Ex-CIA chief Michael Morell resigned from his position as a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Thursday, in protest of Chelsea Manning's short lived appointment as a Visiting Fellow; current CIA director Mike Pompeo canceled his scheduled talk.
Chelsea says "Good."
"Harvard has shown exactly what [marginalized communities on college campuses] are up against," opined John Judis at New Republic. "The real chilling effect on free speech comes from those with actual power, who receive funding from sources like the military, tech giants, and anti-regulation billionaires like the Koch brothers."
Controversial visitors come to campus all the time, don't they? And isn't it the conventional wisdom that their rights must be defended at all costs, no matter how unpopular their ideas or past behavior may be? Well, that may be the case when those who visit are right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter and those who protest their visits are minority or leftist students. But apparently it's not the case when the visitor is on the left and when it's the spies who are protesting. So, no sooner than one could say "whistleblower," in an act of mind-boggling spinelessness Harvard reneged on its offer. -- academeblog.org author Hank Reichman
A 2015 report by Vice News on the most militarized universities in America ranks Harvard number 32 on the list of 100 schools receiving a combined $3 billion in national security research and development funding.
