Punishment Validates Protest

Last week, University President Lawrence H. Summers created a bit of a stir by announcing the addition of an “interpretation” to the University-wide Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The new language appended to the end of the 30-year-old policy made crystal clear what should already have been obvious to everybody: occupying a University building is against Harvard’s rules.

The ensuing discussion has been unfortunately quieter than it might have been. Presumably, so few undergraduates even recognize the reference to the forgotten and beleaguered document, created in the wake of the 1969 University Hall takeover, that there just hasn’t been much reaction. There was, of course, the predictably hyperbolic comment of one member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), the publicity-savvy activist group that masterminded last spring’s sit-in at Mass. Hall. And of course, some people’s knee-jerk reaction is to say that the dictum from Summers and his deans’ council is a poor one: oh, but now it’s going to be harder for students to protest. That’s so unfair. The University should make it easy for us to argue with it and to express ourselves.

But this objection is totally irrational. Before you decide I’m conservative, hear me out. A considerable part of the power of civil disobedience—long a proud liberal tactic—lies in the fact that participants are willing to sacrifice and suffer consequences for what they consider a worthy cause. You can’t make the ease of breaking rules an idea inherent in the rules themselves. People would break the rules all the time. This would only lessen the moral force of such protest, which, when used in justifiable situations, is truly powerful. Nor can penalties differentiate between justified and unjustified actors. Could one reasonably expect the University to allow a random group of people to take over an administrative space? No. And if rules are to be rules, it shouldn’t matter why that group of people is doing it. The willingness to suffer a punishment as an indication of how strongly you feel is the moral force of this kind of protest. If sit-ins turn into cooperative stunts by officials and students, designed to make breaking the rules as easy and casual as possible, then we would make a mockery of all that civil disobedience stands for.

Civil disobedience was never meant to be easy. Your opponent in an argument is going to make you work hard. And penalties and rules by their nature need someone to enforce them. As Summers explained in a recent interview with The Crimson, “It’s essential to the doctrine of civil disobedience that those who…violate laws and break rules accept the consequences of that.” After all, what does protest mean if it costs you nothing to protest? The point is that you feel strongly enough about something unjust that you are willing to defy it and make a statement—like civil rights activists sitting in at segregated lunch counters. (By this definition, some Harvard protestors are anti-traffic. But hey, that’s another column.)

Although his “interpretation” of the policy as it applies to sit-ins is redundant, there are some benefits to raising the issue again anyway, however obvious it ought to be. In the aftermath of the spring sit-in, with the statement gathering dust instead of being actively considered, it was anyone’s guess how participants in another such occupation would be penalized under a new president. College, law school and Kennedy School of Government students received different punishments this spring, with the latter set of students getting off the hook entirely. By re-engaging with the statement and the concepts behind it, Summers has laid his hand on the table: all future sit-ins are fair game for the implementation of this policy. If anyone decides to duplicate last spring’s feat, they’ll definitely be forewarned that the repercussions won’t be the same. (Come, come—does anyone buy the pat explanation that this doesn’t have anything to do with PSLM?) In the wake of a continuing movement for higher wages, despite Summers’ general acceptance of the Katz Committee’s wage recommendations for the University, the atmosphere was just starting to look ripe for Occupation: The Sequel.

Nevertheless, ubiquitous PSLMer cum Katz Committee member Benjamin L. McKean ’02 doesn’t seem to appreciate the heads-up from Summers. McKean dubbed the addition “outrageous.” What’s McKean’s beef? He told a Crimson reporter that he thought the whole community should have been consulted before the deans’ council added the “interpretation.”

The lack of student input isn’t exactly “outrageous”—after all, Harvard isn’t a democracy, it’s a private institution—but if Summers really wanted to remind the faculties of the existence of the statement, he could have done that without adding any language to the document. He would have looked far less heavy-handed and accomplished even more if he had taken a cue from Professors Phillip A Kuhn and James Engell—who suggested reaffirming the statement in a September Faculty Council meeting—and created some Faculty forum for a reminder and discussion. Certainly, consulting the full Faculty instead of just the Faculty Council would have reduced the appearance of autocracy and would have prompted the body that voted on this in the first place to more thoughtfully revisit the issue instead of just reacting to a pronouncement from above.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan ’02 is an English concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.