THE HARVARD CRIMSON | February 4, 2020
Page 6
Editorial The Crimson Editorial board
Op-Ed
Beyond the Lieber Allegations
The Rigged Electoral System
L
ast week, University Professor Charles M. Lieber was charged in federal court for “making materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to U.S. government agencies. The lawsuit filed by the federal government claims that Lieber, who has since been placed on “indefinite” paid administrative leave, signed contracts beginning in 2011 to participate in China’s Thousand Talents Plan for personal financial gain. But the issue at stake is larger than a professor hiding funding or personally receiving illegal payments for research — the TTP isn’t any old foreign entity. Established in 2008 by the Chinese government to bring in scientists from around the world, it has been deemed by the U.S. government to be a danger to national security. It’s not an isolated incident either. The Chinese government has been conducting a broader program of academic espionage against the U.S. and its research institutions. This espionage has most notably included attempts to insert Chinese scholars into research programs dealing with sensitive information. Supplying sensitive information in this context is an especially grave offense given the Chinese government’s past record as an unethical actor. It’s not just intellectual property theft; the Chinese government has displayed political and military recklessness in the South China Sea and has gone so far as to perpetrate the internment and “re-education” of the Uighur ethnic group. Lieber’s alleged acts run contrary to the spirit of our University and warrant
clear denunciation — something Harvard has not explicitly or publicly offered. He not only undermines his own academic and civic integrity, but draws into question that of the University and scientific research more broadly. But given this broader context, Lieber’s case must be the beginning of a broader process of reflection. Harvard must seek to carefully balance its first principles of open cultural exchange and the pursuit of knowledge, while also making sure that it has adequately safeguarded against similar cases. To that end and in response to the FBI and NIH launching national investigations into academic espionage this past year, Harvard has established two new oversight committees dedicated to reviewing sensitive research projects. But we ask still more. Harvard must not only address the actions and susceptibilities of its affiliates but its own institutional ties to a regime whose abuses go far beyond intellectual property theft. As we have previously opined, in cases where Harvard holds financial ties to ethically dubious regimes, the University must seriously consider the extent to which it serves to legitimize these actors and their abuses. Yet still more broadly, we must ask what systemic factors have allowed the Chinese government to take advantage of American research institutions. After all, as of November, more than 70 research institutions were investigating potential cases of academic espionage, almost all of which involved Chi-
nese researchers and scholars. It would seem that the increasing presence of Chinese researchers and funding at U.S. institutions is partially being driven by the insufficient number of American-born scientists the U.S. produces. Perhaps one silver lining of the Lieber case will be increased consciousness about our own national deficiencies in this field. While Harvard must condemn and combat China’s academic espionage, it is critical that the rhetoric denouncing the Chinese state and its actions does not devolve into blanket criticism or stereotyping of Chinese people. Chinese citizens are neither personally responsible for their government’s actions, nor do these individuals necessarily support them. Any totalizing Cold War rhetoric that attempts to erase this distinction would be not only morally reprehensible, but would also undermine the open pursuit of knowledge and innovation Harvard is supposed to champion. We must make a conscious effort to combat rhetoric and attitudes that generalize along racial or ethnic lines and which impede vital intellectual exchange. This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
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COLUMN
I Want To Think Less About Food By Rebecca E.J. Cadenhead
H
ere’s the moment I began to hate my body: I am twelve years old, standing next to one of my friends in front of the mirror in the locker room after track practice. She, like the other girls in our school who were routinely called beautiful, was stick-thin. Comparing the size of our thighs, I realized that I was not. Suddenly, I became convinced that my physical form was inferior to hers; my legs began to seem like a personal failing. From there, I undertook the project of correcting what I saw as wrong with my body; mainly, that I wasn’t medically underweight. Food, instead of something to enjoy, became a collection of macronutrients. In some ways, this line of thinking had already been drilled into me by my mother, a registered dietician. However, her well-meaning advice about eating a balanced diet had been twisted by my own self-loathing into something much more sinister; a bowl of chocolate ice cream was now reduced to 30 grams of sugar, 14 grams of fat, and more calories than I wanted to think about.
These narratives pretend to promote a “healthy lifestyle”, but are almost always actually about weighing less. And if I ate that bowl of ice cream, it would mean almost overwhelming guilt; I had poisoned my body, and there would be consequences. By the time I had entered high school, this way of viewing food had been reinforced by years of exposure to online di-
eting culture. My Instagram feed was filled with references to “clean eating”, my YouTube recommendations were filled with videos titled “what I eat in a day”, and “how I lost 20 pounds in 6 months”. I was obsessed with eating a diet free from any “unclean” foods, convinced that if I were just a little skinnier, I would finally be worthy. For the most part, my efforts were applauded. After all, there’s nothing visibly wrong with someone who regularly eats salad, so it took me too long to realize the truth: I had an unhealthy relationship with food. At the time, “unhealthy” was probably the last word people would have used to describe me; I was known for eating healthily. This image was heavily reinforced by the presence of my mother, who frequently gave nutrition talks at my high school. Outwardly, I was a role-model. Internally, I felt awful, all the time. When I was particularly stressed, I starved myself. Eating disorders are a disease; to be afflicted with one is to have caught a contagion, and the virus is everywhere. Current media messaging tells us eating a balanced diet is the way to nirvana; our supermarket checkout aisles are stocked with magazines filled with tips for eating better (read: losing weight) from beautiful (read: skinny) celebrities. I see the symptoms of the illness in my friends all the time: passing out after eating only half a salad the entire day, or taking punishingly long runs in order to lose an invisible amount of weight. Ironically, if divorced from context, a lot of the things these girls do would be viewed positively, perhaps even as selfcare. This only underscores that our ideas
of what being “healthy” looks like can obscure what is actually self-harm. These narratives pretend to promote a “healthy lifestyle”, but are almost always actually about weighing less. Behaviors that are clearly harmful (drug addiction, intermittent fasting that borders on starvation, bizarre “cleanses”)
I would like to think about what I eat a little less, and I encourage others to do the same. are tolerated, so long as the person doing them fits a physical mold. Case in point: The periods when I was most unkind to my body — and when, as a result, I was the thinnest — were also the times when I received the most compliments. My physical and mental health were always secondary to how I looked. I wish I could tell you that I educated myself on the body-positivity movement, or went to see a therapist, or did some other kind of personal work, and that’s how I got better. But that wouldn’t be true. I no longer skip meals, and for the most part, I’m much happier with my body. Still, I think there might always be a part of me ready to punish myself. We are often encouraged to think about the food we eat. Americans, after all, have a junk food problem, and maybe a little more mindful eating would improve our health outcomes. But I would like to think about what I eat a little less, and I encourage others to do the same. —Rebecca E. J. Cadenhead ‘23 lives in Canaday Hall. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.
By Jacob A. Fortinsky
W
e are now fully immersed in election season with the 2020 presidential election just a few short months away and primaries fully underway. It is, thus, an apt time to revisit one of the great injustices of the American electoral system, which is the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of the massive prison population in our country. Senator Bernie Sanders is currently the only presidential candidate calling for granting all incarcerated Americans the right to vote. Yet, not only do incarcerated Americans lack the right to vote but their bodies are often used to further the agendas of those responsible for the growth of the modern carceral state.
Either prisoners should be granted the right to vote — which I believe is the right thing to do — or they should not be counted for apportionment. Incarcerated Americans are counted in the districts where they are imprisoned and not in the districts where they are registered to vote. This fundamentally undemocratic policy has detrimental consequences on those whose votes are exploited. Either prisoners should be granted the right to vote — which I believe is the right thing to do — or they should not be counted for apportionment. It is immoral and undemocratic to count those who are denied the right to vote as citizens for district apportionment. Elected officials are meant to serve their constituents and the public. The only mechanism by which constituents are able to ensure that their representatives are truly serving their interests is by voting them out. However, individuals who are counted in districts where they cannot vote do not have this ability. In fact, they are often served by representatives who advocate positions diametrically opposed to their own. Imagine a district that includes a massive prison system run by a for-profit private prison corporation. In such a district the only voters would be the employees of the prison and of the corporation imprisoning the overwhelming majority of the district’s residents. The profiteers of the prisons would elect someone intended to represent the prisoners themselves. Yet clearly those voting would have drastically different interests to those whom the representative is meant to represent. This is not just a hypothetical; in smaller districts, this is reality. In Anamosa, Iowa, a district with a massive prisoner population, only 58 people vote, despite there being 1,400 census-recorded residents. This means each voter in Anamosa has about 25 times more political clout than the typical American voter. Allowing these districts with large prison populations to count their prisoners for political representation is the modern-day equivalent of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Though it is often rightfully lamented that slaves were only counted as three-fifths of a person, it is important to recall that it was the abolitionists who argued that slaves should not be counted in congressional apportionment and it was the slaveholders who pushed to count them. Southerners wanted slaves to count so that they could inflate their representation in Congress. It was deemed unfair to count them as full people so they were only considered three-fifths of their white counterparts. We consider this to be incredibly heinous yet say nothing about the apportionment of the incarcerated who count as full people for purposes of allotting representation. In 1790, there were 700,000 slaves in America. None of them had the right to vote, yet threefifths of them also had their votes stolen a second time because they were still counted in district apportionment. As of 2013, there were 2,220,300 incarcerated adults. Similarly, they do not have the right to vote, yet every single one of them has their vote stolen when they are counted in district apportionment. Just as the slaves were then represented by their slaveholders, prisoners today are often represented by the authors of the policies responsible for sending them to prison. A manifestation of this problem that hits closer to home, albeit much less seriously, is that college students, too, are counted in districts in which they largely do not vote and often are served by politicians with interests very different from their own. We may take advantage of the incredibly progressive Cambridge, yet some schools with just as large a liberal student body are surrounded by conservative voters and politicians. And by counting the students as residents of those districts, they are exploited to advance an agenda that they do not have the power to resist. Issues of district apportionment and who counts as being represented might not be as exciting as prison divestment or sentencing reform, but they are nonetheless critical to treating incarcerated people fairly and for our democracy to function properly. As we progress into election season and people continue to debate whom to vote for, it is important to remember that the system is rigged against those behind bars; they are unfairly barred from voting and deliberately misrepresented. —Jacob A. Fortinsky ’21, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Winthrop House.
