Ask Not What Your Institute of Politics Can Do For You, But If It Hazed You

Source: Florida Memory/Unsplash

Harvard’s Institute of Politics has been riddled with hazing allegations, a broken culture, and pieces of its own mission to clean up.

According to The Crimson, the chairman of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ (IOP) Gender and Sexuality Coalition feels he was brutally hazed by members of the IOP’s four-man executive team during an optional spring leadership retreat. The details are almost too shocking to include here: he was asked to recite a portion of Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech in Ed Sheeran’s voice. To make matters worse, alcohol and even water “sat nearby.” Anyone who has been asked by a professor to read a passage out loud in class, and who has proceeded to take a sip of water after, will certainly understand just how dastardly, how unconscionable, the IOP’s actions were.

What’s more, members were asked to submit personality test scores ahead of the retreat, which were later revealed via a game of Kahoot. According to those involved, “although submitting a score was described as optional, opting out did not feel easy.” Instead, IOP members want University officials to opt out for students by endorsing an ever-growing definition of hazing — i.e., “I personally didn’t like that, so it is hazing.” In all fairness, not participating carried real consequences for IOP members. No, not the risk of being kicked out of the IOP or, even worse, being forced to be a member. Members on retreat had already been appointed to leadership, and the IOP Constitution gives the executive team almost no power to remove or discipline a sitting leader. The repercussions were probably something more serious, like being momentarily chided for not participating — grave indeed.

Along with these awful hazing allegations, reporting focused on other serious “cultural issues” at the IOP. Not that the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee¹ (SAC) agrees on 90% of political issues or that its executive team was elected unopposed because of student apathy. No, The Crimson stressed yet more pressing problems: one board member once mixed up someone’s name. Donald Cruse ’27, chairman of the Harvard Political Review, which publishes advocacy pieces for the left disguised as political news, called for the executive team’s resignation over their involvement in the IOP’s failing culture. His open letter, signed by all four members of SAC who have resigned over the last year because of how terrible the culture apparently is, insisted that the IOP should be a diverse and welcoming community — the SAC’s two Directors of Diversity just weren’t enough. In fact, these Directors of Diversity were apparently the exact people the IOP leadership viciously attacked. Allison McGourty ’29, one of those DEI Directors, bravely reported to The Crimson that Vice President Will Smialek ’27 forgot her name at an early spring SAC meeting. This, of course, was because he hates women (or, in her words, he “take[s women] less seriously”), not because they had just met.

Of course, the whole story is funny, but one should only laugh so much. The Crimson published an article accusing the IOP leadership of being sexists and criminals because of what seem like completely spurious allegations. The entire piece is essentially a grab bag of individual, loosely-related grievances from IOP members about the executive team. The left, whether The Crimson or the IOP itself, is always ready to throw its own under the bus. Just ask Joe Biden.

The Institute of Politics, once a gleaming hub for bipartisanship, has come to suffer the fate of all incompetent left-wing leadership: compromised moral values, exclusivity, and nepotism, leading to a culture of self-obsessed oppression olympics. The IOP has real, serious issues: among other things, a dearth of conservatives, student programs built to train students for left-wing activism rather than anything resembling public service, and a bloated, useless 35-member executive board that votes on operations at best once a year. But talking about those things would mean talking about how the left can’t lead — not a presidential campaign, and not even their own overfunded campus advocacy organization.

1. The term for the nearly 40 students that comprise the IOP’s executive team, the chairs of each of its 18 undergraduate programs, and the chairs of its four student coalitions.