Veritas: Everybody Loves Harvard
VERITAS: Everybody Loves Harvard is a documentary directed by the late Shin Eun-jung, a Gwangju native, in which she gives a rare, brutal depiction of Harvard University, unearthing its true oligarchical past and its undeniable influence, both past and present, on both the U.S. government and the world.
Harvard is an empire: self sufficient, prestigious at what it does, luring the best scholars and intellectuals from all over the world to study there and become a member of its elite body. It is one of the greatest success stories known, its existence pre-dating America itself (it was established in 1636).
Harvard embodies the image and ideology of America, “the American dream.” If you want to reach the top of the mountain, you can, and Harvard sits solitary, unaccompanied on that mountain’s peak. It is the third-richest NGO in the world, the Roman Catholic Church being the first. It had an endowment of a staggering 27.4 billion dollars as of 2010. Its prestige, its untouchable elitism, comes from having produced eight US presidents; the most any university has produced, with Barack Obama being the latest. Two more former students (albeit dropouts) went on to become two of the greatest CEOs in the world, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and the current UN Secretary General, Korean Ban Ki Moon, also waves the flag for Harvard University.
This is the image we know of Harvard. It’s the dream of every parent to have a son or daughter attend. Yet that is all it is, an image. VERITAS – which is Harvard’s motto, Latin for “truth” – is a documentary that has no interest in portraying that same facet. VERITAS wants to show how the elite, the ruling class of Harvard, are in fact the ruling class of American society. Harvard, VERITAS wants you to know, is an organ of the ruling class, a highly functional instrument that does the work of the U.S. government and its foreign policy.
In an interview, Shin Eun-jung, a Psychology graduate of Chonnam National University, claims it did not take long for her to see beyond the public image of Harvard University as a liberal institute. When studying English at a Harvard summer school she began to question the ethos of its administration.
She cites some defining examples. The first was a program she saw being advertised there. This program was focused entirely on “racial difference.” The Gwangju native questioned, quietly, why Harvard would promote racial difference instead of racial similarity, since the motto or larger ethos of Harvard promoted human rights. Her second experience had a more profound effect. She recalls going to hear talks on countries such as Iran and thinking that these talks would be on their human rights and their integral need. Yet their premises were based on war as necessary.
It was this ambiguity, if not hypocrisy, that interested Shin, and the connection between Harvard and America – how America, mirroring Harvard, prides itself on being a hub of democracy and social freedom, despite that clearly not being the case. Witnessing first hand how Harvard was justifying war gave Shin an insight into the undeniable link between the actions of the U.S government and the doctrines of Harvard that support its country’s policies. This is the underlying theme of Shin’s documentary; there is no escaping it when you watch it.
VERITAS doesn’t scratch, it claws at Harvard’s surface for truth, and there are many targets in this documentary, the first being the world-famous statue of John Harvard. On the statue it states that John Harvard was the founder of Harvard University in 1838. The film reveals that this is the image, not the truth. John Harvard was not the founder; he was the university’s first benefactor. The university was founded in 1636, not 1638. And shockingly, the statue of the man is not even a likeness of John Harvard himself.
The goal of VERITAS is to shine a light on Harvard history. Discrimination,racism and elitism are all defining issues in American history that are not opposed within Harvard. On the contrary, claims the film, Harvard embodies them. Its elitism, its ties with the ruling class and its conscious and blatant lack of unity with the working class are portrayed in the documentary through the “Bread and Roses” strike of 1912. Textile workers in Boston, many of whom were women and children, protested against their extremely poor working conditions and pay. When the Massachusetts government brought in the military to end the strike, Harvard students – fighting under the slogan “Defend your class” – joined the military, not the workers, in combat.
Victor Wallis, a professor and graduate of Harvard in 1959, calls his former university “explicitly racist” in the documentary. It was a “rich,white and male”-exclusive society. In fact, up until the 1960s, Harvard was brutally racist towards those who did not meet the criteria of the Harvard elite, accepting 25 foreign students only.
The Radcliffe House will forever be a physical symbol of Harvard’s treatment of women. This college for women, opened in 1879, operated under the name of Harvard, yet was located outside of Harvard premises. One former female graduate of Harvard, who attended the Radcliffe House, recalls how professors would teach the boys in university lecture halls and then walk to Radcliffe House and give the exact same lecture to the girls. It was, amazingly, not until 1999 that Radcliffe House fully merged with Harvard, making the university a co-educational institute at last.
The same hostility was historically extended toward the Jewish community, limiting the number of Jewish scholars prior to WWII. Considering the fact that African-Americans were used as slaves to build the grounds of Harvard, it should be no surprise to find there were strictly no people of color were admitted. Harvard students once again protested to maintain its elitism. It wasn’t until after the Civil Rights Movement that Harvard quickly accepted two African-Americans. To echo the voice of VERITAS, this act was clearly nothing more than a publicity stunt, propagating the image that Harvard was a community supportive of social change, thus keeping the public image intact while doing its utmost to resist such movements.
You would be forgiven if you thought that such racism was confined to the student body only, yet this is not true. Shin in this documentary gets to the root of such discrimination, which she identifies as prominent and dominant headsmen at Harvard. Behind the curtain of student protests against change, key figures of Harvard’s academic staff justified their racism through eugenics, the “science” of genetics supporting that class and racial segregation.
VERITAS goes into substantial detail to outline all of this, most of which, if not all, is shocking. One of the masterminds behind eugenics in Harvard was 19th- century zoologist Louis Agassiz, who claimed that the “negro brain was imperfect,” comparing it to a 7 month-old fetus. Agassiz followed up this assertion by claiming that if an African-American learned too much, the brain would swell and the skull wall would burst.
Another professor at Harvard, anthropologist Earnest Hooton, tried to prove criminality to be based on racial background. Other conservative scientists tried to prove that the tropics produced “lazy, inferior people.” In an effort to prove that their notion of a rich, white, male-dominated society is just and to maintain ”white superiority” within Harvard and America, Social Darwinism was distorted.
Their perseverance at Harvard and at other leading universities brought the American Eugenics Society to fruition in the early 20th century. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard (1869-1909), was a great advocate of eugenics. In 1912 the first congress on eugenics occurred at the University of London, chaired by vice-presidents Eliot and Winston Churchill. The drive behind the rise of eugenics was both social and economical. In the early 20th century, the volume of immigrants arriving in America rose caused a panic to sweep across the ruling class, as they feared becoming outnumbered. The force of eugenics was such that the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, restricting the number of immigrants setting foot on American land. Eugenics spread across Europe, and VERITAS asserts that it was the landscaping ideology needed for Nazism to carry out the Holocaust. According to Richard Levins, a professor at Harvard medical school, Harvard’s “science” gave Nazism respectability and a justification to murder.
The real achievement for Shin and her documentary is unearthing the connection between Harvard and the C.I.A. After WWII, America was out to claim its position as a major superpower. To achieve this they looked to scholars and intellects as their think tank, particularly universities that had “area studies” departments to deploy as indirect foreign policy workers. Harvard was one such university.
In VERITAS, Noam Chomsky, world-renowned philosopher and professor at M.I.T., explains how the Centre for International Studies at M.I.T. and the political science departments were openly funded by the C.I.A. What’s even more blatant is the Harvard Centre for International Affairs, the CFIA, which opened in 1958 and was once called ”C.I.A. at Harvard.”
The documentary points its finger at many key figures, the most influential being McGeorge Bundy. Bundy was both Harvard Dean (1953) and a national security advisor to the J.F.K. administration throughout the Vietnam War. Two key Harvard political scientists, Samuel P. Huntington and Henry Kissinger, were also important players within the C.F.I.A. in drafting American foreign policy. VERITAS asserts that Huntington, a major supporter of America’s actions in Vietnam, proposed the masked bombing campaign on the Vietnamese countryside, forcing people out of their ancestral homes and into the cities, while Kissinger ,national security advisor to Nixon, influenced the secret bombing of Cambodia. There were over 600,000 deaths.
But the real conspiracy for Shin is the propaganda that went with such a relationship. Not only were Harvard figures directly involved with U.S. foreign policy, they were also creating the doctrines, the expert opinion, that supported the very actions they had a hand in making, giving justification to actions taken by the U.S.
Shin portrays many things about Harvard that have been unknown to the public. Shin’s great achievement is shining a light on the link between Harvard and the U.S. government. VERITAS shows that in a country that seems to be a democratic, liberal society, Harvard indicates that perhaps this is not always the case.
Shin passed away in late 2012, at the age of 40. It is a tragedy to lose such a passionate woman who no doubt had so much more to give to the world. Yet VERITAS: Everybody Loves Harvard may keep her memory alive for a long time to come.
I grew up in Boston and went to a prep school in Cambridge on Brattle Street that was a rock’s throw from Harvard Square. In addition to being a direct descendant of two founders of the College, I can claim at least ten graduates of it and three others who spent their academic careers as professors teaching for the College – and this is just my paternal lineage. My point here is that Harvard’s alleged ghosts dug up by Shin in her purported expose are, in fact, the simple rehashing of commonly-known stories or information that many, many people have known about for decades and decades .
The G.I.C. has had a fairly obvious anti-U.S.A. bias over the years. So, one should not feel surprised that the late Shin’s attempt to supposedly reveal the already well-known sins of Harvard have been publicized here at the G.I.C. website.
Well, at least the conspiracy-minded Andrew O’Donnell did not pen this sophomoric attack on Harvard, and it’s no surprise that yet another Korean took the time to point a moralizing finger at something from the U.S. It is also not a surprise that this Korean female questions why Harvard wants to be more diverse as most of her people seem to be at least uncomfortable knowing that their own neighborhoods and universities have been ostensibly ruined by the presence of an ever-increasing number of non-Koreans.