Harvard Agrees to ‘Divest’ — Just not from Prisons

Responding to public pressure, Harvard recently announced plans to divest from a source of funding it called “utterly abhorrent.” The announcement declared shared community values, gave hard numbers, and laid out a plan to both address immediate harm and create structural change. In other words, it was everything the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign has asked for — just not for prisons.

HPDC has been petitioning Harvard to divest from the complex web of companies propping up and incentivizing the continued construction and filling of prisons — inevitably with black, brown and other politically marginalized bodies. The group’s arguments have largely been met with either silence or straw men responses.

By contrast, the revelations surrounding billionaire Jeffrey E. Epstein’s human trafficking and his extensive connections to Harvard led to a community-wide response that almost directly parallels HPDC’s demands. Harvard clearly knows how to do the right thing — when it cares to.

So, I’m asking Harvard to listen to Harvard and take some lessons from its own announcement.

First, show your values. University President Lawrence S. Bacow’s announcement opened by condemning the actions and losing no time in considering the victims. This kind of unequivocal language is how all healing should start. Harvard’s response to HPDC, however, has been to deflect any commitment to values by holding that divestment from prisons would make the endowment “political.” Not only is it farcical to hold that all investment is not inherently political, but prisons themselves are the sites of concentrated sexual violence against black and brown people, including against minors. So representing the horror of prisons as an issue to be debated rather than condemned as unequivocally as the human trafficking involved in the Epstein case points to a possible racist divide on whose lives Harvard values.

Next, take responsibility and think structurally. The administration’s reaction in the Epstein case — committing to “review how we prevent these situations in the future” rather than considering this an isolated event — acknowledges the effect donations can have on research and dramatically contradicts the “apolitical” and “slippery slope” arguments comparing divestment from prisons to divesting from corn syrup by creating standards by which to judge the sources of their donations (and, by extension, the endowment). In admitting that such standards indeed exist (which we all knew, given that Harvard has divested from tobacco, South African apartheid, and PetroChina), Harvard reaches the same conclusion as HPDC. All that’s left is to convince the administration that state violence against marginalized communities falls on a different side of those standards than corn syrup.

No one is saying this won’t be hard — including Harvard. Bacow stressed that Harvard’s decentralized process would make tracking Epstein’s donations and those directed by him difficult but worth the effort. He has also insisted, however, that only Harvard’s investments in private prison companies like CoreCivic should be up for debate, denying the existence of the vast prison-industrial complex that continues to incentivize the caging of black and brown people. This expansive view may make divestment more difficult, but, as with the Epstein case, it’s worth the effort.

The administration was also refreshingly transparent in the Epstein case, not only sharing hard numbers but also trusting their audience to understand that this is still a first step. The administration’s transparency in the Epstein case was refreshing. By contrast, requests for information about the University’s investment in the prison-industrial complex have seen Harvard playing dumb by holding to the narrow view of the prison-industrial complex described above, claiming without evidence that investments amount to “only” $18,000, a number that has been contradicted by mandatory public filings.

Harvard also seems to know the value of reparatory justice. In the Epstein case, Harvard plans to “redirect the unspent resources to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.” Acknowledging this as “an unusual” but “proper” step for the University, Harvard reaches the same conclusion that HPDC does when asking for reinvestment of divested funds into the communities most harmed by state violence: It’s not enough to acknowledge the harm. Apologies require reparations.

As unjust as it is, moves by Harvard have an outsized influence, and its leadership position therefore comes with its own set of obligations. That’s why arguing that the costs of divestment aren’t worth the alleged $18,000 invested falls flat: Harvard is perfectly willing to play hero by “engag[ing] [their] peer institutions” in addressing the structural problems that led to the Epstein case. When the values match up, Harvard knows the alleged $18,000 isn’t actually $18,000; it is, in fact, the limitless potential of a major voice in American discourse ringing the bell that something is deeply wrong and giving an example of what can be done about it.

Bacow closed his message by repeating shared values and with the humbling posture that “Harvard is not perfect.” While healing and justice require these acknowledgements of harm, they also require shifting one’s disposition when discovering new harms, not just speaking the words when cornered. If Harvard is truly acknowledging that it is not perfect and will indeed “always strive to be better,” then it should start now: Divest.

David A. Piña is a second-year student at Harvard Law School.