Verita$

Shin Eun-Jung

Description

A critical examination of Harvard’s monumental but disconcerting global influence and power, this book examines aspects of Harvard’s history not generally known. The “hidden history” announced in the book’s title begins with analysis of Harvard’s involvement in the Salem witch trials and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Similarly disquieting, Harvard provided students as strikebreakers in both the 1912 Bread and Roses textile workers strike and the 1919 Boston police strike. Harvard administrators and scientists promoted eugenics in the early twentieth century and had a deep impact on Nazi Germany’s race theories. Its contemporary ties to U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism are also profound. Harvard’s management of Russian economic reform left nightmarish memories, and the university was compelled to pay more than $26 million after the U.S. government sued it. The book also examines Harvard’s investment policy for its massive endowment, its restrictive labor policies, and its devastation of the adjoining Allston-Brighton neighborhood into which it is expanding.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” which means “truth” in Latin. As the author reviews Harvard’s history, she questions the real meaning of truth and changes the letter “s” to “$” to emphasize the ways that Harvard has pursued money and power above its quest for truth.

In directing her award-winning DVD of the same name and in preparing this book, the author used documents and interviews with dozens of people, including Noam Chomsky, George Katsiaficas, Richard Levins, Margaret Gullette, Victor Wallis, and many more.

Sujets

• Peace movement
• Financial crisis
• Labour law

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781629630588
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PRAISE FOR VERITAS: HARVARD’S HIDDEN HISTORY
"Shin Eun-jung’s careful study raises many important questions not just about Harvard but about elite educational institutions and their nature and roles more generally. A valuable and thought-provoking contribution."
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics (emeritus), MIT
"Eun-jung was a remarkable person. It was wonderful to have even a small role collaborating with her on Verita$, which I call ‘Verita$ the Dollar.’ I was impressed by every aspect, starting with the concept and the research she had done. She took on the huge subject of Harvard’s corporatization. Later I watched with admiration as she drew this difficult material together into a cohesive whole and deployed immense persistence in showing it around the world and writing about the subject."
Margaret Morgenroth Gullette, resident scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University; Harvard PhD, 1975; Radcliffe College, B.A., 1962
"What I loved about Eun-jung was her courage the courage to follow her heart’s desire and to leave her country and everything familiar to her, to come to our distant country where she amazed us all with her remarkable critical intelligence and energy. Overnight, it seemed, she learned English at Harvard and then became an award-winning filmmaker with her incisive analysis of that very institution."
Inez Hedges, professor of French, German, and cinema studies, Northeastern University
COMMENTARY ON HARVARD IN THE BOOK’S INTERVIEWS
"Harvard is an organ of the American ruling class whose mission is to do the intellectual labor that class needs."
Richard Levins, professor at Harvard School of Public Health
"Harvard has prestige. That is probably the single thing that brings back to mind the campaign of Harvard clerical workers when they tried to organize against poor working conditions. Their slogan was ‘you can’t eat prestige.’"
Victor Wallis, professor at Berklee College of Music

VERITA$: Harvard’s Hidden History
Shin Eun-jung
© 2015 Eros Effect Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-040-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908070
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
CONTENTS Introduction by John Trumpbour PROLOGUE The Statue of Three Lies CHAPTER 1 Profiling Harvard CHAPTER 2 Governing Harvard CHAPTER 3 The Harvard Tradition: Rich, White, and Male CHAPTER 4 Pentagon University CHAPTER 5 Harvard and Foreign Policy CHAPTER 6 Harvard in Crisis: The Anti-war Movement CHAPTER 7 Harvard’s Role in Russian Economic "Reform" CHAPTER 8 Harvard’s Labor Policy and the 2001 Occupation CHAPTER 9 A Hedge Fund with Libraries: The Financial Crisis of 2008 CHAPTER 10 Harvard at a Crossroads E PILOGUE Time to Stop the Mad Dash About the Author Acknowledgements Photo Sources Notes Index
INTRODUCTION TO THE U.S. EDITION OF VERITA$
John Trumpbour
Shortly before her sudden death at age forty, the Korean documentary filmmaker and television writer Shin Eun-jung (1972-2012) produced a movie and a book about the global role of Harvard. The film Verita$: Everybody Loves Harvard won her the award of Best Director of a Documentary Film at the 2011 New York International Film Festival.
Eun-jung developed her political and artistic sensibility as a student activist in Gwangju, Korea. In her high school years studying Korean literature and poetry, she delivered passionate speeches in support of teachers fighting for educational reform and striking for the right to join a union, the Jeongyojo (the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union). In 1989, 1,139 teachers were sacked for supporting the union, but in 2002 a special committee under the Prime Minister’s Office reinstated them and praised them as exemplars of educational reform and the rising democratic movement in South Korea. 1 Boston College professor emeritus of psychology Ramsay Liem explained Eun-jung’s political passion this way: "A child of the Gwangju uprising in 1980 against martial law and U.S. abetted military dictatorship, she never abandoned her commitment to justice for all Koreans and, actually, I don’t think she had a choice because it was a part of her very being." He elaborated, "It wasn’t a youthful phase in her life or a response to an immediate crisis that would call most of us to action, but her way of life." 2
After years of service as director of the Gwangju Human Rights Film Festival, she later created a thirtieth anniversary documentary on the Gwangju Uprising of May 18, 1980, a signal event in which government troops massacred student protesters against the authoritarian regime of Major General Chun Doo-hwan. The Martial Law Command officially listed 144 civilians, 22 soldiers, and 4 police as dead on June 2, 1980, though Asia Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch, later offered estimates that as many as 2,000 citizens perished in the brutal repression. Gi-Wook Shin, the founding director of the Korean Studies program at Stanford University, has examined the wide variations in the grisly death toll, observing, "The best estimates available today suggest about five hundred civilians dead and over three thousand injured. Many injured people still suffer from wounds, both physical and psychological." 3 University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings explains the political upshot of the Gwangju Uprising for a rising generation of Korean dissidents: "Kwangju convinced a new generation of young people that the democratic movement had developed not with the support of Washington, as an older generation of more conservative Koreans thought, but in the face of daily American support for any dictator who could quell the democratic aspirations of the Korean people." 4
Throughout her research, Eun-jung noticed that many leading apologists for anti-democratic repression in Asia were distinguished graduates and officials of Harvard University. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act confirmed U.S. military and government awareness of the capacity of the Korean Special Forces for merciless crackdown on dissenters, but U.S. officials in several cables gave what the Martial Law Command could regard as a green light for the ensuing iron-fisted suppression. Indeed the Special Forces lacerated students with bayonet thrusts and scorched them with flamethrowers, while mowing down protesters with M1 and carbon rifles blazing with bullet fire. 5 In the months after the massacre, among the prominent Americans who met and seemed to give aid and comfort to Korean military strongman Chun Doo-hwan included former Harvard Board of Overseers chair David Rockefeller and then-current Harvard Board of Overseers member T. Jefferson Coolidge Jr. A major force in developing the postwar fertilizer industry in South Korea, Coolidge had in the mid-1970s negotiated with Seoul and the Korean Traders Association (KTA) to obtain a million-dollar grant for establishing Korean studies at Harvard. 6 The U.S. academic specialist in East Asian Studies most outspoken for bolstering the regime was University of California Berkeley professor of political science Robert Scalapino, who received his MA and PhD training at Harvard.
In the years after her graduation from Chonnam National University in Gwangju, Shin Eun-jung also took sharp notice of the mounting obsession in South Korean society with elite U.S. universities, most dramatically with Harvard. In much of the world, ambitious students pursue undergraduate studies in local universities and then later seek admission to graduate programs in the United States. But many affluent families in Korea start far earlier. In considerable numbers, Koreans send children in their early teens to the United States for high school. Eun-jung heard from many families that the ultimate prize would be an undergraduate seat at Harvard. She appreciated the arduous discipline and work ethic of many young Koreans but also worried that she was witnessing, to paraphrase beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the best minds of her generation destroyed by this uncritical quest to make their Harvard dream come true.
Korean elites are hardly alone in the belief that Harvard represents the pinnacle of educational accomplishment. Alex Beam of the Boston Globe captures this sensibility when he regularly calls the Crimson institution WGU ("World’s Greatest University"). 7 In the popular media, Harvard stands out for amassing the world’s largest university endowment of $36.4 billion (2014), a figure exceeding the annual GDP of more than half the nations of the world in the global rankings of "Gross domestic product" from the World Bank. Yale is a distant second with $23.9 billion of endowment, though as of late magnificent investment returns have reduced the gap with Harvard. 8
Several dramatic indicators reveal overwhelming global deference to Harvard. A very conventional search on the Anglophone-skewed Google using the phrase in quotations "Harvard educated" yields 394,000 hits (October 12, 2014). Other highly esteemed educational institutions may boast of Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, prestigious faculties, and outstanding students, but the "Harvard educated" modifier is bestowed six to forty times more on the worldwide web t