Students, Faculty Protest War But Differ on Tactics

With over a thousand students and faculty protesting the war with Iraq this year, Harvard proved it is still a liberal campus.

While students led the take over of University Hall protesting the Vietnam War in 1969 and occupied Massachusetts Hall in 2001 demanding a “living wage” for Harvard workers, this time the activists’ ranks included both students and their professors.

But already a rift is growing between students and faculty over the methods and goals of the anti-war movement.

Professors have turned to overtly partisan stances on the war. Students, viewing heated partisan positions as divisive, have mostly evaded them.

The difference led to ideological and practical barriers to the formation of anti-war coalitions between students and their professors.

“We were never a team,” says Professor of English and Folklore and member of the Faculty Initiative for Peace and Justice (FIPJ) Joseph C. Harris. “There was really very little communication between us.”

The legacy of the Vietnam War and the accompanying distrust of government shaped professors’ views on war. By contrast, students focused on gaining adherents at the expense of ideological consistency.

Faculty maintained that protests ought to openly address divisive political issues, demanding action not only from the government, but also from the University.

Students focused their efforts on rallying the campus, not dividing it. No major student organization drafted an explicit statement categorically opposing the war.

Many say that such differences in strategy impeded the anti-war movement.

“Activism was down this year,” says Professor of the History of Science and FIPJ member Everett I. Mendelsohn. “We all seemed a little apathetic, a little apprehensive.”

Nearly everyone in the broad anti-war camp says that the protests did not reach their potential, and they are still trying to figure out why.

Taking Sides

Measuring the success of protests is always difficult, especially those against a war that took on an aura of inevitability in the months before it started.

Those most engaged in the protesting were quick to boast of its strength.

“The movement was drastically underestimated at Harvard,” says Michael J. Getlin ’05. “It was strong.”

But those who organized the protests on campus say they felt many students were not receptive to the anti-war message.

“It is always hard to get people out to these things,” says Huibin “Aimee” Chew ’03, a member of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice (HIPJ). “They just don’t believe that they are going to have any effect.”

Many critics of the strength of the anti-war movement say the peculiar circumstances around the war itself are to blame.

With no draft to poach their classmates, and few body bags crossing the ocean, anti-war protestors had little to rally behind, forcing them to mediate many competing views.

Thus, for both students and faculty protesters, success often depended on pursuing an elusive consensus.

President Bush’s claim of connections between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorist network complicated the anti-war position for many.

Other faculty viewed the frequent harkening to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an unjust conflation of two separate issues, and were thus reluctant to sign on to some anti-war efforts.

“The Israel-Palestine component blurred it for many people,” Harris says.

Teaching Assistant in History and Literature Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 says that he was reluctant to join FIPJ since many of its members had signed a petition urging that the University divest from Israel earlier that year.

Student also say that the unique circumstances of the war against Iraq divided their own ranks and hampered mobilization.

“At first we had a little trouble forming a position,” says Peter P. Buttigieg ’04 of the Harvard College Democrats. “There was a very credible liberal argument for going to war and it made us think twice of any stance we might take.”

Some say the conflicted liberal position was exacerbated by the patriotism caused by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Harvard was really in shock after Sept. 11,” says Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’78.

While students and faculty members would eventually form anti-war coalitions, they would largely do so separately.

“I didn’t have much interaction with faculty, says HIPJ member Rita Hamad ’02. “I guess I really didn’t think about them or look to them.”

Mobilizing and Compromising

From the early days of the movement against war in Iraq, students took up placards while faculty were preoccupied with petitions.

In December, HIPJ began mobilization efforts. HIPJ was formed on Sept. 11, 2001 to oppose wars of retribution, and it never adopted a new platform aimed at protesting the war in Iraq.

“We didn’t want to restrict membership,” Chew says. “We never issued an official statement representative of everyone.”

Chew says that the case against war was strong enough that educating students against the war was less pressing than mobilization.

One of HIPJ’s first moves in December was to organize a walkout to be held on the first day of war.

More than 1,000 students walked out of their classes on March 20 to rally in Harvard Yard.

But the walkout was the culmination of smaller demonstrations Harvard students and been participating in for months.

On Feb. 18, about 50 Harvard students traveled to New York City over President’s Day weekend to participate in a 100,000-strong anti-war rally.

By mid-March, as the likelihood of military action increased, HIPJ organized an “Emergency Anti-War Rally” along with four other student groups.

Drawing a crowd of 350 outside the Science Center, the March 12 rally featured folk singers and speeches. The rally was viewed by many as a sign that the movement was gaining visibility.

While several faculty members attended these rallies, they deferred to student organizers, making a few guest speeches but never planning or advertising the rallies.

“Students had the lead in the activism department,” Harris says. “We had lots more to lose with our families and things. No [professor] was ready to go to jail.”

Chew says professors’ reluctance to engage directly in protest did not go unnoticed.

“I was disappointed that we did not get a lot more support from faculty,” she says. “Their attitude seemed to be that they weren’t sticking their necks out and they were really looking to the students for what to do.”

Platforms and Partisanship

While faculty members may not have been lying down in the streets, many were actively opposing the war. FIPJ met for the first time on February 9 and continued to meet every third Sunday for a few months. Unlike the students who focused on public demonstrations, the professors’ first act was to draft a statement directly opposing the war.

The joint mission statement of the Harvard-MIT FIPJ received almost 200 signatures.

While members joined for many different reasons, FIPJ members forced political issues to the foreground of their debates.

McCarthy says that it was inevitable that the Faculty’s first attempt to address the conflict was political given the enormous percentage of them who protested during the Vietnam War.

“We have seen this before. The range of Faculty opinions is always going to be constrained by historical precedent,” he says.

Mendelsohn says that faculty members who had advised the federal government were eager to bring political issues to the forefront of the debate.

“Faculty had to think through the use of American force in Vietnam,” he says. “You had to develop some sort of set of politics to be anti-war.”

Mendelsohn says that the Faculty’s experience in direct political engagement turned its attention to attacking the Bush administration from the start.

Mendelsohn, who has advised presidents on issues such as the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons testing and the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict, says that the Faculty’s political enthusiasm had begun to wane with this war.

“We were a little pessimistic,” Mendelsohn says. “We sent some letters and memos and got perfunctory responses.”

But if professors were not directly engaging on the political scene in Washington, they were certainly critical of it.

“We were realistic enough to know that this administration is a lot less prone to listening to us,” Mendelsohn says.

And McCarthy says that the Faculty never shied away from direct involvement in political issues.

“We know what politics is. When you are intervening in a discourse about war, you are engaging in politics,” he says. “We are not afraid of politics.”

Passing on Politics

Many student groups evaded stark partisan positions on the war in an effort to gain wide appeal.

The campus Democrats and Republicans, who had debated the issue of war in the fall in a broader debate on U.S. foreign policy, refrained from holding a formal debate when the fighting had begun.

“It was difficult for groups with different viewpoints to find a topic that both sides agree upon as important,” says Harvard Republican Club member Michael Alperovich ’04.

From the start, students explicitly avoided political confrontation.

It wasn’t until March 11, two days before the “Emergency Anti-War Rally” that the Harvard College Democrats issued a statement opposing America’s “nearly unilateral engagement” in the war.

Saying that the time had come to take a position on the war, the statement by the College Dems acknowledged the divisions in their own ranks and denied that it was speaking for all Democrats.

“We recognize that it is not the position of every Democrat on campus to be opposed to the war,” said club President R. Gerard McGeary ’04. “That is an important distinction to make.”

At the time, HRC spokesperson Mark Silvestri ’05 criticized the Dems’ decision to formally state their position.

“I think it is obvious that the Democrats, along with many liberals here, would like the [U.S.] not to use force. For them just to formalize it doesn’t really change many things,” he said.

While the Democrats were reluctant to take a political stance, the Republicans said that the question of war best be addressed by “putting political beliefs aside.”

“We wanted to do something with a positive message that would reflect well on our campus image,” Alperovich says. “It wasn’t really a political thing.”

On April 7, HRC began collecting signatures and distributing flag pins in support of the American troops in Iraq. In a response similar to that during the war against Afghanistan, the rally garnered hundreds of signature from pro- and anti-war students alike.

“As a club, the war was a divisive issue,” says HRC member Brandon Trama ’06. “We decided that from a non-partisan standpoint, we wanted to voice our support for the troops overseas.”

This evasion of political issues perplexed many faculty members and others. Getlin, who decided not to join the Marine Corps after realizing that he no longer supported U.S. foreign policy, argued that the effort to divorce political beliefs from protests was flawed.

“The attitude that it is okay to support the troops and be against the war is rather absurd,” he says.

Teaching assistant McCarthy says he was disturbed by a culture of political apathy among students.

“It seems to me incredibly strange that the campus Democrats and campus Republicans would shy away from making a political stance on the most important political issues of our times,” McCarthy says. “That is what they are there for.”

A Separate Peace

While students were dismissing political labels, professors were organizing both against the war and for themselves.

“Some of us felt that there were faculty issues that were distinct,” he said. “Faculty can be fairly independent and isolated entities….We were looking for a larger voice.”

Others such as Mendelsohn joined to fulfill the responsibility they say they felt as campus leaders and leading scholars. But as they organized among themselves, the Faculty soon fastened on the USA Patriot Act as a greater threat than any war.

At Faculty meetings, professors said they were worried about the restrictions the law could put on their own scholarship.

In the 1960s, students had attacked administrators. But this time, professors spoke out to demand that the University take action and protect academic freedom from new security restrictions.

“A university ought to outright defend these issues,” said Mendelsohn. “But Harvard hesitated.”

Mendelsohn, who proposed that the Faculty adopt its own a statement on academic freedom, said that he was asked to wait for University President Lawrence H. Summers to issue a statement.

“They did not take on a leadership role as they had on other occasions,” Mendelsohn said. “I would have loved to see them take a stronger lead.”

Frustrated with what they perceived as Harvard’s tacit compliance with an “unjust war,” professors soon began a new movement against Harvard’s holdings in defense contractors profiting from the war.

At an April 8 Faculty meeting, FIPJ member and Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art Yve Alain-Bois read a statement endorsed by dozens of professors saying that Harvard’s investment defense contractors was amoral and in need of discussion.

“We think that the University should not be the beneficiary of a war not approved by the United Nations, protested by a large portion of the world’s population, and opposed by the governments of many countries traditionally allied to the U.S.,” it read.

The divestment push was deflated when Summers told the Faculty that the University would not take a stance on political issues.

“The University administration is conservative,” Mendelsohn says. “It is the Faculty’s job to push them along and that is what [we] did.”

Futile Tactics?

The Faculty rallied around its academic self-interest, but students lacked a unifying theme for their protests and had no direct interest in the war.

“There was more a concrete link between sitting in Mass. Hall until [the president] made a decision than there was with the war with Iraq,” Hamad says.

The faculty members, by contrast, were in agreement with each other, but found their influence limited.

Ultimately, students also began to question the effectiveness of their focus on big rallies over strong positions.

“Our protests were just the familiar crowd preaching to the choir,” Buttigieg says. “The faculty were in lead.”

But even faculty members question their own commitment to the anti-war effort.

“We were active, but we were not as active as we could have been,” Harris says.

Citing sacrifices he could have made, Harris says he found his engagement with the anti-war movement at times “depressing.”

But others cite deeper reasons for the movement’s frustration.

“There was no coalition building,” McCarthy says. “And that starved the efforts to mobilize.”

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.