foreign policy.

Kuperman, for instance, cited World War II as an example of a successful regime-change war because the Allies replaced the tyrranical regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan with stable, democratic governments. In this vein, Kuperman claimed that “with a longer historical outlook, one sees that regime change may sometimes be the best of one’s options.” At the same time, the United States must learn from the mistakes it made in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Before pursuing regime change in the future, Kupman argued that the United States must ensure that it “gets [its] intelligence right” and “[has] the stomach for the peacebuilding phase.” Unless these conditions are met, future interventions will likely lead to more violence and instability, just as the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya did. Ultimately, these interventions did significant harm and little help; it seems their only contribution was to offer the United States examples of how not to pursue regime change. 

President Bush delivers his “Mission Accomplished” speech to soldiers on the USS Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming an end to the war in Iraq.

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CULTURE

The

Bollywood Dilemma E

very year, the National Crime Records Bureau of India releases a document with updates on the prevalence of crime throughout the nation, and every year, there is seldom improvement when it comes to crimes against women.

The 338,954 crimes against women reported in 2016 marked an increase from the 309,546 incidents reported in 2013. Indian women are often assaulted by men whose intents are to “outrage [their] modesty,” the report says. Crimes against Indian women include stalking, acid attacks, voyeurism, honor killings, female infanticide, sex-selection abortions, and rape. Of the 32,559 women who reported rapes in 2017, 93.1 percent said they knew their attackers.

The prevalence and intimacy of rape in India send a clear signal of the country’s entrenched normalization of gender violence. Many factors shape and propagate India’s culture of violence towards women, including patriarchal laws, the corruption of law enforcement, cultural traditions like the dowry system, beliefs in the domestication of women through their confinement in the home, certain religious doctrines, educational institutions that do not teach gender equality and sexual rights, patriarchal workplaces, and, perhaps surprisingly, Bollywood, India’s mainstream film industry.

A close analysis of two particular features of Bollywood films underscores how Bollywood perpetuates India’s culture of gender violence and constantly places Indian women under

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Sarah Deonarain siege. While Bollywood has produced movies like Pink, Queen, Mary Kom, and Mardaani that portray strong female leads and directly address rape, marriage, gender stereotypes, and child sex trafficking, Bollywood still encourages notions of inferiority by objectifying women — specifically, through “eve-teasing” and “item” songs.

BLAMING BOLLYWOOD Eve-teasing refers to a common refrain in Bollywood films in which a man refuses to accept a woman’s rejection of his advances until she finally gives into his desires. This practice becomes incredibly dangerous when Indian men attempt to emulate the romantic successes of the male protagonists they identify with on screen. Shruti Kapoor, founder and CEO of Sayfty, a feminist Indian organization, said in an interview with the HPR that “there is no concept of consent culture in India.

The more the girl plays hard-to-get, the more exciting love is.”

Item songs, meanwhile, are popular musical interludes, often inserted into movies for entertainment and marketing purposes.

Shweta Sengar argued in Indiatimes that “an ‘item’ here is an object, translating into an objectified female.” However, Harvard professor Richard Delacy noted in an interview with the HPR that “in [the item song] ‘Dard-E-Disco’ from ‘Om Shanti Om,’ the body of Shah Rukh Khan, [the leading male actor], is objectified,

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so men can also be sexualized in these songs, too.” Gender-based violence in India certainly predates the country’s film industry, meaning that the effects of item songs can be more harmful as they play into existing inequalities and imbalances. Hypersexualized item songs and eve-teasing in Bollywood cannot be separated from sexual violence in India.

Item songs often depict women wearing revealing or modern clothing. Wearing revealing clothing is not in itself an anti-feminist act — indeed, Indian women often use clothing to celebrate modernity and reject traditions dictating how they dress and behave. Indian women increasingly wear modern pieces like cropped, midriff-baring blouses known as cholis (blouses), lowrise skirts and pants, shorts, jeans and t-shirts. However, modern clothing is weaponized in item songs, conveying the harmful notion that Indian women who wear modern, revealing clothing do so specifically for male attention.

Actresses in these songs wear this clothing while dancing provocatively in front of men who are usually drunk and making obscene gestures, throwing money and thrusting their pelvises.

These songs send the message that Indian women who wear modern clothing are promiscuous and desire sex, which can lead to rape in the real world when Indian men assume that modern clothing symbolizes sexual consent. Additionally, it convinces men that women enjoy dancing in such predatory environments.

IMAGINED STORIES, REAL CONSEQUENCES Masquerading as an embracement of sensuality, these item songs subject female bodies to objectification under the male gaze — from both the men in the film and the spectators in the audience. According to Kapoor, “[these] sensational, titillating songs [are meant] to entice the audience into watching the movie.” She noted that item songs gain more international acclaim than their corresponding movies because they are widely available through YouTube and other free platforms, so movies often get reduced to these songs and their disparaging messages.

The harms of eve-teasing and item songs come together in “Jumma Chumma De De” — “Give Me a Kiss” — in which one woman, clothed in an ostentatious red dress and sporting bright red lipstick, dances onstage in a huge crowd of men. The song features a call-and-response between the woman saying “Do not kiss me!” and the men responding with “Give me a kiss!” As the men refuse to accept the woman’s rejection of their advances, thrusting their pelvises and waving beer mugs, she smiles and casts seductive glances to the crowd. At one point, the men soak her with a hose and the lead actor picks her up and throws her into the crowd — in response, she splashes around excitedly. And after the men surround her as she spins in circles around a pole, the song culminates with her kissing the lead actor, leaving red kiss marks on his face. The song portrays harassment as an enjoyable experience, sending the message that her early refusals were flirtatious and not genuine.

Organizations like Feminism in India argue that these songs legitimize sexual harassment; last year, they shared a video claiming that “the choreography of item songs often simulate mass molestation or gang rape.” This is evident in “Baby Doll,” when actress Sunny Leone lies naked on top of a mass of hands touching her. The lyrics of item songs often compare women to consumable objects like tandoori murgi, a chicken dish, or afghan jalebi, a sweet dessert. One disturbing line from the song

“Tu Mere Agal Bagal Hai,” “Hai tujh pe right mera, tu hai delight mera, tera rasta joh roku tokne ka nahi,” translates to: “I have every right on you, If I block your path, don’t protest.” The implications of this language speak for themselves. Joyce Connolly, CEO of Snehalaya UK, another feminist Indian organization, told the HPR that she has “always been concerned about Bollywood,” particularly given the “large age gaps in relationships on screen between young women and old men,” another characteristic feature of these films.

These item songs often come abruptly in the narratives of these films, entertaining men in the audience with female sexuality and using women and their bodies as marketing strategies.

A study by Oxfam India reported that 95 percent of young girls surveyed said that boys played these derogatory songs when they walked by, using them as “tools for sexual harassment.” For Kapoor, this link is unsurprising: “When you make light of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, or rape, that is rape culture.”

But what about the women playing these roles? Popular “feminist” actresses like Priyanka Chopra, Aishwariya Rai, Kareena Kapoor, and Deepika Padukone appear to sign up for these derogatory roles in exchange for generous paychecks, either not realizing or disregarding the consequences of these portrayals of women. But the muddling of reel and real into one gross, sexualized amalgamation directly disservices Indian women by justifying and exacerbating violence against them. According to Kapoor, “it used to be that only struggling actresses would take up item songs, but because of their popularity, famous actresses now do item songs as well.” Since these women wield more cultural power, the perpetuation of rape culture through Bollywood increases.

A RESPONSIBLE REMAKE Cinema infiltrates people’s homes and minds, and they retain and carry images from these films that encourage men to relentlessly pursue women or view women as sexual objects. Bollywood does not realize its power as an affordable, accessible, and hugely popular cultural medium. Because it has not recognized this significance, Bollywood has not taken responsibility for the consequences of phenomena like item songs and eve-teasing.

Crucially, beyond a few pioneering directors, Bollywood stakeholders have failed to recognize their positive potential to lead their country in fighting against sexual violence and for gender equality.

Delacy ultimately concluded that “there should be space for films that are purely light and entertaining, but [filmmakers should] definitely be aware that they have a social responsibility.

[They should] add to important conversations and help Indian people have a more complex understanding of their society.”

Bollywood wields enough power to incite social change; with a rate of 1000 movies per year and an audience of approximately 4 billion viewers around the world, India’s film industry is the largest globally. Bollywood can thus begin to reverse the damage it has done by making more feminist films, by directly addressing gender violence in India, and by confronting those who stand against equality for women. Bollywood can save India by deliberately cultivating a new Indian culture that uplifts women.

As long as one Indian woman is raped every four minutes, Bollywood must start using its 24 frames per second to make a difference. 

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The Factory of Words

Aliénor Manteau

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anguage is not static. English, particularly, is flexible and inconsistent. Perhaps English’s development into a contemporary ‘global language’ or lingua franca is due in part to its lack of a formal regulatory body. Though English Enlightenment writers Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift debated the issue, and Americans John Adams and John Quincy Adams suggested the creation of an institution that would “collect, interchange, and diffuse literary intelligence” to “promote the purity and uniformity of the English language,” today there is still no institution to regulate English. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, adapts itself to the changing nature of the language rather than dictating it.

French, on the other hand, is under the official control of the Académie Française — the French Academy. The Academy was created in 1635 under Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to Louis XIII who fundamentally altered French government and society by consolidating the power of the king, laying the foundation for an absolute monarchy. Though François I’s 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets made French, rather than Latin, the administrative and judiciary language of the kingdom, until 1635 no serious philosophical text had been written in French.

The language was still in great flux, in transition between the vernacular and the official state language. Richelieu saw the institutionalization of the French language as an instrument of political and cultural unity, as France transitioned from a feudal kingdom to a nation-state.

Since 1635, the French Academy’s principal function has been to “work, with all possible care and diligence, to create fixed rules for our language as to make it pure, eloquent, and capable of addressing the arts and sciences.” The Academy’s primary mission, then, is the consolidation and creation of French words into a comprehensive dictionary. A regulatory body and a semipolitical institution, perhaps the French Academy could even be called a factory of words.

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LA FABRIQUE DES MOTS In 2013, Erik Orsenna, one of the Academy’s 36 members — unofficially known as “immortals” — wrote and published a short novel entitled “La Fabrique des Mots” — The Factory of Words, which my French grandfather gave me for Christmas five years ago. I read it that very night, captivated by the young protagonist, Jeanne. When a narrow-minded dictator named Nécrole restricts all use of language to a ridiculous list of 12 verbs, Jeanne works to protect language with the help of her classmates and teacher. Jeanne learns about the diversity of the French language through its Greek, Latin, and Arabic roots, which appear in modern French words ranging from écureuil to domicile to algèbre.

At the crux of “La Fabrique des Mots” is the factory of words itself. In the middle of the forest, far from civilization, is an abandoned gold mine where the creators of new words found refuge after Nécrole outlawed language. A man Jeanne refers to as “the Elegant” teaches Jeanne’s class about the process of maintaining the French language: Whenever a new English word arrives, a French equivalent is created from a series of labeled boxes — “prefixes” and “suffixes,” as well as “Greek,” “Latin,” and “other” roots. This process corresponds to the real Academy’s own inventions: For example, ordinateur replaces “computer,” logiciel, “software,” and courriel, “e-mail.” “La Fabrique des Mots,” therefore, is quite directly the Academy’s defense of the Academy.

HERO OR VILLAIN? Yet would it not be possible to recast the Academy as the villain Nécrole? Having an official dictionary necessarily limits the number of ‘real’ French words. The Elegant praises the young students, saying that it is thanks to them that the French

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language will be saved, yet the Academy despises slang, the language of young people. And the Factory’s battle against English words, or anglicization, is in many ways a denial of the natural evolution of a language. If society and words are truly inseparable, why must there even be a factory?

Two recent articles in the New York Times denounced the Academy completely. From an American, or even English, standpoint, the institutionalization of language seems like a “deadlocked” practice: archaic, stale, and impossible. Yet as I have reread “La Fabrique des Mots” — many times — it has taught me that society influences language just as much as it is shaped by it, and that attempts to control and restrict words are both harmful and futile. If this is the message that the “immortals” are sending, perhaps the Academy’s agenda is not as restrictive as it may appear.

The Academy’s main role is the preservation and expansion of French, rather than restriction. Recently, the Academy approved the feminization of professional titles, making it possible, for example, to call a female French president a feminine présidente. The word for “author,” auteur, can now be feminized as autrice, following French word structure, whereas the neologism auteure — though it sounds more natural — is discouraged. In an interview with the HPR, Clémence Pénicaut, a Parisian school teacher, commented on this change: “I think it is important to feminize words even if I’m not very comfortable with everything … autrice, for example, I find a little jarring! Auteure seems better, but that’s silly. We’re just not used to it yet,” she explained. When asked how she views the work of the Academy in terms of the development of the French language, she said: “It’s not indispensable, but it’s interesting to see how methodologically they work, even though it is common usage that decides on the ultimate outcome.”

This is why, though its decisions can be controversial, the existence of the Academy is not hotly contested in France. Unlike Nécrole, the Academy does not enforce its rulings on French grammar and vocabulary. There is no punishment for saying the word “deodorant,” though the Academy prefers désodorant, nor are there sanctions for using the anglicism “curry” over the more faithful term cari. In the end, the Academy exists to update and expand the French language, but it cannot enforce its decisions against the people.

And indeed, many young people reject the language of the Academy, preferring to embrace a more dynamic and egalitarian process of language formation. “The French Academy is a controversial institution whose reforms are far from popular,” explained Hortense Gaffinel, a law student in Paris, in an interview with the HPR. She expanded on her reservations, saying: “It’s a great institution which from the time of Richelieu has seen the French language evolve, but one could say that it is inaccessible to a great majority of the population and is reserved for the elite.” Ultimately, she agreed that “French follows trends more than [it follows] the Academy.”

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This influence is due to a variety of factors — French lacks words for certain things and concepts, while English is more concise and permeates younger generations through popular culture.

Newspapers and advertisements also play a role: As Catherine Frammery remarked in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, the press is both “the guardian and the modernizer” of language, and for most journals, the brevity of an anglicism such as “remake” is preferred over the French nouvelle adaptation.

The 1994 Toubon Law, which mandates the use of the French language in official publications, workplaces, and advertisements — ensuring that any English phrase will have a French translation — marks an attempt by the French government to minimize the impact of English. However, rather than curtailing the evolution of language, the law merely serves to promote national unity and guarantee the language skills of every French citizen, since passing a spoken French exam is required to become a citizen. Therefore, though French is both preserved and adapted by the government, it may still adopt outside influences through regular people.

THE FUTURE OF FRENCH David Gva, a student in Geneva, Switzerland, spoke with the HPR about the Academy’s role in French society today. “The Academy’s function is now honorific,” David explained. “The initial mission is to preserve the French language. They’re here to ensure that the French language doesn’t decay, to preserve a patrimony that is backed by the best French writers … [because] French vocabulary should be self-sufficient.”

When asked whether the Academy’s influence is ultimately positive, negative, or neutral, he said: “It’s positive, it’s useful in the sense that the French language should remain unique.

Essentially, it worked really well up to a certain point, and now, with the speed at which new information is shared and the fact that the working world and the world of technology are dominated by English, the Academy has taken part in attempting to ensure that French remains independent from English. This goal can be understood.”

The French Academy has always been indivisible from the question of French unity. As the French language questions its own identity, the French people must understand what it means for their language to be closely tied to the state and yet dependent on the will of the people. The Academy may provide guidelines to follow, but French speakers themselves must ultimately determine the direction in which their language evolves. This is a great responsibility.

Perhaps it would be useful to take a page out of “La Fabrique des Mots,” in which Jeanne, too, comes to understand the inseparability of society and language: “We must remind ourselves,” explains Jeanne, “of what we owe to the words, we who respect them so little even though they are our oldest and most loyal friends. Yes, we humans created the words. But they, in return, have not ceased to invent us.” 

The most influential “trend” in the French language today is undoubtedly anglicism. Most of the new words the Academy creates are direct responses to the spread of English. The global use of English is seen as a threat to the individuality of French, as increasing numbers of French words find English replacements.

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Not so Black and White Srividya Maganti

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ince 1944, Middle Eastern- and North African-Americans have been legally “white,” having to check the “white” box on demographic surveys like the U.S. census. The reason for this classification can be traced to the 19th century, when MENA Christians who intended to immigrate to the United States identified as “Caucasian” to evade restrictive and racist immigration policies. Perhaps the fact that many MENA individuals are “white-passing” — having phenotypic features that allow them to be perceived as white and thus access some degree of white privilege — is another reason for this classification. Moreover, research shows that some MENA-Americans, particularly those who historically immigrated from Lebanon or Syria and who are non-Muslim, older, and more educated are more likely to identify as “white” than as “Arab-American.”

However, within the last few years, the decades-old movement for creating a separate MENA category on the U.S. census has been reinvigorated, shedding light on how MENA identity differs from mainstream white identity. In examining how the experiences of MENA-Americans differ from those of European descent, it becomes clear that MENA-Americans are marginalized in ways that European white Americans are not, and that MENA-Americans share a unique cultural background. These salient differences in privilege and culture between MENAand white Americans, as well as the benefits that the addition of a MENA category would bring, necessitate the addition of a MENA category on the census and other demographic surveys.

DEFINITIONAL DIFFERENCES In arguing for the MENA-white distinction, one might consider a definition of race that is both biological and cultural.

Traditionally, race is seen as a phenotypic category: The American Sociological Association defines race as “physical differences that groups and cultures consider socially significant.” The physical differences that the United States — and much of the Western world — considers “socially significant” are reflected in the racial categorization scheme of the U.S. census, which includes the categories “White, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander.” Ethnicity is a related but distinct concept, referring to “shared culture, such as language, ancestry, practices, and beliefs.” Even accepting this restrictive definition of race as purely physical, a significant portion of MENA individuals are visibly non-white; this alone is evidence of the need for a MENA racial category.

However, scholars argue that one’s race is dependent not only on physical features, but also on religion, culture, and migratory experience. Using this definition of race, MENA-Americans are different from European white Americans in that many are recent immigrants, many are Muslim, and all share a distinctive Middle Eastern culture that is separate from European culture.

“It is the culture — the food, the language — that bring people of this region together,” Rumaitha Al Busaidi, a Harvard Kennedy School student from Oman, said in an interview with the HPR.

THE PLIGHT OF MENA-AMERICANS Americans of MENA origin experience disadvantage and discrimination that is unique; as such, they lack white privilege. A variety of factors make the MENA-American experience

challenging and at times traumatic — they often carry historical traumas experienced in countries of origin and during the process of immigration and resettlement, and must navigate a hostile American environment as well. Extreme American national policies such as increased surveillance and policing of MENA-Americans, as well as negative stereotypical portrayals of MENA-Americans in the media, add to the psychological stress faced by MENA-Americans. And this officially sanctioned discrimination has only worsened with the actions and policies of the Trump Administration, most notably the “Muslim Ban,” which prohibits residents of six MENA countries from traveling to the United States and effectively suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

These macro-level factors facilitate the potential for microlevel aggressions, which occur on the daily, interpersonal level, and result in further trauma. Discrimination, xenophobia, harrassment, and exclusion are familiar to many MENAAmericans, challenging the notion that their experience can be understood as white. White Americans of European origin do not typically face the structural and interpersonal forms of discrimination and trauma that many MENA-Americans do. For Al Busaidi, even quotidian interactions are often impacted by her race, which others are quick to perceive given her dark complexion and hijab. “If I were to walk into a store, I would have a very different conversation than a white person would have. I would be asked ‘Where do you come from?’ I would perhaps be asked about religion or U.S. foreign policy.”

UNDERSTANDING DISCRIMINATION In the context of the War on Terror and recent American interventions in the Middle East, MENA-Americans have become increasingly racialized, categorized as distinctly “Middle Eastern” as a result of both external and internal processes. This heightened racialization in turn amplifies racial differences and provides a greater basis for prejudice and discrimination.

“White fear” is one reason for the growing racialization of MENA-Americans. Cases of radical Islamist terrorism like the September 11 attacks have exacerbated xenophobia and Islamophobia, with white Americans increasingly viewing MENAAmericans as threats. Al Busaidi described the stereotypes through which white Americans tend to (mis)understand the Middle East: “People paint a picture of MENA countries as being places of rebellion and violence, societies where women don’t have rights. Media coverage makes it seem like MENA people are the source of all the problems in the world.”

The conflation of MENA and Muslim identity is a salient factor in explaining the increased racialization of MENA Americans. Al Busaidi, herself a Muslim, attested to this phenomenon.

“There is a big misconception that everyone from MENA comes from a certain religion. Not everyone from the region is Muslim.” The Islamophobia that has grown in the wake of terrorist attacks thus becomes directed toward MENA people more generally.

Americans also tend to think in a dichotomous racial binary, which leads to selective racialization. In order to conform to the traditional “white-nonwhite” paradigm, in-between populations like MENA are categorized on either side depending on their favorability to the white group. Members of the white ingroup subconsciously categorize favored and famous MENA individu-

WINTER 2019 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 43

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als as white and categorize infamous and disfavored MENA individuals as Middle Eastern. Consider famous MENA individuals such as Andre Agassi, Ralph Nader, or Shakira, who are all seen as “white,” and contrast them with Osama Bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini, who are seen as “Middle Eastern.”

Internal racialization plays a role here, too: In order to evade racial discrimination, many MENA-Americans assimilate with white identity, perhaps even subconsciously. Michel Nehme, a Lebanese-Australian student at Harvard College and the assistant program director at the Project on Shiism and Global Affairs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, described this trend in an Australian context during an interview with the HPR. “When you have particularly Islamophobic tendencies, you will see ethnic enclaves tighten and you’ll see people who diverge from those ethnic enclaves trying to become as white as possible. In Western Sydney, there is a dense population of Shiite and Christian Lebanese who have become autonomous, while many Lebanese outside that space have become incredibly westernized.”

Although this response may alleviate experiences of discrimination, it impedes efforts at fostering group solidarity, undermining civil rights efforts as MENA individuals are not recognized as a disadvantaged minority group. Indeed, studies have shown that because MENA identity is often conflated with whiteness, the group is understudied, effectively discounting its unique challenges and experiences and furthering its marginalization.

THE CENSUS SOLUTION The addition of a MENA box on the national census questionnaire would allow many MENA-Americans to more accurately express their identity. The broad group contains a diversity of identities, with members identifying as white, non-white, or something in between. Nehme, who was raised in Australia and has Lebanese parents, told the HPR that he would identify as both MENA and white, acknowledging that his white-passing status allows him to enjoy privileges that others with darker complexions and more typical MENA features would not. But he also identifies with being MENA, having been raised with elements of Lebanese culture in a way that sets him apart from the typical white Australian. On the other hand, Al Busaidi would not — and does not — identify as white. The addition of a MENA box, she said, would more precisely encapsulate her race.

Moreover, this addition serves as a symbolic gesture — it acknowledges the presence of a unique Middle Eastern identity that is also very much American. Nehme noted that “it can come across as flippant for a census to acknowledge the differences between Caucasian and Asian-American, between Caucasian and African-American, etc. It seems like an omission [to leave out MENA]; it seems like they’re saying the Middle Eastern community isn’t as tied up in U.S. life as these other ethnicities.”

But the impacts are pragmatic as well; as Khaled Beydoun wrote in Al Jazeera, the resulting “data would benefit Arab Americans with regard to state services, political organisation and influence, as well as research and healthcare.”

And in an interview with the HPR, Yael Berda, assistant professor in sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, emphasized the material benefits of adding a MENA category to the census. “Having categories for a group

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means that they can request allocation of funds and show previous discrimination” Berda explained. “And as we’ve seen with the addition of the Hispanic/Latino category on the census, once there is a more accurate data on the racial makeup of a population, media outlets better cater to a particular population and politicians better serve the needs of their constituents.”

Nehme reiterated this point: “It is important for MENAAmericans to feel like … they can mobilize as a voting block, especially in the face of Islamophobic tendencies. Currently, they are treated and feel like disparate communities in America, lacking strong ties and the ability to politically mobilize.”

Some argue that it might be better to be part of the “hegemonic category,” and that Middle Eastern communities in the United States actually benefit from the existing census structure.

Berda acknowledged that a danger in classifying MENA populations is that enforcement agencies may more easily surveil and discriminate against them. “It depends on who has access to the information: enforcement agencies, corporate powers, or public leaders? But regardless, as long as there is a category, it may be deployed by anyone. This is a very real concern.” But these risks of discrimination seem to reflect the existing prejudices that MENA-Americans face, and the fight against this discrimination requires accurate data. Transparency about how the data would be used, as well as restrictions against using it for targeted discrimination, may help to ameliorate this concern.

Throughout American history, the definition of whiteness has expanded and contracted, from the exclusion of Southern and Eastern Europeans from the white racial category in the 19th century to the inclusion of Middle Easterners and North Africans in the white racial category in the 21st century. History has shown us that race is dynamic in nature and constantly evolving. Given their physical and cultural differences, social and political realities, and unique histories, it is time that MENA-Americans be given a census option that better encapsulates their lived experiences. 

BOB COHN INTERVIEWS

PRESIDENT OF THE ATLANTIC

with Mikael Tessema

B

ob Cohn is currently serving as a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Cohn is the former president of The Atlantic, a literary and cultural commentary magazine distributed in print and online founded in 1857. Before working at The Atlantic, Cohn worked for Newsweek and Wired magazines.

Cohn has been named publishing executive of the year by Adweek and was president of The Atlantic over the time period that saw it win magazine of the year in 2016 and best website in 2013 from the National Magazine Awards.

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Harvard Political Review: What did you do before coming to Harvard?

Bob Cohn: I’ve been a long-time journalist in a variety of different roles. My most recent role was at The Atlantic, where I was for five years the editor of our digital operations, TheAtlantic. com, some other digital properties we had, and then for the last five years I was president of The Atlantic.

HPR: Many journalists have expressed concern that changing media consumption habits will endanger traditional news sources. How did you deal with this shift when you were at The Atlantic?

BC: The major story of my eleven years at The Atlantic was the shift from print to digital. When I got to The Atlantic in 2009, we were basically a print magazine with a small digital presence and a small live events business. And over the course of those 10 or 11 years, we became much more multi-platform and shifted both our delivery patterns of our journalism and the revenue sources that we had into a much more digital environment, to the point where when I left we were getting more than 80 percent of our revenue through non-print sources; when I arrived it was 20 percent.

HPR: Did you get any pushback to any of the reforms you proposed to meet that challenge, and if you did, how did you address them?

BC: It’s funny, the story of legacy media transforming into digital operations when they’ve been successful has largely come with pushback. If you look at the successful transition properties — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, some of the networks, etc., not to mention a lot of legacy magazines from Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Hearst — pushback is fairly common. The Atlantic was a little bit different in that we were a relatively small business when I arrived. There had been no recorded evidence of The Atlantic ever making a profit in its previous 150 years, so it was largely a magazine where wealthy men lost a tiny portion of their wealth over time. So whereas the New York Times or Time Magazine or Vogue Magazine need to worry about the shift away from the huge amounts of money they were making in print, The Atlantic was never making huge amounts of money in print. So the tension you would get from diverting, pushing away from print was not there. In fact, for us it was more existential — to find a digital footing, to get a digital audience, and to get digital revenue — than it was for some of those other properties. And we largely grew our way out of the problem. Whereas these other properties had to migrate people from their print platforms to their digital, and they had to teach print writers how to write for the web, teach print salesmen how to sell for the web, we largely hired our way out of the problem because we were a relatively small staff. So it was almost completely additive, and as a result a lot of internal tension was avoided.

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HPR: Thinking not only about the shift toward digital media but toward shifting media consumption patterns, especially social media, do you think that shift has been good or bad for journalism on the whole?

BC: We can talk about Facebook as what I think of as a “frenemy” of The Atlantic and other publications, but on the “friend” side it was a huge driver of audience. When I got to The Atlantic we had two million monthly unique visitors, and when I left my editorial role we had about 20 million uniques; we grew about 10-fold during that period. And some of that was through increasing our staff and increasing our output of stories and getting better at the business and the journalism of digital, but a lot of that was on the back of social, and Facebook — the amplifying effect of Facebook was a huge bonus for us. On the flip side, when you’re in Facebook Instant Articles or you’re in the Facebook environment, you don’t really own the relationship with the reader. And so, sometimes, they’re reading your content within the Facebook ecosystem and not The Atlantic ecosystem — there’s still ad revenue but it’s not as much ad revenue as there might have been because you’re sharing it with Facebook or with Apple News. So these social platforms have been excellent for overall boosting the size of the audience, but the cost is that the data and the relationship can sometimes be owned by the platform and not by the publication.

HPR: You mentioned Facebook. Do you think attacks against “fake news” by the president have been received any differently by long-form outlets like The Atlantic than your peers in cable news?

BC: Well I think the question of fake news — or the allegation and the bumper sticker of fake news — has put publications like The Atlantic and others really on notice. It is always imperative to get your facts right and be accurate, because that’s the duty of good journalism. Now you have the added layer of this administration using the allegations of mistakes and so-called fake news as a political weapon, and attacking the press and journalists by name and publications by name, and they’ve been endangering the work journalists do, but that’s not really per se part of fake news. But the obligation to get it right is all the more essential, not just as a duty to your profession, but because you can’t give the president any ammunition to attack the First Amendment.

HPR: On that note, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of magazine writing compared to traditional newspaper reporting?

BC: The distinction between straight-ahead newspaper reporting and what we think of magazine reporting — which, in fact, is also practiced by newspapers, you know, the New York Times does excellent what we might call “magazine-style” reporting — because if you think about the province of magazines historically as analysis, and synthesis, and explanatory journalism, and narrative-driven journalism, those are things that magazines have done very well over a century. Those are also things that

INTERVIEWS

great newspapers do. So those things have been blurred, and [although] I think of The Atlantic as a magazine — we come out once a month in print — by far, the size of our audience, the size of our revenue, the size of our staff, those are driven by our digital platform, not our print platform. And yet we still think of ourselves as a real-time magazine, so we’re not in there with deep reporters covering every turn of the wheel on news. But you take a big news day like yesterday — when the speaker announces they’re going to open an impeachment inquiry — The Atlantic is in there writing about that, but trying to bring instant context and analysis, and not straight-ahead “here’s what the House caucus is doing right now,” but to back up and put it in some kind of context relative to Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, to talk about Trump’s norm-busting behavior in some kind of historical context, but in there in real time, and I think that there’s been a kind of convergence between magazine journalism and traditional newspaper journalism and even broadcast journalism. The web has made a great convergence possible, I think.

HPR: Looking back at your vision of the future of digital media 10 or even five years ago when you took the helm of The Atlantic, how accurate do you think your predictions, if you made any, turned out?

BC: I don’t think we had any idea what we were getting into.

When I arrived at The Atlantic — first for the editorial job before I became president — the goal was simply to try to transition this great print magazine onto a digital footing and secure it and future-proof it going forward. I don’t think we knew what that meant in 2009 and 2010, we didn’t anticipate podcasting, video — web video existed, obviously but we didn’t know what role it would play, Facebook was around but the power of Facebook to drive audience hadn’t really been tapped into yet — Facebook wasn’t really a news operation, it was still a photos and friends kind of stuff. Twitter had been around for a couple of years, but it also didn’t have the kind of power it has now. So the important thing — and what made us lucky at The Atlantic — is to have some values that you know you stand for. We had 160 years of editorial values to guide us to be experimental, to be entrepreneurial, and to be willing to imagine that the founders of The Atlantic — Emerson and Thoreau and Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe — would be tweeting, would have podcasts, would be on Facebook. They would use the modern tools to tell their stories, just like they used print back in the 19th century.

HPR: Thinking about how those values have been taking shape, how do you think your business leadership has been shaped by your time as a journalist?

BC: It was somewhat unusual that the person running The Atlantic as president came out of journalism, as I did for more than 25 years before I became president. And there might be some demerits in that, because I didn’t come out of finance or sales or marketing, but the upside is I came out of the editorial side, and I would think of it as, if you’re running Ford Motor, it’s nice to have spent some time on the factory floor. And I really know the product of The Atlantic, which is that we create content. If you’ll

excuse the term, we are journalists. And it takes a lot of people — you know, the newsroom is less than half the size of the whole company — because we have all kinds of other job categories outside of the content creators, outside of the journalists, but the product we create is stories for readers, and that’s kind of baked into my background and my DNA and my experience as a reporter and a writer and an editor and a newsroom manager.

And I think that there was some advantage to that when it came time to lead the whole organization.

HPR: Looking back on all the changes in your time in journalism and as a business leader, what would you say was the most pivotal moment in your career?

BC: Well oddly, it was many years ago. My first 10 years out of college I worked at Newsweek in Washington. And your listeners may not even know what Newsweek was or is, but Newsweek and Time were the great news weeklies at a moment when the news weeklies really were at a pinnacle of power in the national conversation. And I spent 10 years there — minus a little bit of graduate school — and my last role was covering first the Supreme Court and the Justice Department and the FBI and the Washington legal beat, and then I spent three years covering the Clinton White House. And so you asked what was a pivotal decision, it was leaving that and going to California to become a magazine editor when I hadn’t had any editing experience outside my college newspaper — and I had been a writer and reporter — and to do so not in mainstream journalism, but I went back to the magazine at my alma mater, Stanford, and I was the editor and also the publisher of Stanford Magazine for a little over three years. That set me off on a course first to be an editor — just a roll-up-your-sleeve story editor — but also to be the leader of a small organization. We only had 12 people and a relatively small budget, but I was 32 and I was in charge of it, and that was an important moment for me to say, “Okay, I kind of like this, I get to make decisions about what the cover is, and what the cover language is, and what stories we write, who writes them and how much we pay them, and then eventually how we fund the magazine with advertising and contributions from readers, etc.”

So that kind of set me off on a different direction as an editor and a manager, and then I got back into more mainstream journalism at Conde Nast when I went to Wired magazine. But I had the tools of having been a very mainstream reporter at Newsweek, plus having some management and leadership experience at this quirky but awesome little magazine. And so I think that was important for me. And then definitely moving from the editorial side to the business side, which was a little more unusual as I was saying. And just to broaden the horizon, being someone who runs a media company in 2020 is quite a bit different and I would suspect more interesting than it was say 40 years ago or 30 years ago when I was starting this because the terrain is so much more complicated, and figuring out the way forward with all of the opportunities and challenges that the media business presents right now makes running these companies much more of an intellectual puzzle than it might have been say 30 years ago when it was more of a transactional advertising relationship with your funding sources. So that’s been a really interesting shift for me as well. 

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ENDPAPER

TO MAKE A MAGAZINE

Drew Pendergrass

T

he ‘group project’ is, in my experience, the worst part of high school. More a game of chicken than a collaborative effort, the goal of a group project is to do as little work as possible in the hope that your partners panic and pick up the slack before the deadline. Because I did not yet understand the free-rider problem, I usually blinked first, scrambling through a massive pile of work in the middle of the night. The final grade was never good. From my perspective, this was a grave injustice: Teachers were penalizing me for the (in)actions of others. The 1949 Geneva Conventions say collective punishment is a war crime, I thought, so drag the pedagogical radicals to the Hague.

When I came to college, I was excited to put the horrors of collaboration behind me. It is strange, then, that I voluntarily spent over a year helping to organize the biggest, unruliest group project I have had the privilege to join. Every issue of the Harvard Political Review is the product of about 50 writers, editors, designers, photographers, business managers, coders, and staffers. As publisher, my job was to make sure that everyone got along well enough to make magazines and to maintain the website. This was very hard. I can think of no other organization on campus that collects everyone from socialists to Tea Party conservatives, much less one that asks them to produce around 200 color pages per year and mail them around the world.

Yet the HPR works, the same way that a bumblebee mysteriously manages to fly with a tiny pair of wings. To give you an idea about how unlikely this is, in my time as publisher we had a multiweek disagreement about the title of our longform initiative — Red Line — because it sounds like “redlining,” the racially charged practice of denying services based on residential zones.

Although the debate was relatively mild, ultimately resolved by making the logo clearly reference the Red Line from the Boston T subway system, it shows how principled our staffers are, how willing they are to challenge decisions and take a stand. I was first drawn to the HPR because of this vibrant spirit of dissent, although this culture makes it a challenging group to manage.

The most astonishing thing is that the HPR works without the normal institutions that resolve extreme disagreement, such as an arbitration system. The only real rule is that the magazine itself does not take editorial positions — if it did there would be riots, because our writers are a wonderfully angry bunch who can disagree with anything.

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The HPR functions for two simple reasons: (1) everyone on the HPR cares about making something good, and (2) they are held to a strict deadline. Deadlines are important, because people have an incredible capacity to resolve passionate disagreements if they need to send a magazine to the printer in the next 12 hours. Plus, since everyone is invested in the organization, no one is willing to tank the project if they do not get their way.

I have come to believe that strong leadership is just a matter of finding good people, letting them do what they love, and giving them totally made-up due dates. In this environment, collaboration emerges naturally between the most unlikely people, like that song featuring both Coldplay and Rihanna.

The most important thing about the HPR is that it does not ask people to compromise their beliefs. I think that good conversations about politics can only occur with an expectation of disagreement. If I end up agreeing with someone I am debating, it usually means we did not differ substantially in the first place.

As publisher, when I set a deadline, I was only asking the staff to turn in a PDF by a certain date. I was not asking that they be happy with it, or for it to represent an optimum middle ground of the opinions of the people behind the scenes. After all, a good magazine should have a bit of fire in it.

Op-ed columnists around the country lament the lack of civility in American politics today. They get upset when students protest a speaker, or when people have a hard time reaching a middle ground. I tend to believe that passionate disagreement is normal, and that wishing for anything else is a fantasy — certain groups of people have incommensurable interests. If anything, democracy thrives when people show in public how different their beliefs are; disagreement makes our ideological fault lines clearer, giving people more ability to position themselves according to their needs and values.

I would love to bring one of these op-ed columnists to the HPR, because our little magazine perfectly shows how people can learn from each other and work together without agreeing even once — again, and this cannot be repeated enough: The key to collaboration across difference is deadlines. After all, there are great benefits to a bit of incivility during sharp debates on matters of principle. I have sharpened my arguments by reading articles I disagree with. I have even, on occasion, changed my mind. 

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