Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians. Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Bassett’s ouster from the center, since denounced by hundreds of Harvard faculty and students, is not an isolated institutional failure. It exposes a deeper crisis in three intertwined domains often treated as guardians of modern moral universalism: human rights institutions, global public health organizations, and American universities. All have long claimed to speak for everyone. All have repeatedly insisted that their missions transcend partisanship, borders, racial and gender differences, class, and interest groups. And all – when confronted with the political pressures surrounding Palestine – have shown how conditional their commitments have always been.

Global public health and human rights institutions often present themselves as frameworks rooted in the simple idea that every life holds equal value. But as historians such as Samuel Moyn have shown, the modern concept of universal human rights emerged in a geopolitical landscape dominated by powerful Euro-American states and has been regularly used to launder, rather than confront, the inequalities of the postcolonial order. Their universalism was – and remains – in fact thoroughly selective and particular in practice. Countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany – all of which have styled themselves as leaders of “the free world” and beacons of the Enlightenment – have often condemned abuses by geopolitical rivals while overlooking or rationalizing atrocities committed by their own leaders, citizens and allies.

Global health bears a similar imprint. Its modern institutions grew from colonial medicine, cold war politics, and philanthropic ventures – think the Gates Foundation, which today dominates global public health – that position wealthy countries as benevolent........

© The Guardian