Politics & Power Quote by William Kirby

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation is less a mission statement than a defensive crouch. Kirby is drawing a bright line between scholarship and service work, and he does it in the only language elite institutions reliably understand: hierarchy. University first; consulting second. The jab lands because it acknowledges a temptation everyone pretends not to feel - the pull of proximity to power, money, and policy relevance that can turn research into a prestige-adjacent product.

The second half of the sentence widens the frame: knowledge on Asia is not to be extracted, packaged, and sold back to decision-makers in Cambridge. Its meant to be made "in conjunction and in cooperation" with scholars and leaders in Asia, a phrase that tries to preempt the oldest critique of Western area studies: that it can slip into a soft colonial posture, treating regions as objects of study rather than partners in inquiry. Cooperation here is reputational armor, signaling ethical seriousness while also courting legitimacy.

There is also a practical institutional politics at work. By insisting Harvard is not a consulting shop, Kirby is protecting academic autonomy: the right to ask slow, inconvenient questions that dont map neatly onto a clients needs. Yet he still name-checks political, intellectual, and cultural leaders, a careful hedge that keeps doors open to influence without admitting dependency. The intent is to claim purity while remaining plugged in - an aspirational balancing act for any global university trying to look principled in public and relevant in private.