When Harvard was renegotiating a contract with janitors and other workers in the fall of 2005, many students pushed the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to pay a living wage.
Vivek Ramaswamy, then a politically active biology major, led the dissent. Writing for the school newspaper, he argued that a raise would come “at the cost of respect that the rest of the Harvard community has for these workers.” And in Listserv emails obtained by NBC News, he bemoaned the student government’s involvement in the debate, citing the recently bungled planning of a Wyclef Jean concert.
“Their duty to perform these basic tasks,” Ramaswamy, now a Republican candidate for president, wrote to Ali Zaidi, then a student government official, now President Joe Biden’s top climate policy adviser, supersedes “their prerogative to make political statements on behalf of the student body.”
It was neither the first nor last time that Ramaswamy earned his reputation as a disruptive brainiac who was willing, and even eager, to dance on political third rails and challenge conventions.
That eagerness would come to define Ramaswamy at a trio of top institutions — St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Harvard and Yale Law School — where classmates recalled a pugnacious student who centered debate in his educational life and always seemed to push his takes past their logical endpoint.
“He was known in the class as the devil’s advocate,” one former law school classmate said. “And at a certain point, if someone is always playing the devil’s advocate, you have to kind of wonder whether he’s actually the devil.”
The son of Indian immigrants from Ohio and the product of elite East Coast institutions that make convenient foils for culture warriors like him, Ramaswamy arrived on the national scene this year as a surprise White House contender.
The 38-year-old literally wrote the book on “anti-wokeism.” He has rapped to Eminem, dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy…
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