PRESS RELEASE: Harvard Senior Fellow Bill Lee Confronted on Prison Divestment Stance
On Thursday, November 21, 2019, student supporters of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign silently protested Wilmerhale partner and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow William Lee’s lunch lecture at Harvard Law School. Lee visited the Law School to speak about his experience as a trial lawyer, representing Harvard University in the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit, which challenged Harvard’s admissions policies which factor in race. When Lee started talking, student organizers stood in the back and held up signs which stated “Affirmative Action, Yes! Prison Investments, No!” and “Bill Lee, Prisons are White Supremacy[.]”
The protest comes on the heels of a meeting last month between members of the Harvard Prison Divestment and Harvard’s Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR), including William Lee. At the meeting, HPDC representatives asked CCSR, “Are you open to considering the possibility of divestment?” Bill Lee, who chaired the meeting on behalf of President Bacow and the CCSR, refused to answer the question. HPDC organizers asked repeatedly, stating that the meeting would have little value if the committee was not open to considering divestment. After stating that the campaign would be open to meeting when the committee was open to considering divestment, HPDC organizers left the meeting.
“We left the CCSR meeting resolved to keep the pressure on for prison divestment, and not be put off by PR tricks. It’s especially disheartening that Bill Lee would fight for affirmative action, but then allow Harvard to profit off of the caging of Black, brown, and poor people. Both issues are about systemic racism.”
At William Lee’s lunch lecture, organizers passed out flyers to the audience which said, “Bill Lee wants you to know that he’s not a racist because he defended affirmative action. But let’s be clear: Profiteering off of prisons is racist! When Bill Lee refuses to consider our demands of divesting from the prison-industrial complex, he is upholding white supremacy!”
Lee acknowledged the protestors. “I thought you might come,” he said to the protestors. “Let me just say one thing because the prison divestment campaign is here. The president and I offered to meet with them, we wanted to ask them some questions, and they walked out of the room. So I think it’s important that you know that we offered to meet with them and they walked out.” He did not mention his refusal during the meeting to say he was open to considering prison divestment.
Protestors silently held signs until the Q&A. One protestor asked, “Bill Lee, when you met with the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, you refused to say you were open to prison divestment. Your lack of willingness to consider divestment led prison divestment activists to walk out. In light of your support of affirmative action, will you support prison divestment, yes or no?”
Lee ignored this protestor’s question but called on an audience member, unaffiliated with HPDC, who asked, “Why are you putting my family members in a cage?” Lee again ignored the question. Another student asked Lee why Harvard invests in private prisons. Lee stated that he agreed that it was an important issue and that Harvard could do more but he disagreed with the conclusion. A third student asked about Lee’s “cognitive dissonance” in supporting affirmative action but not supporting divestment from the prison-industrial complex. Lee ignored the question.
“In the lecture, Bill Lee bragged about hiring a descendant of slaves as an expert in their lawsuit, and he said that the expert was ‘eloquent,’” saidAmanda Chan, a third-year law student. “Harvard willgladly parade around this expert and yet, Bill Lee still invests Harvard’s endowment in prisons– the modern day institution of slavery. It is sheer hypocrisy and blatant tokenism.”
Bill Lee quoted an Asian American member of the Harvard Admissions team who said, referring to Harvard’s Admissions’s policy, “I would never be a part of something that discriminated against people who look like me, my friends, my family.”
“Lee said that the Admissions team would never want to discriminate,” said Marina Multhaup, a second-year law student. “Yet Bill Lee continues to ask the Black students and other students of color at Harvard to participate in a system which profits off caging their families and people who look like them.”
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