History, Harvard, and the Role of Higher Education in Capital Accumulation

It feels like we can’t go a week, a day, five minutes without more bad news.

Even those who are trying to pay attention to it all are overwhelmed by the number and magnitude of threats, and it is difficult if not impossible to sift through the constant flow of horrifying new developments and also do the important work of linking them to long-standing patterns. It therefore seems unfair to utilize the shaming trope “why aren’t more people paying attention to [x] issue”, or to frame our lack of attention to a particular issue as a moral failure. While we do need to think carefully about how all of these violences are interconnected, each of us cannot all focus on everything all the time. We need to discern where we are needed, and where we can usefully intervene.

With all of this in mind, as someone who studies the foundations and political economy of higher education, I would like to invite a conversation among scholars and practitioners of higher education about a recent report regarding Harvard’s endowment that in my mind is worthy of our attention, and which might point us to a different understanding of contemporary crises than the ones we are often given. In particular, we might come to understand that these crises are not exceptional developments, but rather the most recent symptoms of a white supremacist capitalist country whose hegemony is growing thin and whose desperate defenders are lashing out in response. That is, these crises might show us the true face of a country that was built on slavery and settler colonialism, and continues to be sustained through dispossession. If I were attending ASHE this year, I would love to have this conversation with others in person; but since regretfully I’m not, I am hoping this blog will encourage others to engage around this issue, particularly as the conference theme creates the space for such conversations.

“That school outside of Boston”

Harvard is the oldest university in the lands that are currently known as the United States, as well as the wealthiest, at least if we are speaking about its endowment — which has now reached $39.2 billion. Harvard is also an iconic institution within the US popular imaginary. Everyone has heard of Harvard. It is the setting of many movies — Good Will Hunting, Legally Blonde, the Social Network. There are lots of jokes about Harvard; my favorite is not exactly a joke but the hilariously predictable move of feigned modesty when a Harvard grad, when asked where they went to school, says “outside of Boston,” as if we all didn’t know exactly what they are talking about.

It can be convincingly argued that Harvard gets way too much emphasis and attention for an institution that educates an extremely small portion of US university students, and beyond that, an institution that looks exceedingly different from the public institutions where most students are enrolled. If we think, however, about cultural and political influence rather than raw numbers, then this excess of attention starts to make more sense. Seven US presidents have been Harvard grads (more than any other single school), it regularly has the highest number of grads in Congress, and it shares top billing with Yale as the alma mater of the most Supreme Court justices.

Yet for all the attention Harvard gets, not nearly enough of it takes a critical eye to its role in the preparation of US political and economic elites, and thus in the reproduction of the dominant political and economic system. Currently, all higher education eyes are (understandably) on the lawsuit, led by a white conservative activist, that is being brought against Harvard for allegedly implementing admissions quotas that punish Asian American applicants. In this case, Harvard appears as the clear winner in the eyes of most liberal and left thinkers — after all, Harvard is defending affirmative action. In this, I agree with Harvard. But with all the attention focused on this issue, another story about Harvard has fallen through the cracks: a report about its financial investments, produced by the non-profit GRAIN and Rede Social de Justicia e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights), which finds that:

· Harvard’s endowment fund has spent around $1 billion to acquire control of an estimated 850,000 hectares of farmland around the world, making the University one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse farmland investors.

· Harvard’s farmland acquisitions were undertaken without proper due diligence and have contributed to the displacement and harassment of traditional communities, environmental destruction and conflicts over water. The consequences of these deals are particularly dire in Brazil, where Harvard’s endowment fund has acquired nearly 300,000 hectares of land in the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savannah.

· Harvard’s opaque farmland investments resulted in windfall remunerations for its fund managers and business partners but have failed as an investment strategy for the University

You can view the full report here. The report notes that Harvard’s farmland investments are widespread across the globe, not only in Brazil but also in South Africa, Russia, the Ukraine, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. In many cases, the titles to the land in question were highly contested (often as a result of land-grabs and attempts to privatize Indigenous and public lands), and/or the land itself is in ecologically sensitive areas. These investments have occurred over the last 10 years, and were added to Harvard’s previously existing investments in timberlands throughout the world. The farmland investments also followed the same pattern as was used for the timberlands, of using off-shore shell companies and tax havens, which make it difficult to trace the investments and hold Harvard accountable for them.

This recent report is not the first to call Harvard to account on this issue. The alarm was raised in 2014 through an open letter from “civil society leaders” that expressed: “deep concern about Harvard University’s troubling investments in farmland, forests and other natural resources around the world. Over the last several years, Harvard and its investment arm, Harvard Management Company, have been repeatedly implicated in scandalous incidents of unsustainable and illegal investment practices in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Research from numerous independent sources…provides mounting evidence that the university, in pursuit of outsized profits, commonly uses offshore shell companies to hide its role in large-scale land acquisitions, often in impoverished rural communities and environmentally fragile ecosystems.” You can view the full letter here.

Then, last May 2018, one of the overseers of Harvard’s investment funds, Kat Taylor, wrote an open letter to the university’s other overseers and resigned her position, citing how investments of the university’s endowment fund might be invested in “fossil fuel reserves we can never afford to burn, land purchases that may not respect indigenous rights, water holdings that threaten the human right to water, and investments at odds with the safety of children and first responders.” Although Taylor notes that she is not certain which investments the university actually has, this is in part the point. Not only should this information be uncovered, and made public, but the fact that Harvard does not have this information on hand is not an act of mere ignorance, but rather the result of intentional efforts to structure the investments in ways that are opaque. Harvard has a vested financial interest in not knowing the details of its investments; this is wilful ignorance.

For some people, Harvard’s age and power is enough to explain its wealth. However, as critical scholars we should be thinking beyond such often-deceiving common sense. We have to ask: where exactly did all this money come from? And, if we are critical scholars who recognize capitalism as an inherently exploitative and extractive system, then we specifically have to consider that, even as many would prefer to see educational institutions as benevolent and somehow untouched by the most unsavory dimensions of capital accumulation, like all institutions successfully operating (and in Harvard’s case, thriving) within a capitalist system, there is nothing innocent about their pursuit of profits. Boggs and Mitchell (2018) have coined the useful phrase “accumulation by education,” refracting and repurposing the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” to capture the specific ways that (higher) education has often served as both a direct and indirect means of, and justification for, the accumulation of capital in the US.

Indeed, we can trace the violence of Harvard’s accumulation all the way back to its origins. In his book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Wilder (2013) documents how “Harvard’s history was inseparable from the history of slavery and the slave trade…Harvard…was a pillar of the antebellum racial order. Not only were the students, the faculties, the officers, and the trustees white, but people of color came to campus only as servants and objects.” Many of Harvard’s benefactors accumulated their wealth through the slave trade and plantation ownership. Harvard, like many schools at the time, also sought to enroll sons of wealthy plantation owners, from both the South, and the West Indies; many Harvard graduates fought in genocidal wars against the Indigenous peoples of what is now New England; and “Many Harvard men built their careers on the Caribbean and Africa trades.” It was not only that Harvard accumulated wealth through its plantation-class enrolments, and donations that were entangled with violence; it also produced racial science that asserted the natural inferiority of Black and other non-white people, which was in turn used to justify enslavement and colonization — that is, the accumulation of capital through processes of racial and colonial dispossession.

Within a capitalist system, there is no benevolent or innocent way to accumulate wealth; this is not hyperbole, but rather based on scores of critical political economic analyses of how capitalism functions. The driving force of capitalism is accumulation, and accumulation can only come through: (1) the exploitation of (formally free) laborers, appropriating the surplus value that the laborers produce, (2) the expropriation of (formally unfree, i.e. enslaved and indentured) laborers, and the dispossession of lands and resources, appropriating the total value that these entities produce (Silva, 2014). Harvard and other institutions of higher education are no exception to this pattern of accumulation.

If not accumulation, then what?

This dependency on, and complicity in, capital accumulation has been there from the very beginning of higher education in what is now the US, even as its exact dimensions have shifted over time. In fact, capitalism is one of the primary conditions of possibility for modern (which means, also, colonial) formations of higher education. For instance, I have written about the way that the 1862 land-grant colleges and universities were indirectly dependent on the US’s post-Revolutionary War colonization and accumultion of Indigenous lands, and these schools continued to depend on capitalist markets as this was where proceeds from granted land had to be invested (Stein, 2017). The patterns of accumulation that started with the colonial colleges in the 17th and 18th centuries thus continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and have not shifted as much in the 21st century as we might like to think. Rather, as Chakravartty and Silva (2012) note, today’s “‘new territories’ of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices” (p. 368).

So what does “accumulation by education” look like today? Boggs and Mitchell cite McMillan Cottom’s (2017) important book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-profit Colleges in the New Economy as an illustrative example. McMillan Cottom traces how for-profit institutions are taking advantage of declining public safety nets, increasing job precarity, and an enduring belief in the value of education, as a means to make profits. Their strategy of accumulation targets those populations who are made most vulnerable to processes of dispossession within the regimes of value instituted by racial-colonial capitalism — much in the same way the strategies of sub-prime mortgage loans did (Chakravartty & Silva, 2012).

Harvard’s endowment investments offer another example of contemporary accumulation strategies in higher education, and we would be naïve to think there aren’t more institutions doing the same, and even more that would do the same if they could. The report about the Harvard endowment’s investments in farmland actually notes that the University of Texas, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the University of Michigan, Emory, and UPenn all have similar investments. The report suggests that economic conditions today are such that farmland continues to be seen as a good investment, as a “real asset,” instead of volatile stocks. Capitalists are always seeking new places to invest, but increasingly, they are not finding them. That is, there are fewer and fewer places where capital can be invested and produce a profit. This has been the case since the 1970s, and thus we see efforts to squeeze profits from elsewhere — e.g. lowering taxes (thus leaving fewer monies for things that had once been public provisions, such as higher education), and failing to increase wages as productivity increased. It appears from the report from GRAIN and Rede Social de Justicia e Direitos Humanos that Harvard looked to farmland as a new area for investment after the spectacular collapse of the housing market in 2007/8 — which was itself another attempted effort to invest and squeeze profits that ultimately failed to be sustainable. Yet we can also note from the report that thus far its farmland investment strategy has not been profitable for Harvard (though it was profitable for the fund managers who arranged it, and have now left).

In fact, broadly speaking, it is not clear whether any strategy can restart the growth engine of capitalism, regardless of our assessment of its ethical impacts. It is, however, likely that efforts to accumulate will only become more brutal, and that further capitalist growth will be devastating for the already devastated global climate. For instance, we can witness the excitement of the US and Canadian business communities at the prospect of new investment opportunities in Brazil, given the stated intention of the new, openly racist, misogynist, and homophobic far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to privatize state companies, forcibly open up Indigenous territories for capitalist development, and remove protections for the Amazon (the latter two of these moves are highly interrelated).

It therefore appears more certain than ever that there is no such thing as ethical accumulation. This is a difficult conclusion to come to when, even if we have a critique of capitalism, we also know that our higher education institutions — including ones far more modest than Harvard — have come to rely on accumulation, in both direct and indirect ways, for their reproduction. It is difficult to foresee what higher education could look like outside of the racial capitalist regime of accumulation, as this would have to be part of larger social shifts that would well exceed the bounds of any particular campus.

In the short-term, we might take cues from reports like the one produced by GRAIN and Rede Social de Justicia e Direitos Humanos, which suggests that Harvard faculty, students, and alumni should: “Demand that the University’s endowment fund ceases all its investments in farmland; Take immediate measures to resolve all land conflicts associated with its current land holdings; Ensure that affected communities are adequately compensated for damages.” Beyond Harvard, there are already several, often student-led efforts to advocate for institutional divestment from fossil fuels. In the long-term, however, the task before us is much greater, and much harder to conceptualize ahead of its doing, especially if, as Silva (2014) suggests, the end of racial-colonial capitalism will require “the end of the world as we know it,” and it then follows, the end of higher education as we know it.

I started out this blog by stating that I wasn’t interested in shaming people for not paying more attention to this issue, especially when there are so many competing tragedies that occupy our attention. However, there is nonetheless a way in which even critical higher education scholars tend to rest on a particular pledge of allegiance to social justice that has a selective memory. If we are serious about justice, then we need to think both more widely and deeply about the ideas and institutions that we hold dear. The point here is not that we should seek a space of purity outside of our own, or our institutions’, implication in harm. Actually, I would wager that no such space exists. Simultaneously, this impossibility of purity cannot be an excuse for indifference or inaction. Rather it may be an invitation to face up to the full depth of our complicity, and the impossibility of a pure place of action, and to “start from there”, as Shotwell (2016) has suggested. That is,

if we want a world with less suffering and more flourishing, it would be useful to perceive complexity and complicity as the constitutive situation of our lives, rather than as things we should avoid…To say that we live in compromised times is to say that although most people aim to not cause suffering, destruction, and death, simply by living, buying things, throwing things away, we implicate ourselves in terrible effects on ecosystems and beings both near and far away from us. We are inescapably entwined and entangled with others, even when we cannot track or directly perceive this entanglement. It is hard for us to examine our connection with unbearable pasts with which we might reckon better, our implication in impossibly complex presents through which we might craft different modes of response, and our aspirations for different futures toward which we might shape different worlds-yet-to-come (p. 8)

In her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) writes of “trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past,”and points to the failure of most institutions like museums, or universities, to do this work (p. 13). Further, even when these institutions try to account for slavery and colonialism, it is falsely presumed that the past is “over”, or at least progressing linearly toward an inevitable end. Universities are always trying to move past what is not past. What if instead we identified the continuity of racial-colonial violence in the present? Our efforts to address injustice on our campuses will be incomplete if we do not understand the processes of racialized capital accumulation that not only made and continue to make our campuses possible, but which our campuses also continue to make possible by naturalizing the colonial logics and practices of extraction.

With this imperative at the fore, I also recognize the common demand of higher education scholars that we offer clear implications or best practices about how to move forward. Though I am unwilling/unable to offer a prescription for how we might proceed, given the impossibility of knowing what a radically transformed or decolonized campus might look like, and given the ways that local contexts significantly shape what is possible at any given place and time, I will end with some questions we might keep in mind when we are creating and assessing possibilities for addressing injustice on our campuses. These are a reiteration of questions that I offered immediately after Trump’s inauguration; they are partly inspired by questions from Dean Spade and Mariame Kaba about how to evaluate proposed reforms:

How does the injustice or harm being addressed relate to longer histories of injustice, and how does the vision for resisting it connect to longer histories of resistance? Are we considering both the local and global impacts of this harm? Can we better integrate our efforts to address immediate campus concerns with long-term visions for transformation that address sedimented structural harms? In the proposed plan, whose visions of justice, responsibility, and change are affirmed and enacted, whose are silenced or tokenized, and whose still haven’t had the chance to be voiced at all? Whose safety and comfort are prioritized? Whose/what kind of labor is being valued and devalued? What might be the unintended consequences of the proposed vision or plan of action, including the possible effects beyond formal campus boundaries? Does the proposal disrupt, denaturalize, and/or dismantle existing hierarchies of humanity in curricula and campus practice, or just rearrange them? In our pursuit of justice, how do we account for our own complicity and foreclosures? What else might we build at the same time as we work toward transforming the institutions we have?

If you are interested in these and related questions, I invite you to check out the Higher Education Otherwise network, which seeks to pluralize the available horizons of possibility for HE, and grapple with the uncertainties, complexities, contradictions, and difficulties that each possibility presents.

Works Cited

Boggs, A., & Mitchell, N. (2018). Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus. Feminist Studies, 44(2), 432–463.

Chakravartty, P., & Silva, D.F.D. (2012). Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism — an introduction. American Quarterly, 64(3), 361–385.

Cottom, T. M. (2017). Lower Ed: The troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy. The New Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. University of Minnesota Press.

Silva, D.F.D (2014). Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The quest (ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 81–97.

Stein, S. (2017). A colonial history of the higher education present: rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 1–17.

Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.