Harvard University’s decision to rescind Chelsea Manning’s visiting fellow invitation didn’t stop her from meeting with student activists near the Ivy League campus this week.
Ms. Manning tweeted Wednesday that she recently met with members of several Harvard student groups, notwithstanding the school’s decision to extend and then rescind a prestigious visiting fellowship invitation to the convicted WikiLeaks source last month.
Participants of the meeting included members of several student groups including Harvard’s Transgender Task Force and Gender and Sexuality Caucus, among others, Ms. Manning, 29, tweeted.
About 30 students attended the off-campus event Tuesday evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a spokesperson for the groups told The Associated Press.
Ms. Manning, a transgender former Army intelligence analyst, was arrested in 2011 and charged in connection with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks. She was convicted by an Army judge in 2013 of multiple related counts and subsequently sentenced to 35 years behind bars, but had the bulk of her sentence commuted by outgoing President Barack Obama in January and released four months later.
The Harvard Kennedy School named Ms. Manning as a visiting fellow at its Institute of Politics last month but ultimately rescinded her invitation after the initial offer ignited heated reactions on campus and off.
“I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility,” Douglas Elmendorf, the school’s dean, said afterwards. “I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our original invitation.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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