Fair Punishment for Protesters

Yesterday’s statement from the Harvard administration calling for stricter and more consistent punishment of students who illegally occupy University buildings sends a clear signal that President Lawrence H. Summers intends to enforce the University’s rules. In contrast to his predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine, Summers says that students disrupting University employees will ordinarily face suspension. The new policy clarifies the University’s stance toward protests like last spring’s living wage sit-in and makes clear the potential risks to students taking such actions.

The University’s rules should not tolerate or encourage coercive protests. These include, by definition, any time students take over a University building and disrupt the lives of students, Faculty or staff in the name of a political cause.

Of course, University policy has clearly stated for over 30 years that these sorts of occupations are unacceptable. The University should enforce this unambiguous rule lest it more regularly be ignored. Students who disobey this policy in the future must be punished; if not, there could be a proliferation of unnecessary protests.

Coercive protests may, in some cases, be justified. When protestors sat-in at lunch counters throughout the South in the 1950s and ’60s to protest segregation, they were clearly justified. But legitimate coercive protest can only be founded upon a narrow range of the most critical issues. Improving the wages of Harvard’s lowest-paid workers, while a laudable and important goal, is an example that does not meet this threshold.

There is, of course, no way to know whether some situation might arise in the future vital enough to warrant the takeover of another Harvard building. It would be more than presumptuous to say that a coercive protest at Harvard could never be justified. But as protestors who fought against Jim Crow laws in the South will attest, justified coercive actions have serious consequences. Students who take over buildings have no reason to expect the University to smile benignly; they must be willing to face the possibility of disciplinary action, and even suspension.

The threat of punishment makes the protest itself more powerful. The persuasive impact of a sit-in comes exactly from the fact that students are willing to face punishment in order to make their point. Were the University policy to be consistently light, future takeovers could rightly be viewed as little more than media stunts entailing no substantial risk of punishment to the protestors.

Student protest is vital to improving the University. Harvard policy should never try to prevent students from exercising their freedom of speech and assembly. The administration’s new policy, of course, does not do this. Indeed, it will have no effect on students chanting in front of Mass. Hall, picketing in the Yard or handing out fliers in Harvard Square. This statement simply makes clear the potential costs to students of the decision to occupy a University building.

Dissent: Treatment Is Too Harsh

The staff’s argument in favor of President Lawrence H. Summers’ announcement is shortsighted and harsh. To accept suspension as an expected and fair punishment for unauthorized occupation of University buildings, the staff must believe that the University is perfect—that there would never be a need for students to act out against the University in protest.

Yet Harvard is far from perfect. And in the future, there will be instances when students act out to change University policy. But by initiating this policy, Summers is implicitly abridging the freedom of disciplinary boards to distinguish between worthwhile and unjustified acts of protest. A suspension may be too harsh a punishment, depending on the situation.

The staff has called this move a sign of strong leadership by Summers. In making this announcement, however, Summers has expressed his fear of future actions of civil disobedience by students. True leadership demands that he address protests when they come and make an appropriate judgment in each instance.

—Jonathan H. Esensten ’04, Judd B. Kessler ’04,

Jasmine J. Mahmoud ’04 and Daniel P. Mosteller ’03