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 BULLY PULPIT
The Buzz
“The critical ingredient is race.”
Alex Keyssar, speaking at a brown bag discussion in late October on why the country still has the Electoral College, despite the fact that over the years, more than 500 amendments have been proposed to reform or eliminate it. Keyssar, an historian, said the real reason it was never eliminated isn’t because small states were opposed, but because slave-owning southern states, counting slaves as three-fifths of a person, could boost their representation in Congress, giving them more power.
“This is not happening on Mars — this is happening in your world.”
Professor and human rights activist Michael Ignatieff at a panel discussion in the Forum in October on the crisis in Darfur that has displaced nearly 1.5 million people. Ignatieff urged students to speak out about the international community’s inaction.
“All it’s done for all this yammering and ‘g-word’-using is sanction the rebels.”
Samantha Power, lecturer at the Kennedy School and author of “A Problem From Hell,” her Pulitzer Prize winning book on genocide, at the same Darfur Forum, on how the United States government has yet to live up to its condemnation of the genocide going on in the Sudan.
“There is no guarantee that the next generation will be more flexible.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, speaking in the Forum about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peres was commenting on the belief, by some, that the culture of mistrust is currently so great between the Israelis and Palestinians that it might be better to wait for the next generation to make peace. His recommendation was not to wait.
“We got kinda bogged down when students couldn’t decide between ‘tastes great’ or ‘less filling.’”
When asked the difference between speaking at Harvard and other schools, Harvard College graduate Chris Nowinski jokingly referred back to Miller Lite’s famous beer mantra. Nowinski, currently a professional wrestler known as “Chris Harvard,” was participating in a pre-election Forum discussion with Harvard athletes called “Jock the Vote.” The discussions at Harvard, he said, were much more substantiative.
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