Like most Harvard students, I receive an email blast every morning from the Harvard Gazette, the university’s official news source and mouthpiece. I don’t usually read it, but this morning, the email’s subject line caught my attention.
“Harvard assists move out,” it read. For the ill-informed reader, this headline obscures two things. First, it creates the impression that some exogenous entity imposed the move-out, without any agency or action on Harvard’s part, when Harvard itself made the decision. Beyond this issue, the use of “move out” is puzzling: It was not scheduled in advance, flexible, or voluntary, which the term “move out” would imply. Some students I know use the term “evacuation,” while others call it an “eviction,” which seems more accurate. After all, the university is kicking us out of our dorms. “Move out” as a term entirely obscures the school’s decision to force everybody to move with only five days’ notice.
I hoped that the subject line would be the end of the ridiculous and disingenuous statements in the Gazette, but I was mistaken. The blurb in the email itself was even worse.
As the Gazette — and by proxy, the university — wrote, it is currently “moving into the gap” with “stipends” and “additional assistance” to help students move out. For starters, this misleading phrasing again implies that somebody else made the decision to kick all of us out of our dorms, and that unnamed, mysterious, and exogenous entity left students reeling. Harvard, by this reading, is entirely benevolent and altruistic by providing the resources that it can to help students affected by the implied outside force affecting us all. Again, the impression given is disingenuous at best and entirely misleading at worst. I cannot emphasize this enough: The school itself made the decision to kick us out, and the administration seems to have had no guidelines, resources, or logistical concerns thought out when it made the announcement. As conversations and harried phone calls have made clear, the school did not consult the Financial Aid Office, the library system, or the faculty when making the decision and only told them approximately at the same time it told students. Therefore, Harvard is moving into the gap that it itself created with its hurried decision to evict us.
Unfortunately, the article itself also uses this misleading rhetoric. The lede, for instance, claims that the university’s “information aims to give students, professors, and staff a hand” in transitioning. However, this whole situation seems to me like the naughty child who pushed his friend into a wall and then offered him a hug while saying that he was kind.
Additionally, the article creates the impression that Harvard was prepared from day one. For instance, it quotes Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana’s emails announcing the decision two days ago as if those very same emails had also announced the assistance policies that the Gazette was detailing. They did not. Likewise, the Gazette cites Frequently Asked Questions pages which often did not have answers to those questions. Although administrators have added to these pages over the last couple of days, the time when they did not have clear answers was a time of deep uncertainty and confusion.
Furthermore, many answers remain unclear, including the status of the student work contribution requirement for students on financial aid, or downright unhelpful. Storage with Olympia costs at a minimum $255, yet Harvard is only subsidizing $200 at the maximum. Likewise, students who wish to ship their belongings outside the continental United States will hit that $200 limit fairly quickly.
I will concede that the move appears necessary from an epidemiological standpoint: College dorms house thousands of students all in close contact, and with a presumptive positive case of COVID-19 in the Harvard community already, under normal circumstances it would likely spread through the dorms like wildfire. But that does not mean that the university should announce the decision with short notice, without logistical details, and without first informing those responsible for implementing the decision. Likewise, it does not mean the university should have free hand to wreak havoc in students’ lives and then turn around and imply through its official publications that Harvard is a wholly beneficial actor with no culpability in causing the problems that it is now stepping in to remedy.
Other publications have noted this inconsistency between the university’s rhetoric and reality. Last night, The Crimson wrote an eloquent editorial criticizing the university’s haphazard and chaotic decision, with similar themes to my critique. Yet I found myself particularly puzzled by one line, near the beginning of the piece: “The University’s mixed messaging,” it argued, “has left students to face the uncertainty of pandemic alone without the ubiquitous paternalism of the College.” After reading this morning’s email, that claim did not sit right with me, so I quickly typed the term “paternalism” into Google. Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as “interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.”
If Harvard’s forced move-out, evacuation, or eviction, whatever you call it, is not paternalism, I don’t know what is. The university hasn’t abandoned paternalism; it has doubled down on it. The least it can do is write news reports that acknowledge its responsibility for creating the uncertainty it is now attempting to rectify.
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