Angry Activists

Harvard students are an angry bunch. The Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice (HIPJ) protests President George W. Bush’s imperialism with an indignation reminiscent of hippy-filled Vietnam-era demonstrations. The Harvard AIDS Coalition (HAC) cannot tell us enough about the global AIDS crisis, or how evil companies like Coca-Cola are not providing comprehensive health coverage to their African employees. The Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) blasts Harvard for not paying its janitors a “living wage,” despite concessions from the administration.

We ought to laud the HIPJ, HAC and PSLM for their conscientious advocacy, if they actually focused on their visions of social justice. Instead, these groups load their protests with demonizing references to the people and establishments they blame for the ills they are seeking to correct. The protests are not about the janitors, but about the avarice of Harvard administrators. They’re not about the Africans, but about Coca-Cola’s corporate greed. And they’re not about Iraqi civilians, but about Bush, who—like all Republicans—is clearly a bad, bad man.

But contrary to what many Americans think about angry campus activism, we are not spoiled suburban children craving something to whine about. There is another more fundamental reason that protesters enjoy both prominence and mainstream acceptance on our campus.

We, the valedictorians, National Merit Scholars and published writers who matriculate each year at Harvard, have spent most of our young lives proving to everyone how smart we are, when suddenly, a campus full of other smart people shatters our self-confidence. Insecurity about our own intellectualism, more than a desire to whine, drives us to support activist organizations that fight for “enlightened” social causes. We become part of the intellectual elite that cares about things like AIDS in Africa and the living wage, and we thrive on the mystique.

That is why, if we do not join the protesters ourselves—in fact, the vast majority of us choose not to—we offer them our tacit support. We infer from their tirades the progressive visions they should be advocating. We allow them to shape the landscape of political debate, centering the ideological spectrum around their radical liberalism and radicalizing moderate conservative perspectives. We allow angry protesters to define the zeitgeist of the Harvard experience.

We allow ourselves to be preoccupied with global injustice and the nefarious right-wingers who perpetrate it. But we ignore the fact that Harvard has given us something real to whine about: a lousy undergraduate education. We won’t organize in protest for greater faculty involvement with students, but we will demand that the faculty be more ethnically diverse. We don’t care how engaging our courses are, as long as the syllabi include historically marginalized groups.

As the angry left-wing elite to which we defer for our enlightened opinions tells us, protesting the white and “Eurocentric” state of academia is more important than whether the ideas we encounter here engage us, whether our education inspires us and whether professors take an active role in our intellectual growth.

Perhaps it’s time to redirect our rage.

—Luke Smith is an editorial editor.