Harvard Crimson: Unsettling Truths About Harvard’s Investments in Prisons
Paul T. Clarke, Jarrett M. Drake, and Anneke F. Dunbar-Gronke, members of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, wrote for the Harvard Crimson about why the university must divest from prisons.
A growing coalition of students across the University’s many schools have formed the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign to hold Harvard to its stated ideals. We are calling on Bacow and the Harvard Management Company CEO N. P. Narvekar to disclose and divest the full scope of our holdings in the prison-industrial complex but also to take meaningful steps to repair the harm that the University has already inflicted through its investment choices. We call on Bacow and Narvekar to re-invest the divested funds in local organizations, initiatives, and companies, led by people directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. They should also create funded academic programs and projects that hire scholars and grassroots organizers to teach and research creative approaches to eliminate structural social harms in ways that do not rely on prisons and police.
Harvard enriches and is enriched by a system that keeps 2.3 million souls in shackles and millions more under surveillance. The only truth more unsettling than that would be indifference to these facts, which would indict our own inhumanity and ignore our collective complicity with injustice. This is not an inevitable state of affairs. We can construct an endowment — and hopefully a society — without reliance on prisons and police. If our motto of “veritas” means anything, indeed we must.
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