Monday, December 22, 2014

How can the Harvard Corporation not stand for occupation?

"Top Harvard University officials have stepped in after campus food services administrators agreed to remove the SodaStream label from equipment in their dining halls and not to make any new purchases from the company.

The decision to boycott SodaStream came after a series of meetings with faculty and concerned students to discuss the implications of using a product manufactured in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

But now Harvard University Dining Services is reconsidering its decision on the grounds that it should not have taken “political” factors into account. This flatly contradicts a decision in another recent case — that administrators did not contest — to boycott a company whose chair made anti-gay comments.

The university administration’s intervention in the SodaStream case is in keeping with other openly pro-Israel positions taken by Harvard President Drew G. Faust and Provost Alan Garber."