In April, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow should have spoken during a forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Before he could begin, student activists caused the event to end when they demanded that the school move its endowment away from prisons and fossil fuels.
The story has become big news now because the school decided not to punish those involved. Harvard did not even threaten to punish the students.
Greg Piper reports at The College Fix:
Left-wing activists shut down Harvard’s president. Harvard didn’t even threaten to punish them.Universities tell students it’s okay to disrupt campus events when administrators fail to punish activists for previous disruptions.Harvard University went even further with anti-fossil fuel activists: It didn’t threaten to punish them at all.Isa Flores-Jones of Divest Harvard told The Harvard Crimson that “none of” the group’s members were “directly” threatened with discipline, much less punished, for their shutdown of President Lawrence Bacow’s event with the Harvard Kennedy School in April.The activists took over the stage before Bacow and Graduate School of Education Dean Bridget Terry Long could start talking. Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf feebly asked the protesters to move to the back of the venue, but they refused even that, according to the Crimson.Bacow finally spoke up after “several minutes” of din to scold the protesters, but didn’t bother having them physically removed. Instead, the administrators deplatformed themselves and relocated the event to an inferior venue, rewarding the activists for their intolerance.
Here’s a video of the incident:
A report from The Harvard Crimson described the moment when Bacow tried to engage the protesters, who kept shouting.
Alexandra A. Chaidez and Luke W. Vrotsos write:
A New Day for DivestmentJust moments after University President Lawrence S. Bacow took the stage in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School at an event in early April, student protesters emerged from the crowd with signs demanding divestment.Six activists joined Bacow on the stage, sitting silently with their signs aloft as the Kennedy School’s dean implored them to leave the stage and allow the event to continue. Following his request, the students and roughly 20 counterparts scattered throughout the room began their signature chant: “Disclose, divest, or this movement will not rest.”Addressing the protesters, Bacow questioned their methods.“You’re not being helpful to your cause and I suspect you’re also not gaining many friends or many allies in the audience by virtue in the way in which you choose to express your point of view,” Bacow said.After a few minutes, he left the stage to continue the event in another room, while students remained chanting a while longer before leaving together and returning to Harvard Yard ecstatic.The demonstration represented the first time that activists from Divest Harvard and the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign had joined together publicly to advocate for their cause. Over the past several months, the two groups have ramped up their demands for the University to divest its nearly $40 billion endowment from companies related to the fossil fuel and prison industries.
These students have decided what is best for Harvard’s endowment, you see. They know better than the people paid to manage the funds.
You have to wonder why the students bother to waste their time pursuing an undergraduate degree. Shouldn’t they be advising investors on Wall Street?
Featured image via YouTube.
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