Welcome Resolution to Sit-in

The 21-day Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) occupation of Massachusetts Hall has ended. The administration has agreed to create a new committee composed of diverse interests to reexamine the issue on a clear timetable, and it will institute a moratorium on outsourcing until the committee returns its report. We congratulate both sides on a compromise that not long ago seemed impossible, and we look forward to renewed progress on the issue of a living wage.

In large part, the committee is designed exactly as we would have wished. In addition to faculty from a wide range of disciplines, the committee includes union representatives as well as four Harvard students. Harvard administrators have recognized that the diversity of interests represented on the committee is unusual for Harvard, and we hope that its formation will set a precedent for greater openness and transparency in Harvard’s official proceedings.

We are also glad that the administration has chosen to select the student representatives through their representative bodies, the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) of the Undergraduate Council and the Harvard Graduate Council. These students will go in with a legitimacy as student representatives that no other feasible means of selection would confer. We believe that the strong interest and prior research of many PSLM members merit the inclusion of one of their number on the committee, and we would encourage SAC to keep this in mind as it makes its nominations.

With this committee in place, we look forward to an honest and productive inquiry into the issue of a living wage for Harvard’s workers. We hope that all the committee’s members, students and workers as well as faculty, will take up their responsibilities with open minds. The committee should also solicit some degree of public input to inform its conclusions. Sincere and well-researched debate will be critical to the committee’s success.

The committee will be working under a deadline of Dec. 19—a reasonable balance that takes into account both the need for detailed study and the pressing nature of the issue. Important, though, is that the date comes after the end of President Neil L. Rudenstine’s administration. Though not formally involved in organizing the committee, President-elect Lawrence H. Summers should take the committee’s recommendations seriously. Its report will be non-binding, as should be expected, but for the administration to take heed the committee’s deliberations must be viewed as more than a mere exercise in counting heads.

Though this protest is now over, a number of issues still remain. Perhaps most pressing is the question of discipline for the students involved in the sit-in. The protesters were fully aware of their violation of University rules, and it is not unreasonable that they be brought before the Administrative Board. Given their unjustified seizure of a University building, whatever their punishment, PSLM would have no right to complain.

However, we do not see what would be gained by dealing the protesters an unnecessarily harsh punishment, especially after the University gave them food and supplies for 21 days. Given the nature of this sit-in, the punishment of the protesters, if any, should not require them to withdraw from the College for any period of time. Now is a time for reconciliation rather than division, and for moving forward on the issue of a living wage.

Despite the cries of victory heard outside Mass. Hall during the rally yesterday afternoon, the campus should not be complacent about the need for a living wage or the work that must be done to achieve it. The sit-in’s great success was in galvanizing community support for the living wage and in moving the issue from a fringe concern for the University to the center of administrators’ agendas.

The administration would never have granted a living wage as a payoff to protesters; the creation of a broadly representative committee, the moratorium on all outsourcing and the revisiting of an issue that three weeks ago the University had considered closed perhaps represent the best possible outcome the campus could have hoped for. We are very glad that PSLM has chosen to continue its fight for a living wage outside Mass. Hall. Now is the time for students to redouble their efforts to make the case to the committee and the administration that Harvard should pay its workers what they deserve.