A Treatise on the Millennium

I have, over the course of the last year, become strongly displeased with the thinking of this campus. I have long hoped--perhaps spurred on by an over-abundant knowledge of the Harvard of the late 1960s and an overdose of Puritan literature--that a fortuitous alignment of the stars and the coming of the Millenium would bring Harvard students together with ever-increasing celerity into a harmonious union of souls.

But instead of spontaneous outpourings of agape in the spiritual centers of our new community--the cafes of Barker, Loker and the Coop--I find only double lattes bubbling forth, not human understanding, and the solitary and studious, not the concerned and informed. The goings on of administrators often dominate the pages of this newspaper and raise the ire of our nascent activist community, as the administrators appear slow to adopt the changes many feel are necessary to unite the disaffected factions of the campus. Despite our pleadings, we have no multicultural student center, junior faculty are almost never tenured, there is no ethnic studies department, the Core has not (really) been reformed and finals are still after Christmas.

Harvard, though, is a large and unwieldy animal. As the saying goes, students are here for four years, the Faculty for a lifetime, but the University is here forever. And consequently, what the University does is not all that important. It may seem from the outside as sublimely terrifying as Niagara Falls, but we must remember that the permanent stuctures and bureaucracies that truly make up the University are but the giant rocky cliff, shifting slowly and imperceptibly over time. It is not the falls themselves but the water flowing over them that holds the power.

While I would be the last person to argue that Harvard students have too low an opinion of our place in the world, I am disgusted by the argument, always present but growing in strength, that it is not our business to speak our minds about anything other than party hours, cable TV in the houses or the thickness of our toilet paper. We hold the power of our constant change, and as we flow through this school we must always be aware of the legacy we leave. We have the power every four years to completely define our existence. We must not waste it.

The tenor of campus politics this fall revealed a pervasive ignorance and selfishness among undergraduates. We have forgotten, it seems, the battles of our not-too-distant past and have lost entirely our ability to think of anything other than muddling our way through this conduit to medical school or Wall Street. I have difficulty deciding which bothered me more, the outcome of the grape debate or the Undergraduate Council election this December, but both highlighted our ready willingness to abandon integrity in the moment of choice for the easy comfort of shallow goals.

I was astounded when the ad hoc Grape Coalition was formed; never before in my memory had a conservative group taken an active stance in campus politics. Conservatism here tends to be expressed in enforced apathy. The opinions of Harvard students or the Undergraduate Council do not matter in the world, they say, and it is pretentious to think that Pepsi will pull out of Burma just because we say so (I'm sure they pulled out from the goodness of their corporate hearts). But to have a group challenge the very foundation of the progressive liberal orthodoxy was new and frightening.

The debate was predictable at first. The more liberal factions on campus quickly mobilized and informed themselves of the allegations the United Farm Workers (UFW) have made about grape growing conditions. Many middle-of-the-road students didn't care, and the more short-sighted and selfish factions mounted an ignorant "Grapes taste good" campaign. We have gotten along quite well for some time without grapes, and I doubt very sincerely that many of the eventual yes-voters ever bought grapes on their own out of frustration that the dining hall didn't have them. A vote for yes, essentially, said that a small convenience for we the elite is worth any amount of suffering it may cause someone else.

Then the serious pro-grape people began to attack the UFW itself, and things changed fast in an even more disturbing way. Because we cannot know for certain what the actual conditions in California are and can only hear the opinions of the grape growers and the UFW, we do not have enough facts to vote no, they said. And it was this side that carried the day. What this means, essentially, is that when conflict arises between organized labor and the rich land-owning class, we give the benefit of the doubt to the latter.

This backlash against the liberalism that has dominated Harvard since the '60s is, I have heard many theorize, due to the campus's inability to identify with the progressive left any longer. People who think about the world outside Harvard are weird, popular sentiment goes, and it has become cool to flaunt anti-progressivism. This was nowhere more clear than in the recent Undergraduate Council presidential elections.

The real story of the election is not that the hyper-conservative Beth A. Stewart '00 was elected council president. She, like all of her competition, was remarkably bland. This year, for the first time in the last four years, none of the candidates running for president or vice president of the council had tried for one of those offices previously. The field was young and filled with leaders by default, not by those who have in the past defined a strong vision for the council.

And, in fact, it was the idea of strong leadership that our current batch of candidates ran against. For the past two-and-a-half years, we have had ideologically strong and consistent leadership at the top of the council--leadership many have attacked for creating factions where there were previously none and pulling the council down into petty partisan politics. This argument ignores completely the history of the council.

In the fall of 1995, the Progressive Undergraduate Council Coalition (PUCC) swept through the council's general elections, picking up more than half the seats largely because it pulled together a group of people who actually cared enough to campaign for them. At the same time, they managed to elect a progressive slate of leaders to the council's top positions, most notably Robert M. Hyman '98 as president and Lamelle D. Rawlins '99 as secretary.

The conservative view is that in this instant, the council changed from a productive, student-oriented group to a political organization concerned with shaking an angry liberal fist at the world.

This view is naive, simplistic and wrong. It is important to note that the pre-PUCC, "golden era" of the council that the most recent crop of candidates pined for was long gone before any of them had even applied to Harvard. The council, I can recall from my days of covering it three years ago, was far more of a forum for blatant partisan politics before PUCC than after; the council chambers were a snake pit of backstabbing quasi-politicos walking around in suits and trying to look important while they planned one miserably failing social event after another.

What really happened when PUCC took over was that the committee everyone wanted to be on was the Student Affairs Committee, charged with voicing student concerns to the administration and the world, and not the Campus Life Committee, dedicated to bringing us a string of mediocre and over-priced bands for Springfest. Yes, the council did start to talk about politics, but in asking the University to divest from Nigeria, for example, it was merely taking a cue from the council of 10 years before in its constant battle for divestiture from South Africa.

PUCC was big and rowdy and didn't give a damn about mandates or proper roles for the council, and it had a spectacular track record of strongly advocating responsible politics and pushing through important student services from anonymous HIV testing to the funding of rape aggression defense classes.

PUCC and its legacy of a progressive presidency was able to bring forth true leaders, people concerned with doing what is right, not just timidly organizing dances and advocating the few weak opinions that everyone on campus agrees to. And now, by smugly attacking progressive leadership, the council's new executives have made their offices meaningless. It doesn't matter if Stewart is president; a trained monkey could tell the administration we want cable.

What will happen as a result of this election is that the campus will retreat from any sort of common discourse back into its private little holes. No longer will anyone be concerned with the great flow of Harvard students through this august school, and no longer will anyone care what mark we leave for posterity. We will go back to sipping our evil lattes, too weak to stand for anything and too lazy to care.

Andrew A. Green '98 was managing editor of The Crimson in 1997.