An aerial view of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Everything has changed since Donald Trump cheated and got himself elected president in 2016. All of us true believers in American democracy were naive, including the top public opinion pollsters and journalists. Almost no one gave him a chance.

Now many of the same people who were fooled by Trump are being fooled again, thinking his lead in the polls with 11 months to go before the 2024 election means he will be president again. I do not believe that, but I am not naive. I’ve known for a long time that everybody cheats.

Where did I learn it? From a little coming of age comedy-drama released in 1979 called “Breaking Away.”

Dennis Christopher plays Dave Stohler, a cyclist who is the son of a stone cutter in Bloomington, Indiana. He idolizes the Italian cycling team, until he gets to ride with them in an exhibition race. When he keeps up with the team and challenges them, one of the riders forces him to crash, leading to his loss of innocence and disillusionment.

When his dad asks him about it, he says: “Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know.”

“Well now you know,” says his dad Ray Stohler, played by Paul Dooley, a used car salesman who does his share of cheating to sell cars.

For years I’ve watched with exasperation as expert after expert tried to figure how the secret of the “Trump voter.” Being from the South, it was no mystery to me. I grew up with these people.

Just the other day, while scrolling through the free broadcast channels, I caught a snippet of an interview Judy Woodruff conducted on PBS with an ex-marine who is pushing an anti-vax agenda. Before quickly changing the channel, my only thought was: “What is she doing putting this guy on TeeVee?”

Much has been written about the white, Christian Trump voters with less than a college education. Less has been written about how easily manipulated these people are by a crass politician willing to lie unmercifully to get their votes and loyalty. I wrote the definitive piece on it awhile back, but most people don’t know about it because it wasn’t featured on cable TeeVee.

How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

As Trump told them over and over again on every channel, these people believe there is an elite cabal of Ivy Leaguers and a Deep State that has it in for them and their kind.

Trump just successfully tapped into this existential anxiety and used the media and social media to convince them he and only he was on their side.

Well now there is a new scandal brewing that might just reinforce this feeling that everybody cheats, including Facebook and Harvard.

The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper at the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, broke a story earlier this year that a dean there intended to shut down the Technology and Social Change Project, a research effort founded and run by Joan Donovan, “a prominent disinformation researcher,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Harvard Misinformation Expert Joan Donovan Forced to Leave by Kennedy School Dean, Sources Say

The news surprised many observers, according to CJR, since Donovan is highly regarded in her field and had reportedly been wooed by a number of prestigious institutions of higher learning before agreeing to join Harvard to lead the project. She was among the first researchers to get her hands on internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook staffer who had collected evidence of alleged wrongdoing by the platform, and whose disclosures would come to be known in the media as the “Facebook Papers.”

Joan Donovan: NAJ screen shot

“This looked like a coup for Donovan and also for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center,” the CJR says, where her project was based.

Unnamed sources told reporters for the Crimson at the time that Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government, was forcing Donovan out “because she and her work were getting too much attention,” it was reported.

Elmendorf reportedly ordered her not to spend any more money on the Technology and Social Change Project or to hire any more staff, and also blocked her from doing any public appearances or interviews about her research. The official line came via James Smith, a Harvard spokesperson who told the Crimson that the decision had something to do with a university policy that requires every research effort to be led by a faculty member (technically Donovan was staff, not faculty).

Donovan has a very different take on her departure.

In a 248-page document that became public on Monday and was addressed to both the president of Harvard and the U.S. secretary of education, she alleges that Elmendorf and the Kennedy School targeted her team, their work, and her personally in an effort to “diminish—if not destroy—their research,” and that they did so to protect “the interests of high-value donors associated with Meta,” the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

Now you would think that Harvard would not be thrilled to be associated with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, Meta, Instagram and other platforms, since he dropped out of college and never finished his degree. He pretty clearly didn’t learn much at Harvard, except how to type code. The university certainly cannot take any credit for helping to create the so-called genius of Facebook, since he is not an alumnus.

But you know money and what it can buy.

Donovan argues that Harvard infringed her rights to academic freedom and freedom of speech, and further alleges that Meta pressured Elmendorf to act, noting that he is friends with Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s former chief operating officer. Elmendorf was Sandberg’s advisor when she studied at Harvard in the early 1990s. He attended Sandberg’s wedding in 2022, four days before moving to shut down Donovan’s project, making one wonder what they talked about over expensive champaign.

(Disclaimer: I have my own serious problem with Sheryl Sandberg. She is the bitch who first worked with Google to create its monopoly ad platform, then was hired away by Facebook to create its ad interface when the company went public in 2012. This helped put many newspapers and online news sites out of business and thousands of news reporters out of work. A groundbreaking new study from Columbia University and the University of Houston, with Boston-based consulting firm The Brattle Group, documents how Google owes news publishers $10 billion to $12 billion annually and Facebook $1.9 billion).

Study: Google and Meta Owe News Publishers at Least $12 Billion

The university had received a $500 million donation from the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in December 2021, a Christmas present to the university with strings from a nonprofit foundation controlled by Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, and Priscilla Chan, his wife.

In Donovan’s statement, which includes copies of dozens of emails and text messages between her and Harvard faculty members, Donovan alleges that Meta “inappropriately influenced” Elmendorf and others at the Kennedy School in return for the promise of funding, leading to what Donovan calls a “significant conflict of interest” that was compounded by the friendship between Elmendorf and Sandberg. Donovan alleges that this conflict created a culture of “operating in the best interest of Facebook/Meta at the expense of academic freedom,” and that Harvard sabotaged her attempt to create a public archive of the Facebook Papers.

In an email, Smith, the Harvard spokesperson, told CJR that Donovan’s allegations are “false,” describing her narrative as “full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations,” in particular the suggestion that Harvard allowed Facebook to “dictate its approach to research.” Smith added that research projects routinely come to an end, and that the Facebook Papers archive project was completed, proving that even the so-called best universities hire PR people who lie.

Donovan says that the archive was much less extensive than she envisioned. Harvard has said that it offered Donovan a job as an adjunct professor, but that she turned it down. She was hired as a staff researcher, not a faculty member. But claiming she had no academic freedom is the kind of hair splitting that only corrupt administrators use to justify their corrupt actions.

Donovan took an assistant professor position in the journalism program at Boston University.

In an interview with CJR’s Mathew Ingram, Donovan said that her relationship with Harvard started to sour in October 2021, when Elmendorf asked her to speak at a meeting of the Dean’s Council, a group of the university’s high-profile donors. Nancy Gibbs, Donovan’s faculty advisor, interviewed her about social media and disinformation and the discussion eventually turned to the Facebook documents that Haugen had leaked a few weeks prior to the meeting.

As Donovan recalls, she referred to the leak as “the most important documents in internet history,” and told the meeting that they should be made public because they contained evidence that Meta knew some of its products were seriously flawed and were even “harming democracy.”

Elliot Schrage, then the vice president of communications and global policy for Meta, was also at the meeting. Donovan says that, after she brought up the Haugen leaks, Schrage became agitated and visibly angry, “rocking in his chair and waving his arms and trying to interrupt.”

During a Q&A session after her talk, Donovan says, Schrage reiterated a number of common Meta talking points, including the fact that disinformation is a fluid concept with no agreed-upon definition and that the company didn’t want to be an “arbiter of truth.” According to Donovan, Gibbs was supportive after the incident. She says that they discussed how Schrage would likely try to pressure Elmendorf about the idea of creating a public archive of the documents.

Gibbs and Schrage had not been reached for comment at the time of this writing.

According to Donovan, Elmendorf’s friendship with Sandberg was common knowledge at Harvard. Donovan says that she and her colleagues were “very cautious” about their work on the archive and that they spent a lot of time “hand-wringing about who we were going to upset” with their research.

After Elmendorf called her in for a status meeting, Donovan claims that he told her she was not to raise any more money for her project; that she was forbidden to spend the money that she had raised (a total of $12 million, she says); and that she couldn’t hire any new staff. According to Donovan, Elmendorf told her that he wasn’t going to allow any expenditure that increased her public profile, and used a number of Meta talking points in his assessment of her work.

Harvard made a big deal of announcing the donation in December from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to fund a new institute devoted to the science of both artificial and natural intelligence.

Jeff MacGregor, a spokesperson for the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, told the Washington Post that the fund had “no involvement in Dr. Donovan’s departure.”

Of course they would say that. Just like Trump, these people learn to lie and cheat.

Donovan said regardless of whether Meta put pressure on Elmendorf or he simply realized that high-value donors would be upset with her work, the result was the same: the closure of her Technology and Social Change project, which she says caused significant damage to her reputation and her academic career. Donovan says she tried to move her work to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, but that the head of that center told her that they didn’t have the “political capital” to bring on someone whom Elmendorf had “targeted.”

The interview with Donovan was facilitated by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal-aid group that also worked with Haugen after she revealed her identity. When asked why she chose to make her complaint an act of whistleblowing as opposed to a routine legal case, Donovan replied that she is filing a wrongful termination action against Harvard, adding that she wanted to take the extra step of outlining her allegations in an official whistleblowing document because the principle at stake is an important one.

Donovan said that, during the meeting with Elmendorf, he implied that if she was sued over her work, the university would not protect her, and that she couldn’t expect to have any academic freedom because she was a staff member on contract rather than a faculty member.

“The idea that only faculty are protected by academic freedom strikes a number of observers as a dangerous one for a university,” CJR reports.

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, told the Post that, when a researcher is as prominent in their field as Donovan is, the university “ought to award that person the protections of academic freedom.”

Donovan told me that she believes the pressure to shut down her project is part of a broader pattern of influence in which Meta and other tech platforms have tried to make research into disinformation as difficult as possible.

Meta did not reply to a request for comment by the time of this writing.

Donovan said she hopes that by blowing the whistle on Harvard, her case will be the “tip of the spear.”

Maybe she meant informing the public and saving democracy. One has to wonder if Harvard shares those concerns, or is only interested in its bottom line as a private, for profit college.

So now you know. Everybody cheats.

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