I owe Harvard’s divestment movement an apology. For years I dismissed them as unserious. I mocked their encampments. I questioned their reading lists. I once suggested, unkindly, that a person who cannot locate a river on a map should not chant about it.
I was wrong. Not about the maps. About the framework.
Because this month, the framework finally met its moment. On July 2, the government of Turkey barred a cruise ship from docking at Kusadasi and Istanbul. The ship, Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady, carried nearly 2,000 passengers on an Atlantis Events charter out of Athens. Turkey explained that the passengers belonged to groups whose behaviors do not align with the structure of our society and our moral values, which is government-speak for gay. The ship rerouted to Alexandria. Egypt then revoked its docking approval in the middle of the night. Passengers, including Patti LuPone, a woman who has closed shows more gracefully than most countries open ports, found notes under their cabin doors. Egypt gave no reason. Egypt did not feel it needed one.
Two sovereign states. One protected class. Discrimination announced in writing. It sits atop a long record: Istanbul has banned Pride marches since 2015, and Egypt prosecutes gay men under debauchery statutes. If you spent the last several years anywhere near Harvard Yard, you know exactly what happens next. The petitions. The letters with 400 faculty signatures. The tents. The demand that Harvard Management Company purge its portfolio of complicity down to the last index fund.
So I waited. I refreshed my email. I checked the Yard for load-bearing nylon.
Nothing. Not a letter. Not a tent. Not so much as a strongly worded Google Doc.
I was confused, and then I was inspired. The activists are busy people. They cannot be everywhere. Clearly they simply need someone to draft the paperwork, and I, a Harvard graduate with a working knowledge of copy-paste, am that someone.
So I have launched a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Turkey and Egypt. I want to be clear about my method: I did not write it so much as transcribe it. The demands are the standard demands. Divest the sovereign debt. Suspend the partnerships. Refuse the gifts. I have borrowed the argument, joint by joint, from the divestment campaigns Harvard already knows by heart, and changed only the names of the countries. If the argument was sound before, it is sound now. If it is suddenly unsound, I would love to know what changed, because it cannot be the human rights.
I am not even the first to the format. In 2002, faculty at Harvard and MIT signed a joint petition calling on both universities to divest from Israel until specific human rights conditions are met. I have preserved their sentence out of respect for the craft. I changed the countries. The human rights I left exactly where they were.
I have also sent the petition to every Harvard organization that has previously endorsed divestment on human rights grounds, and invited them to co-sign. This should be the easiest signature of their lives. It is their own language. It asks them to oppose governments that ban Pride marches and prosecute gay men. It is, by their stated principles, a moral layup.
I will publish a running tally of responses. I am an optimist. I expect the signatures to pour in any day now, just as soon as everyone checks whether the oppressed in question are the right kind.
The Harvard Idiot lives in Copenhagen, a city whose port has never once inspected the guest list. He is aware that this is a low bar. He notes only that two countries recently failed to clear it.