Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, has said that he believes his work, which has included criticisms of Israel’s human rights violations, is the reason for Harvard’s rejection.
Harvard declined to comment on details of the decision.
Spicer and Lewandowski, for their parts, survived the backlash in 2017. But also that year, Manning’s invitation to the Kennedy school’s Institute of Politics was rescinded by dean Douglas Elmendorf, who said at the time that offering it was a mistake.
In 2019, controversy struck again when the Kennedy School named former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who presided over the Flint water crisis, a fellow. Snyder turned down the one-year fellowship after a wave of pushback from Michigan residents and members of Harvard’s community.
The controversies have contributed to confusion surrounding the role of Harvard fellows and prompted Harvard leaders to reconsider the process of proposing and confirming Kennedy School fellows. An official with the Kennedy School told the Globe the goal is to have “a more consistent approach” for fellow nominations and fewer total fellows, while ensuring that they spend more time engaging with the campus community. The current process requires that nominations are submitted and approved before making offers.
“The part [of the process] that has been in place for a few years is that [the school has] to affirmatively approve and not just rubber stamp,” said the official, who asked not to be named because the school hasn’t authorized public comment.
Faculty members and staff were updated during the recent fall semester about planned changes in the fellows process, the official said. The Harvard Crimson first reported that Elmendorf was reconsidering the fellow process in 2017 after speaking with members of the campus community.
Kennedy School fellowships differ in length and substance. Some are yearlong commitments that include public speaking, engaging with students, scholarship, and writing. Others are as short as few days, as was the case for Spicer’s fellowship.
The policy changes appear to differ from a faculty-driven approach the Kennedy School historically relied on for naming fellows. Elmendorf said in 2017 that the school has “hundreds of fellows” across departments and he does not “view the title of ‘fellow’ as conveying a special honor,” or as an endorsement.
Charlie Clements, former executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of the Kennedy School, said his center “never had a fellow nomination that wasn’t approved” by the dean’s office in Clements’s five-year tenure.
Clements, who left in 2015, said fellow applications were typically accompanied by candidates’ resumes, letters of recommendation, and thoughts from the center’s faculty director about “how this person could enhance our mission or add to the scholarship of human rights — basically justifying to the dean why they should be approved.”
Clements added that fellows are a “terribly important part” of the Kennedy School’s mission. They often have recently stepped down from prominent roles and can offer insight to and field questions from students.
In Roth’s case, Mathias Risse, current director of the Carr Center, said in an e-mail obtained by the Globe that his team reached out to Roth last summer to discuss a fellowship in detail “because he is one of the most distinguished human rights leaders of our time and one of the most visible faces of the human rights movement,” Risse wrote. Roth “agreed in principle,” to accept the position, he told The Nation.
Risse said he did not anticipate the dean’s office would push back on Roth’s nomination. Elmendorf’s rejection “was a profoundly sad moment for me personally,” Risse wrote.
“My subsequent conversation with Ken Roth to explain this decision to the extent I could was one of the lowest moments in my professional life,” he said.
Kennedy School declined to detail internal discussions about individual fellowship candidates. But the recent confusion over Roth’s rejected fellowship has prompted some to question how seriously the university takes academic freedom when it comes to discussing Israel and Palestine.
Risse separately told the Globe that Kennedy School fellowship appointments often involve “tough calls.”
“On the one hand, [the Kennedy School] has an inherent interest, or should have that, in having controversial people on campus to discuss their views with them,” Risse said. “But then — how controversial is too controversial, and under what considerations? So the dean’s office has assumed more control over the things, and high profile cases come up for extra scrutiny.”
The Kennedy School official said work surrounding fellowships is still ongoing. Ideally, there will be “an enhanced” nomination and review process that formally involves a range of faculty members.
This fall, following the Harvard rejection, Roth was named a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview published on the university’s website, Roth said he planned to write a book “to answer the question of how a relatively small group of people moves governments around the world.”
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Hilarysburns.
