Renew Harvard
We are seeking to join Harvard’s Board of Overseers to restore the University’s status as the world’s leading center of scholarship and education.
Who We Are
We are Harvard alumni seeking to protect the institution we hold dear. We bring leadership and management experience in business, law, and military service.
What We Believe
Harvard’s exceptionality results not from its fame, history, fortune, or influence, but rather its unwavering commitment to seeking truth.
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What We Will Do
- Restore leadership excellence to Harvard
- Uphold free speech and academic standards
- Protect all our students
- Remedy operational and endowment mismanagement
Our Ask
If you are a Harvard alumna or alumnus, please nominate all four of our candidates by January 31 to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, at https://vote.escvote.com/harvardpetition. All candidates can be nominated at once. Then please vote in this spring’s election for these same candidates:
Join us in recommitting University leadership to excellence by nominating the team below to the Board of Overseers by January 31st , and by voting for them in this spring’s election.
Zoe Bedell
Harvard Law School J.D. 2016
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Zoe Bedell is an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where she prosecutes cybercrime. She previously worked at a law firm where her practice focused on complex commercial…
Logan Leslie
Harvard A.B. 2015, J.D. 2019, M.B.A. 2019
Logan Leslie is the founder and CEO of Northern Rock, a company that buys, operates, and grows small businesses. With a portfolio of over 50 companies, Northern Rock employs more than 500…
Alec Williams
Harvard Business School M.B.A. 2017
Alec obtained his B.A. in public policy from Princeton University before joining the U.S. Navy. A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with 14 years of service, Alec serves as a Lieutenant Commander in…
Julia Pollak
Harvard A.B. 2009
Julia Pollak is Chief Economist at ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace. She leads a team that conducts research on the health of the labor market, identifies hiring trends, and helps employers…
Nominate Our Candidates
If you are a Harvard alumna or alumnus, please nominate all four of our candidates to Harvard’s Board of Overseers by clicking the button below:
Petition candidates like us must each receive 3,238 alumni nominations by January 31st. Then please vote in this spring’s election for these same candidates:
Zoe Bedell, Harvard Law School, 2016
Logan Leslie, Harvard and Radcliffe College, 2015
Alec Williams, Harvard Business School, 2017
Julia Pollak, Harvard and Radcliffe College, 2009
Our Platform
Restore leadership excellence to Harvard
Alumni are understandably disheartened by Harvard’s self-portrait this year. The University has suffered crescendoing scandals and demonstrably poor leadership at the very top. Yet our leadership challenges extend far beyond this. Those failures…
Action Plan:
- Courageously defend our Veritas mission
- Demand academic integrity: from the Corporation to the freshman class
- Introduce good governance, transparency, and independent oversight
- Establish and publish criteria for selecting the next President that prioritizes candidates’ competence and aligns to the responsibilities of managing a large, complex enterprise like Harvard
Uphold free speech and academic freedom
Challenging bad ideas with better ones is how Harvard became Harvard. Allowing the free and open debate of ideas was our University’s lodestar for centuries, only recently abandoned. Students should be judged on their caliber of mind and…
Action Plan:
- Integrate a well-defined policy
- on academic freedom and free speech into the Code of Student Conduct.
- Proactively cultivate ideological diversity and contrarian thought in the Corporation, administration, faculty, and student body to resist conformity and groupthink
- Establish and enforce a policy that prohibits the University from taking public positions on social or political issues
- Allow students to face criticism for thoughtless speech. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence
Protect all our students and their genuine diversity
Diversity has always been among Harvard’s greatest strengths, but administrators have become surprisingly uniform in what they value. Racial diversity is a paramount goal for any top University. So too should be diversity in socioeconomic…
Action Plan:
- Zero tolerance for violence or threats of violence. Ideas are not violence. Actual threats, harassment, and bullying are.
- Protect every expression of identity equally, to include even traditional identities like religion
- Apply the Code of Conduct uniformly and consistently to foster free expression
Remedy institutional mismanagement
As of Fall 2022, only a quarter of Harvard’s full-time employees directly serve the University’s academic mission, while over 40% (over 7,700 staff) are administrators. Tuition and fees now total $79,450 for 2023-24 undergraduates: more than double the…
Action Plan:
- Restructure the University’s administrative bloat to lower operating costs and tuition
- Hold the endowment to market-based performance standards
- Reverse the mismanagement of donor relations that has cost the University billions
- Give students “bang for their buck” by grading management on what share of tuition actually goes toward faculty and the educational mission
Petition candidates like us must each receive 3,238 alumni nominations by January 31st.
Then please vote in this spring’s election for these same candidates:
If you are a Harvard alumna or alumnus, please nominate all four of our candidates to Harvard’s Board of Overseers by clicking the button below: