Verita$: Harvard's Hidden History

by Shin Eun-jung, John Trumpbour (Introduction)

Overview

A critical examination of Harvard’s monumental but disconcerting global influence and power, this book examines aspects of Harvard’s history not generally known. The “hidden history” announced in the book’s title begins with analysis of Harvard’s involvement in the Salem witch trials and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Similarly disquieting, Harvard provided students as strikebreakers in both the 1912 Bread and Roses textile workers strike and the 1919 Boston police strike. Harvard administrators and scientists promoted eugenics in the early twentieth century and had a deep impact on Nazi Germany’s race theories. Its contemporary ties to U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism are also profound. Harvard’s management of Russian economic reform left nightmarish memories, and the university was compelled to pay more than $26 million after the U.S. government sued it. The book also examines Harvard’s investment policy for its massive endowment, its restrictive labor policies, and its devastation of the adjoining Allston-Brighton neighborhood into which it is expanding.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” which means “truth” in Latin. As the author reviews Harvard’s history, she questions the real meaning of truth and changes the letter “s” to “$” to emphasize the ways that Harvard has pursued money and power above its quest for truth.

In directing her award-winning DVD of the same name and in preparing this book, the author used documents and interviews with dozens of people, including Noam Chomsky, George Katsiaficas, Richard Levins, Margaret Gullette, Victor Wallis, and many more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629630403
Publisher:	PM Press
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Shin Eun-jung was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1972. Her hometown’s historic uprising in 1980 had a profound effect on her life. A student activist, she later worked as a television news writer for nine years. From 2000 to 2004, she directed the Gwangju Human Rights Film Festival, which screened documentaries from around the world. This book is based upon the award-winning film of the same title. Verita$ won Best Director of a Documentary award at the 2011 New York International Film Festival; it was screened at the Society for Cinema Studies, the International Labor and Video Festival in Turkey, the San Francisco Labor Fest, and in its Korean version at the Seoul Marginal Film Festival. The Korean version of the book was a bestseller among nonfiction titles. Until she suddenly passed away in November 2012, she was hard at work translating the book into English.

Born in North Carolina, John Trumpbour earned a BA in history at Stanford Universityand later received a PhD in history at Harvard. He edited How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire (South End Press) and is the author of Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge UniversityPress), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. He is currently Research Director for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Table of Contents

Introduction John Trumpbour vii

Prologue The Statue of Three Lies 1

Chapter 1 Profiling Harvard 7

Chapter 2 Governing Harvard 23

Chapter 3 The Harvard Tradition: Rich, White, and Male 35

Chapter 4 Pentagon University 59

Chapter 5 Harvard and Foreign Policy 91

Chapter 6 Harvard in Crisis: The Anti-war Movement 105

Chapter 7 Harvard's Role in Russian Economic "Reform" 137

Chapter 8 Harvard's Labor Policy and the 2001 Occupation 153

Chapter 9 A Hedge Fund with Libraries: The Financial Crisis of 2008 167

Chapter 10 Harvard at a Crossroads 191

Epilogue: Time to Stop the Mad Dash 205

About the Author 208

Acknowledgements 210

Photo Sources 212

Notes 217

Index 228

Editorial Reviews

Verita$ recites a litany of bad acts: the Salem witch trials, eugenics, a so-called 'collaboration' with Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, architects of financial collapse such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, McCarthyism, racism, sexism, tyrannical labor practices and “a poison called elitism.” —Sarah Rose, New York Post


"This book's thesis is that Harvard University serves the interests of wealth and power and reproduces social inequality by empowering elites. The author asks why shouldn’t 'the ultimate goal of higher education be creating a civil society in which more people live equally and happily?' Recommended." —W.S. Simmons, CHOICE


"Verita$ provides a well informed and historically-based description of America’s premier educational institution. The book demonstrates how Harvard has impacted the world through research, education, and policymaking." —Harry Targ, Socialism and Democracy

From the Publisher