How Long Must We Wait?

It’s 3 a.m. outside of Massachusetts Hall. Six students are huddled on blankets in a circle around boxes of Pop Tarts and fruit snacks. They speak in hushed tones as a police officer stands by wearily. Inside the building, through a lighted window, other people sometimes wave cheerfully to the students outside. From out here it looks warm and cozy inside the office of the president of Harvard University.

The protestors, members of the living wage campaign of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), have been occupying the president’s office for 13-and-a-half hours.

The students outside the building speak about the need for Harvard to live up to its responsibility as a member of the Cambridge community. They burn with the idealism of youth, even in the cold morning hours.

But they also speak about their frustration at apathy of other Harvard students.

It has always been puzzling, why Harvard students have always been so dismissive of student protests. At other universities, students love to protest. At the University of California—Berkeley there’s always a vigil, a sit-in, a march or a rally being held. Students don’t just occupy the president’s office; they string themselves up on the campanile and hang in tents hundreds of feet off the ground for days on end. Harvard students, on the other hand, tend to support dialogue with the administration.

However, over the last several years dialogue has led, at least in the protestors’ eyes, to nothing. The more radical actions of students like those at Berkeley, however, have reaped large rewards. In the spring of 1999 Berkeley students staged an eight-day hunger strike in which 100 people were arrested in order to save their ethnic studies department. The costs were high—five students were put on trial for their activities during the strike—but their demands were met.

With examples like these, the calculation for most student activists is dangerously simple. Higher escalation leads to greater concessions. But escalation has its costs, not just for the students involved—they claim to be prepared to face the consequences, whether they be arrest, expulsion or the Ad Board—but for the University as a whole. One need only look to the strike of 1969 for an example of how quickly things can get out of control.

In 1969, 200 students occupied University Hall. Students were dragged out and beaten by police officers, an escalation ordered by then-President Nathan M. Pusey ‘28. After the expulsion of the students from University Hall, 2,000 students joined in the strike. The escalation backfired for the administration, just as this escalation could backfire on PSLM.

But unlike the happy-go-lucky protestors on the west coast and Pusey in 1969, PSLM members have shown an astounding degree of deliberation and strategy in their decision to escalate.

PSLM made their decision after long deliberation, four-hour-long meetings and the failure of their previous attempts to meet with and compromise with University officials. They planned this action carefully, down to the detail of not carrying in their keys in case they could be construed as weapons. In no way can they be seen as vacationers, or face the accusation that the Harvard strikers did in 1969 that they were just trying to extend spring break.

Still, PSLM faces the most opposition not from an angry president, but from their annoyed peers. Their tactics are dismissed as childish grandstanding. Compromise and deliberation, that’s how Harvard students want conflicts resolved. Unfortunately, it is the Harvard students who dismiss PSLM’s actions out of hand who are being childish, and it is they who are displaying a lack of deliberation.

There are only two good reasons not to join in the PSLM’s cause. The first is because you disagree with their goal—the living wage. The second is because you disagree with their methods. You wish conflicts could be settled at boardroom tables or around dining hall tables. But when one group (students and low-paid workers) have so little power, and the other (the Corporation) has so much, there is no real discourse.

At the very least, Harvard students not in support of the strike should refrain from charging their classmates with silliness. This attitude betrays a lack of intellectual engagement with the discourse of protest and institutional change. This behavior is unbecoming of a Harvard student. A decision not to support PSLM on intellectual or moral grounds is noble; a dismissal of their actions is both ignoble and unjust. It smacks of the same disgusting arrogance with which the University treats students involved in the presidential search to the living wage campaign. We can do better than to treat each other that way.

It’s 4 a.m. now, and the next shift silently rolls up on bicycles and appears out of the shadows. Cigarettes are lit, conversation ensues, and finally, the huddled group starts to get up, stretch and prepare for bed. Some will come back with sleeping bags to wait out the night, others will be back in another two, four or six hours. They say goodnight to the cop outside, displaying conduct becoming of Harvard students to the last, and disappear back into the night.

Who knows how long they will be there, fighting for what they believe in. Who knows how long they will have to wait for the support or recognition of their fellow students.

Meredith B. Osborn ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.