Remember PSLM

To the editors:

I found Luke Smith’s Valentine’s Day comments on the state of activism at Harvard very hard to take seriously (Comment, “Angry Activists,” Feb. 14). To imply that shaming the administration or attracting attention through rabble-rousing speeches is somehow incompatible with a stated “[vision] of social justice” (and therefore disingenuous) would be to ignore, for example, the successes made by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) in the period of time immediately following the sit-in. The “concessions from the administration” that he mentioned, after all, did not come without a fight (and if the PSLM’s protests were not truly “about the janitors,” then to whom were these concessions made?).

Patrick J. Bradley ’05

Feb. 14, 2003