The Harvard Kennedy School kicked up a lot of dust last week. Its Institute of Politics (IOP) added Chelsea Manning to a list of visiting fellows alongside two other somewhat edgy appointments - Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer - and then withdrew Manning’s fellowship after current and former CIA leaders ended their association with the school in protest.
The withdrawal led to howls of everything from hypocrisy to another victory for the Deep State. There’s been plenty of kerfuffle, but for the wrong reasons. The problem isn’t glorifying Chelsea Manning, nor is it cutting her but not, say, Sean Spicer. None of the three should have been made fellows in the first place. Their appointments undermine stewardship of good governance and the belief in government itself.
To review, Corey Lewandowski is a former Trump campaign manager, known for his combative relationship with the press - and seemingly everyone else. Sean Spicer was President Trump’s Press Secretary until recently, and was widely maligned for his shaky relationship with facts. Chelsea Manning was a soldier given 35 years for leaking classified information to Wikileaks. President Obama commuted her sentence. While the school withdrew her fellowship appointment, it has invited her to speak there at a future date.
As Manning was bumping Anthony Scaramucci off the winner’s podium for shortest-lived appointment of the year, critics filed into roughly three camps. Camp 1 was explained by the Kennedy School's dean himself, who basically said she was removed because there’s an honorific implied in a fellowship appointment that’s inconsistent with her criminal conviction. Camp 2 came from a chorus of observers who condemned Harvard for hypocrisy in dumping Manning but keeping Spicer and Lewandoswki. Camp 3, ostensibly led by Manning herself, claimed another victory for the Deep State - that, as Manning tweeted, the CIA can pressure Harvard into deciding what it teaches. (For the record, while untrue, I’m pretty sure half of America thought that, anyway.)
Nope, nope and nope.
It’s possible to commit a crime and still be a reasonable fellowship appointee. Consider anyone jailed during the Civil Rights movement for peaceful civil disobedience. And at face value, it’s not necessarily hypocritical to withdraw Manning’s appointment and keep Spicer and Lewandowski. If, for example, you do believe one shouldn’t bestow an honor on someone known for criminal activity, then it is legitimate to distinguish between someone convicted of a crime, and two people never accused of one (other than on Twitter). Finally, a respected institution having the wisdom to recognize and correct a mistake after protest - even if some of that protest came from members of the CIA - does not constitute a government takeover of academic freedom.
So why care? We are in the throes of a nearly unprecedented undermining of key principles of functioning democracy. The current presidential administration does not recognize the importance of the free flow of quality information to making our system of government work. The president himself has so little respect for freedom of the press - another fundamental component of democratic self rule - that he has referred to members of the media as 'enemies of the American people.’ Wikileaks is rewriting our sense of responsible civil disobedience from a hiding place overseas. Lastly, as an electorate, we’ve gorged for 40 years on a steady diet of “government is not the solution, it’s the problem.”
It is truly inappropriate, then, to invite into honorary fellowship with students training for government service: someone known for whipping up contempt of the press, someone known for lying about observable facts as the official White House spokesperson, and someone who, while celebrated in some corners, illegally betrayed nearly half a million state secrets. A school of government should promote faith in, and the good practice of, government. These three represent the opposite.
What if Harvard held a seminar series on “What makes democracy?” and invited each of the three to give a talk and take questions within that context? Perfect. As an alumna of the Kennedy School, I’d embrace that. But to give Lewandowski, Spicer and Manning visiting fellowships as a cohort - now, and when the world actually does abound with people practicing good government and good governance - was wrong-headed.