Letter to the Editor
by Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Dalia Al Kadi, Marcos Ferreiro on March 10, 2010 in Letter to the Editor, Opinion
Dear Editors of the Harvard Kennedy Citizen,
The earthquake in Haiti has shocked and saddened us all. We have been inspired, though, by the outpouring of support from the Harvard Community. At the same time, relief and reconstruction are currently entering a critical stage: while concerned actors must continue to mobilize support, the challenge becomes to utilize donations and efforts in the most efficacious ways. The task is not as easy as simply giving money: experiences during natural disasters have taught harsh lessons – namely that financial donations that are forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of a disaster often pour in and overwhelm local systems, yet, after the initial deluge, monies are not sustained long enough to address longer-term challenges. Facilitating disaster-stricken countries’ abilities to address such challenges, including the rebuilding of critical infrastructure and security systems, social service investments, and institutional capacity building, is an essential component of humanitarian relief strategies and greatly impacts the degree to which disaster-stricken countries are able to rebuild themselves. The 2004 Tsunami is an iconic example of the ill-effects of uneven funding flows that are solicited and allocated without in-depth – or any – capacity and needs assessments; it is essential that we not reproduce these same mistakes.
With this in mind, we raise the following issues based on our respective experiences assisting in crises in Somalia, Burma, Lebanon, many places affected by the Tsunami, etc – arguing that citizen donors are ultimately responsible for maximizing the impact of their donations:
1. Money is often not the limiting factor: Coordination (interagency and with governments), logistics, human resources/capacity, and security are often larger constraints; excessive funds often exacerbate these problems;
2. High-Impact Short-term Funds: Given these constraints, funds designated for immediate use should be allocated strategically, contributed to NGOs based on each organization’s absorption capacity. Even organizations with great capacity and may face legal restrictions that limit the amount of funding they can carry over from one fiscal year to another. For this reason, many organizations opt to disburse funding hastily on endeavors of limited impact. The donor community should emphasize transparency in aid monies received, so that funds can be allocated in the most effective ways (see below).
3. Sustained Long-term Funding for long-term Institutional Capacity Building: Funding that exceeds current absorptive capacity can be better utilized by:
a. Disbursing funds to organizations that have the legal and administrative capabilities to manage and spend the funds over a longer time period, as well as the competency and experience to engage in post-natural disaster redevelopment work;
b. Placing funds with organizations that will have the long-term scope, organizational reach, and capacity to disburse funds to viable but capacity-constrained NGO’s on the ground;
c. Build on previous models (in Pakistan, for instance ) that encourage donors to make long-term incremental pledges rather than one-off donations.
Funding distributed this way is more likely to contribute to the development of civil society institutions (educational, associational, market-based/cooperative, and political) that can continue to utilize and amplify the impact of contributions for years to come. This may allow Haiti to emerge from this tragedy with greater capacity to improve the long-term social welfare of its citizens.
Finally, we would also encourage all members of the Harvard Community to go beyond disaster relief support to consider the deep and enduring problem of Haiti’s underdevelopment. Poverty exacerbated the effects of the earthquake, something made clear in Chile just last week: a quake some one hundred times more powerful there killed only hundreds, rather than hundreds of thousands who have perished in Haiti. And yet some who focus on Haiti’s underlying poverty, such as columnist David Brooks of the New York Times (“The Underlying Tragedy” Jan 14, 2010), have distorted the issue by advancing an argument that it is Haiti’s ‘culture’ that has determined its poverty. Harvard Professor Paul Farmer, who as a physician anthropologist has navigated Haiti’s cultural nuances for 20 years, reminds us that “systemic studies of extreme suffering suggest that the concept of culture should enjoy only an exceedingly limited role in explaining the distribution of misery…’Culture’ does not explain suffering; it may at worst furnish an alibi” (Pathologies of Power (2003), pp 48-49). Here that alibi – Brooks’ idea that one should blame voodoo for Haiti’s underdevelopment (also demeaning a value system, while apotheosizing Judeo-Christian ethics as the standard bearer) – encourages an elision of the far more relevant political and economic variables that helped contribute to Haiti’s underdevelopment. To wit, Haiti’s 20th century has been characterized by direct and indirect U.S. military occupation and domination. In the 1910s, the US invaded and occupied Haiti directly for twenty years, at which point it literally rewrote the country’s Constitution, allowing ownership and exploitation of Haitian resources by foreign capital, and in which document it refashioned the police in order to put down peasant resistance to these policies, killing thousands in the process. Throughout the rest of the century, the US supported Haitian military coups and presided over unsustainable extraction of natural resources by transnational corporations. These realities contributed to and compounded Haiti’s economic and political decline, leading to a collapse of the country’s agriculture sector, the onset of massive emigration, political coups, and the rampant spread of diseases such as AIDS (see Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, 1992: pp 178-190). These historical events also explain, in ways that no myopic or culture-based analysis can, why it is that Haiti’s latest – and perhaps greatest – challenge yet, the 2010 earthquake, has exacted the toll it has. The “underlying tragedy” of the challenges that Haiti has and will face is neither an accident of history, nor the result of unique cultural traits; it is the result of geopolitical and global economic machinations that we have the capacity and obligation to change if we want to support Haitians in their quest to fashion a brighter future.
Therefore, fighting reactionary and opportunistic discourses such as Brooks’, both in our Harvard Community and beyond, is the responsibility of those committed to justice. Indeed, speaking back is a critical aspect of ‘what we can do to help’ – provided that it duly leads to a deeper interrogation into the ways in which we are complicit in the political-economic foundations that exacerbate disasters like these, and to the extent that such an interrogation spurs a commitment to work to alter systems and structures that allow such exploitation to endure (from unequal trade laws, to militarized ‘development’ schemes, and beyond). To truly assist Haitians in their long path to recovery, and the millions of people elsewhere who experience similar states of vulnerability, we must not only commit our money – we must also commit our voices to demand fundamental changes.
Sincerely,
Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Dalia Al Kadi, Marcos Ferreiro
MPA-ID-1
France is Not Racist!
by Boris Jamet-Fournier on October 27, 2009 in Letter to the Editor, Opinion
Call me crazy, but I think it is hard to write a sensible op-ed without providing some context and relying on hard facts. A French Legislative Rainbow Named Desire, printed in the last edition of The Citizen, gets both the context and the facts wrong. The op-ed is a violent charge against France, where “political alienation among minorities” supposedly is the rule. According to the piece, in France, minorities are not acknowledged by the government while politicians can get away with blatantly intolerant sound bites. Ouch.
The piece follows the public release of an amateur clip showing Brice Hortefeux, France’s Janet Napolitano, commenting, “One… is okay. It’s when you have many of them that problems start emerging.” Although he denied it, Hortefeux was talking about the French-Arab minority. The fact that this remark was uttered at a quite informal Party convention and that the minister was ostensibly joking – he directed his comment at a young Frenchman of Algerian descent who later backed up Hortefeux’s denials of racism – does not make it any more acceptable. Whatever type of humor he fancies, a member of the government should never make this kind of comment in public, especially since France is in need of a more diverse political personnel, as the article correctly pointed out.
Yet the op-ed’s main argument makes very little sense. The analogy between the French of Arab descent and African-Americans in the U.S. is inaccurate for at least two reasons. First, it neglects the religious divide between a largely Muslim French-Arab population and the non-Muslim Caucasians. Second, it completely ignores history. African-Americans have a long record of dialogue and fights in the American society: where is the Parisian Rosa Parks, where is the French-Arab Martin Luther King?
A French Legislative Rainbow Named Desire shows the same disregard for history when quoting an extremely suspect French study. Researchers have found that voters are more likely to support a candidate named “Marianne” than a candidate named “Samira.” Anyone who has ever sent a postcard from Provence or Bretagne knows that Marianne is on every French stamp; she has been the symbol of our Republic for more than 200 years. Would Americans not vote for a candidate with the Star-Spangled Banner Flag as a campaign logo?
The piece then moves on to the absence of “ethnic labeling” in France, which is hugely controversial on the national scene. Yet these debates are not even mentioned in the article, and readers are led to believe that Frenchmen have decided to ignore ethnic minorities altogether. The truth is that ethnic statistics are disputed because they conflict with the republican myth that treats French men and women as citizens first, not as representatives of an ethnicity or members of a church.
The key assertion that “not a single elected official in France protested against this repugnant remark” – reprinted in bold later in the article for effect – just boggles the mind; for several weeks, it has been impossible to escape the comments, analyses, denunciations and refutations around Hortefeux-gate. As one of a myriad of examples, Hamon, Royal and Besancenot, all three members of the opposition, have asked for Hortefeux’s resignation. Just google it – a precaution that might have been a helpful step before submitting the op-ed for publication.
Other instances of questionable judgment include referring to former President Chirac as a symbol of tolerance towards minorities – he too made quite acidic comments in his day – and the idea that “French law forbids positive discrimination for minorities.” Sciences Po, my alma mater, started implementing a well-known affirmative action policy almost a decade ago. Other institutions have since been inspired by the school’s approach.
It is still unclear if Hortefeux was joking or not, but regardless, his rather despicable comment is highly inappropriate. I agree with the piece that France would benefit from a revamped voting system with more proportional representation. However, I cannot be satisfied with an op-ed that shows such disregard for the facts.
France is not racist – of course, it can still do a lot to achieve better representation of ethnic (and other) minorities in government, but the conversation should start in a healthier place. This debate is not over, and the Hortefeux case will actually give The Citizen an opportunity to raise this issue again, when the minister appears before court in mid-December; yes, in France, racist comments in public are forbidden by law!
Letter to the Editor
by Leah Vincent on November 20, 2008 in Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor:
My name is Leah, and I am the woman who you may sometimes see around school wearing zebra print leggings. I am possibly the only woman (or man) to ever wear zebra print leggings in the Kennedy School. And I, the zebra-print-legged woman, would like to ask you to consider that if you check yourself, you might just wreck yourself. Read more
Letters to the Editor
by The Editors on May 2, 2007 in Letter to the Editor, Opinion
To the Editor:
While visiting Boston last week I stopped by the Kennedy School and, being a former writer for this paper, picked up a copy of the Citizen. I found the lead article “New joint degrees: hybrid MBA or subordinate MPP” to be very interesting from an alumni point of view. Working now as “a McKinsey consultant with a more humane image” I wanted to weigh-in on the issue.
Specifically, two points come to mind: one, that there is nothing to fear from a joint degree program and, two, that this program does not put in jeopardy the kind of impact that KSG most desires from its alumni. Since graduation I have consistently been impressed and honored with how well respected the Kennedy School degree is viewed and received in the professional workplace. Whether you are graduating with joint degree or with and MPP/MPA this will not change. Offering the opportunity for someone to study business as well as policy should not in any way dilute (1) the mission of the Kennedy School or (2) its worldwide reputation.
Which leads me to my second point. The joint degree leads to at least two ends - the public servant who leaves the program with greater business acumen and the businessman who graduates attuned to public policy, its issues and paths towards solutions. Both of these have the high-potential to lead to greater public value and impact than either alone. The Kennedy School should not forget or neglect the vast potential to make a real positive difference even when working “on the dark side.” At McKinsey I have had fantastic opportunities to make real policy change on a world-wide scale with the resources of a global private sector firm behind me. If this is where the future MPP/MBAs land is this something we should fear? I think there is indeed a strong case for this program to at least identify, if not lead students to, these positions.
Giles Whiting, MPP ‘05
To the Editor:
When I saw the front-page article, “Student parents at KSG criticize lack of support” (April 18), I was as excited as my toddler gets when I let her use my laptop. What was not emphasized in the piece, though, is how this issue is primarily about gender discrimination. Last fall, as I adjusted to being in school after being a work-at-home mom, a KSG administrator advised me not to “advertise” the fact that I have kids. No, this didn’t come from a sexist old guy, but a mother herself who had internalized the discrimination that moms face on the job. It was dreadful advice. As mothers, we are forced to choose between being “out of the closet” mommies or denying part of our identity to survive in a professional environment that’s unfriendly to families. When I asked the administrator what the school did to support parents, she paused and then said there was a highchair for use in the forum.
The Citizen article raised the question of why KSG should make more accommodations to parents than others struggling with personal and financial challenges. It shouldn’t, but like racial and class inequality measures, failing to accommodate mothers is a form of gender discrimination. On top of our breeding and breastfeeding responsibilities, women still do most of the childrearing. Next fall I’ll begin a doctoral program at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the reasons I chose Berkeley was their mommy-friendly policies and support. How many women do not come or even apply to KSG because of the absence of such support? Is this one of the reasons why the mid-career program is only 1/3 women?
Mothers who come to KSG also have less opportunity to develop social networks with classmates and visitors than their childless cohorts. Most happy hour and evening events are during our bewitching hours – childcare pickup, dinner, baths and bedtime stories. I have fantasies of bringing my 4-year-old son, Liam, and my 22-month-old daughter to an evening forum event. I would breastfeed Kalian in the front row in front of some bigwig. Liam would be melting down and start screaming for dinner. Then, I would unleash my toddler (from the donated high chair, of course) to run up and down the aisles and onto the stage. Protests like this at Harvard in the 1970s generated day care centers. Is this what it will take to finally close the gender gap?
Jen Schradie, MC/MPA
