My name is Esme Bashwiner. I am a 1994 graduate
of Harvard College and a 1999 graduate of Harvard Law School. Right now
I'm a Chesterfield Smith Community Service Fellow at the law firm of Holland
& Knight in Boston. As a Chesterfield Smith Fellow, I provide full-time
pro bono legal services to people in the Boston area.
As an alum, my experience of Harvard's digital
resources is primarily with
post.harvard.edu. Certainly I use the email forwarding, which I think
is a
wonderful tool. But more specifically, I had a recent experience where
I
really felt connected to Harvard. In mid-September, a member of my class
was imprisoned in Malawi. Apparently he's now an opposition party leader
in Malawi, and he was imprisoned for speaking out against the government
- at least that's what he was charged with. There were rumors that the
Malawian president was thinking of seeking a constitutional amendment
to allow him to run for a third term, and this classmate of mine had opposed
that publicly and was arrested. Within 24 hours of his arrest there was
an entire community that built up, just ad hoc from... Initially, I think,
a guy who was a 1961 graduate of Harvard looked up our class president
from 1994, which is the year that I graduated, and told him that this
classmate had been imprisoned in Malawi. The class president located the
person who was in charge of the listserv, a notice went out on the listserv,
and the listserv people told their friends, and their friends told their
friends, and I got wind of it and I told my friends, and the next thing
you knew everybody had been contacted. The ambassador to Malawi had been
contacted, The Boston Globe, the BBC, The New York Times, the office...
Somebody had attempted to get the office of the President at Harvard to
make a public statement about, this type of thing shouldn't be happening
in Malawi. It was interesting because it wasn't organized. There wasn't
a page at Harvard where this was happening; this was just the loose network
of people who came from Harvard and have gone on to build connections
with the BBC, with The New York Times, with the ambassador to Malawi -
the United States ambassador to Malawi - so they were able to really make
a difference. He was released the next day.
For me this is Harvard's digital presence.
There was an example of where Harvard on the Internet could really work,
because the class listserv got the whole... it was a tool that this 1961
graduate was able to access, which then mushroomed into a mini-movement.
But that was one time in the last 10 years since I graduated from Harvard
that I've seen that happen, and it should be happening more.
I don't think that necessarily the most effective
way to make this happen
would be by having someone physically at Harvard who organizes this type
of thing. But I also think that Harvard has an obligation to bring to
the attention of its alumni issues that it has decided, as a university,
are important issues. There's a lot going on at Harvard; people are thinking
about things at very high levels, and people at Harvard are going to have
a sense about what's important and what are the ways... what are the areas
in which a mobilization of Harvard alumni around the world can really
make a difference. That's something that I, sitting in my law office in
Boston, might not have a sense of. So to the extent that Harvard itself
could endorse or sponsor certain campaigns, that might also encourage
people who are otherwise busy to get involved.
The difficulty of having Harvard sponsor particular
campaigns is, who is
Harvard? and how do you choose which campaigns the University is going
to sponsor? There's a hundred thousand great things happening at any one
moment. So the idea of allowing this loose network to do its thing is
a really great one. The question is, how do you train people to use that
network, and to make the most of it?
I think Harvard is two distinct but interconnected
things. It's Harvard, the
University, which is the professors and the students and the facilities
and the physical plant and Harvard in the way that it interacts with its
community here in the Boston area. And then there's Harvard, which is
the huge network - or collection, right now, more like - of alumni who
have come from Harvard and who have now gone off to take what they learned
from Harvard and use it to affect things in the world. So the more that
Harvard focuses attention on making resources available to alums, the
more effect that Harvard is going to have on the global community, because
it's through that alumni network that Harvard actually acts in the world.
So the idea of an internal digital identity and an external digital identity
- I think that's a false distinction.
Back to
Interview page
