NEWS: REPARATORY JUSTICE

from Scout Cambridge March/April 2020 Issue

LOVE LETTER TO CAMBRIDGE

REPARATORY JUSTICE: A LOOK AT THE HARVARD PRISON DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGN

BY ELIE LEVINE

When Harvard University student Jarrett Drake worked on a class project regarding the school’s investments in prisons in the fall of 2017, he didn’t expect it to garner national attention and spark widespread campus action in the following three years.

The class had focused on incarceration, ending with a final creative project. Drake dove into the project with his classmate, Graduate School of Design student Sam Matthew. Throughout the course of their research, Drake and Matthew discovered that Harvard’s $40 billion endowment includes holdings in companies that profit from the prison-industrial complex. The result of their project was Harvard’s Investments in Prisons (HIP), a look at the school’s investments in the prisonindustrial complex (PIC), which later grew into a full-fledged activist group: the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign (HPDC).

A MOVEMENT IS BORN

According to Rachel Herzing, co-founder of the grassroots organization Critical Resistance, the PIC is composed of “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to what are, in actuality, economic social, and political ‘problems.’” This means that private prison businesses gain profit from incarceration, rather than tackling the problems that lead to imprisonment at their roots.

Most of the university’s investments are not public. However, of the holdings it does disclose, $3 million are invested in the PIC, the HPDC found. This number includes investments in private prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group. It also includes exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—which are bundles of stocks and bonds—bound up in these private prison companies, as well as companies that profit from the PIC through bail bonds, surveillance, prison labor, transportation, and other services for public and private prisons.

For the better part of 2018, Matthew and Drake took the data they had gathered about the PIC for the project. In February 2018, Drake, along with a group of other Harvard students, held a teach-in on Harvard’s investments in prisons.

He says 10 people attended the first interest meeting on March 2, 2018, and meetings continued throughout the semester.

Drawing on resources from a widespread network within and outside of Harvard, Matthew and Drake launched what would become the HPDC in the fall of 2018. At the time, it bore the same name as their project: HIP.

Though he changed the group’s name to HPDC in October to more directly reflect the group’s mission, Drake’s definition of the organization’s goals at that time still stands.

While Drake learned that the problem of the PIC was a national one, with effects that spread far beyond Harvard’s borders, he also witnessed the movement’s growth within the undergraduate and graduate communities at Harvard—from the School of Public Health to the Divinity School to the School of Education, Law School, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, as well as the Business School and the Graduate School of Design.

On Nov. 1, 2018, HPDC hosted an open forum at the Law School where they presented a more extensive breakdown of their research and mission. The HPDC has now blossomed into a group of students actively working to sever Harvard’s financial ties to the PIC.

Among HPDC’s ranks are Amanda Chan and Anna Nathanson, both third-year Harvard Law School students; Ismail Buffins, a third-year Divinity School student; and Drake, a third-year Ph.D. student in anthropology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

‘THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY’

The HPDC has been escalating its efforts during the past year. The group circulated a petition in February 2019 that garnered 3,000 signatures and presented it to University President Larry Bacow on March 1, 2019. They also held a rally of 200 people, mostly students, and asked the undergraduate student government to vote in support of divestment. When Bacow gave a speech at a gender inequality conference at Harvard, the HPDC came with a banner that communicated that gender inequality persists in prisons.

Chan explains that the group met with Bacow and Senior Fellow William Lee in the fall of 2019, where the administrators gave their “usual spiel about how they’re not going to listen to us or help us or take us seriously.” The students followed up with a silent protest at a talk Lee gave at Harvard Law School’s 45th Annual Fall Reunion. “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings,” one sign read.

“Harvard only fights for

progressive causes when it benefits them,” Chan says, adding that Bacow and Lee are proud to have been on the right side of affirmative action because it was in their interest.

Bacow published an oped in The Harvard Crimson condemning the protesters who attempted to draw attention to PIC divestment at an event held in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Kennedy School. In the op-ed, Bacow criticizes the HPDC for infringing upon his free speech.

“A university committed to truth cannot function if some members of our community shout down others,” Bacow says in the statement.

At one action, a Harvard University police officer asked Chan to take down a sign she was using to protest as Bacow watched it happen. She condemns Harvard’s administrators for repeatedly not taking her complaints seriously.

“We even had that meeting with them in October. They all went around the table and agreed it was an important issue and they all said it was worth discussing,” Chan says. “But none of them— not a single one of them—stuck their necks out and said, ‘We should seriously consider this because we want Harvard to be on the right side of history.’”

In response to the claims members of the HPDC have leveled against the university, Jason Newton, Associate Director of Media Relations & Communications in Harvard’s office of Public Affairs & Communications, refers to an article in The Harvard Crimson

from October of last year.

According to the article, the HPDC walked out of a meeting with Bacow and the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CSSR) when the administrators did not provide a yes-or-no answer to the question of whether they would consider divestment. The CSSR is a sub-committee of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing body, which handles investments.

At the meeting, Lee, senior fellow at Harvard, said that he had read the report and requested to have a conversation to gain a deeper understanding of the PIC. He told The Crimson in an email that student activists had refused to answer his questions about the PIC.

‘WHERE’S MY MONEY GOING?’

In response to months of inaction from the university administration, the HPDC filed a lawsuit against various Harvard officials and the Harvard Corporation. They sued them on two counts.

First, the HPDC alleges that the university is in breach of their fiduciary duty to the donors in considering the university’s charitable purposes.

Nathanson and Chan made small donations to the university, which means that Harvard has a fiduciary duty to listen to them, too.

“My $20 is somewhere in that pot of $40 billion. Where’s my money going? I need answers. I want answers, and I have a legal right to those,” Chan says.

There is precedent for this in the world of Harvard student activism: in 2016, the fossil fuel divestment movement Divest Harvard filed a similar lawsuit that failed in a lower court and a Massachusetts Appeals court because the students had “no legal standing” to influence the Harvard Corporation, the Boston Globe reported.

The second count in the HPDC lawsuit is that of false advertising. According to Nathanson, this count deals with the connection between the PIC and slavery’s legacy. Chan says the university profits from the same systems of oppression it appears to denounce.

“Harvard has a huge reputational benefit from being progressive-minded,” Chan says.

In a 2016 statement, Harvard’s then-President Drew Faust invoked the school’s history of slavery. He sought to honor the importance of enslaved Africans, with the overall goal of understanding “the attitudes and assumptions that made the oppressions of slavery possible in order to overcome their vestiges in our own time.”

“Harvard is profiting from the exact same systems of oppression that W.E.B. was against, the exact same systems of oppression that Martin Luther King would hate, and detest, and speak out, and fight against,” Chan says. “It’s actually lying to the public and making money by positioning yourself as a pro-Black, antislavery, antiracist institution, but it is one of the many institutional investors that actively profit [from] the oppression of Black people.”

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