By Mathias Risse
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Dear friends of the Carr-Ryan Center –
In light of recent developments, I am writing to express my profound solidarity with all international students and visitors at Harvard University and the United States. Human Rights are for everyone, and in that spirit the Carr-Ryan Center sees itself as a distinctly international place. Harvard is America’s oldest university and thus one of the most American places there is. As every car plate in the state says: Massachusetts is the “spirit of America,” and Harvard is in the fabric of society, everywhere. Over the last decades American universities have educated the world and thereby have immeasurably increased American soft power. In turn, international students and visitors have been essential to the intellectual excellence we have been able to achieve and maintain. This treatment of our international community members is profoundly troubling.
As it happens, I just spent several days in Bonn, Germany, as part of committee that supervises the German government’s Strategy of Excellence. As was this entity just awarded about 500 million euros in federal research support for 70 research clusters across the country and across all fields, ranging from “Adaptive Conversion Systems for Sustainable Energy Carriers & Chemicals” at Aachen; “A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm” at Bremen; “Responsible Electronics in the Climate Change Era” at Dresden; “Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining” at Jena; “The Politics of Inequality” at Konstanz; and “New Perspectives on Premodern Textualities” at LMU/ Munich. A new cluster on Transforming Human Rights at Erlangen-Nürnberg was also among them, as I am delighted to report.
It was profoundly troubling to realize that many of these topics (especially around climate change and sustainability) might not currently be considered for federal funding in the U.S., and that the criteria of inclusiveness that, following international standards, this group did of course also consider in our evaluation of the proposals might now be interpreted as civil rights violations here. What was also troubling is that quite a number of members of this globally staffed committee reported an increase in applications from the U.S. for junior positions, and that universities outside of the U.S. are already negatively affected by efforts of the current administration to get them to agree to their terms or lose opportunities for partnerships, including in the life sciences where curing diseases is the goal. The administration's attacks on Harvard and other universities since January 20th is already being felt around the world.
But I am also happy to say that an enormous number of the almost 100 proposals this committee had seen through the process had principal investigators with Harvard roots or ties, or included collaboration with Harvard and of course other institutions in the U.S. And I am happy to bring back the news that international support and solidarity with Harvard in particular and American universities in general is deep and sincere.
I am glad to see that Harvard's president is fighting back against this latest illegal and egregious attack on our international students and community of scholars, and I support this effort to protect our international community. Human rights belong to all, and human rights are valued by all, despite what the attacks from this administration might suggest. Our international colleagues are vital to this work.
Yours sincerely,
Mathias Risse
