The End of the Harvard Century

The Harvard Crimson

In 2015, Consortium Scholar and human rights lawyer and activist, Teng Biao was a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. During the spring semester, he and a colleague planned to give a talk about their experience as dissidents, but he was told by a senior administrator that, “hosting an event with two Chinese dissidents only days after a historic meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and then University President Drew G. Faust would ’embarrass’ Harvard.” The talk was cancelled. The full article, linked here, details the history of Harvard’s relationship with China, and calls to light potential implications for academic freedom given the recent shift in China’s geopolitical power, noting that in some instances today, “Harvard depends on China more than the other way around.”