Where Have All the Commies Gone?

I applied for this column to challenge what I though was the dominant leftist ideology that pervaded campus and hampered Harvard’s academic purpose. Naively, I hoped to set down a beacon of rationality as a guiding light in a dark forest of liberal orthodoxy. Unfortunately, I have discovered few liberal excesses to denounce. I am no beacon, and we are covered not in darkness, but in a thick gray haze of purposelessness.

Harvard’s student body is not just lacking the progressive vigor that led to the takeover of University Hall in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, or the Mass. Hall occupation in 2001 to rally students against low worker wages. It is bereft of any vigor at all.

When political activism does occur on campus it is wishy-washy and bland. Even the most radical elements of the student body, such as the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), are surprisingly tame by historical standards. Instead of appealing to socialist notions of equality in their quest for higher wages, they couched their stance in terms of cost of living and prevailing wage rates. And in lieu of occupying Mass. Hall, they sent workers’ children to Larry Summers’ house on Halloween to ask for money for their families—only to realize that he was not there because someone had leaked their plan beforehand.

The Undergraduate Council (UC) recently learned an important lesson about school politics when it tried to pass a simple nonbinding resolution in support of workers and reasonable wages. The outcry was not only from the Harvard College Republicans—a group that incidentally has become so marginalized that is has been reduced to sending out whinny emails when it is offended by something. But voices all over campus stood up to denounce what they saw as a breach of the UC’s fundamental purpose, which apparently is wasting money on concerts that never happen and failing to extend dining hall hours.

I am not saying that I truly want to go back to the days of boycotts and occupations, as they waste resources and class time. But I do admire the energy and optimism of the not-so-distant past that has recently escaped us.

I half-heartedly wish some enterprising young socialist would catalogue the supposed “evils” of the huge consulting and financial consortiums that employ University resources to recruit our top talent every year. This would at least provoke a bit of debate on campus about the best way to make use of our education. Yet this prospect is dubious because although the dominant ideology expressed on campus is liberal, the main mode of action is very much conservative.

Worse still, I fear that this sort of conservatism has begun to pervade the classrooms. I have heard several professors—including some who are right of center—lament: “Where did all the communist students go?” And it is true that until relatively recently there was a small but critical mass of communist, or at least Marxist, students equipped with enough oddball ideals to make even the most bleeding heart congeal a bit.

From what I can gather from those who remember, these little revolutionaries brought a passion and zeal to class that spurred everyone to fierce discussion. Even more importantly, they meant that section was never ever dull.

Oh, how I long for those days. Now many of us are so afraid to criticize each other that I find myself manually ticking away the seconds in my notebook to pass the time in some courses (excluding this semester where all my classes are excellent) out of dreadful boredom. Perhaps we now have so much faith in economics that we only challenge each other’s assumptions. Or maybe we’re so jaded by interest group politics that we think our opinions don’t matter anymore.

I’m not sure, but it must stop. Only by embracing a wide swath of ideas and engaging them head-on with passion can we truly find out who we are. Many of the country’s most influential people spent their college years radically promoting a political agenda they would one day disavow. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and radio commentator Michael Medved essentially did an ideological 180 after college, as did some prominent members of the Harvard faculty.

One prominent alum, John Adams ’1755, famously said that “in politics, the middle way is none at all.” I’m not entirely sure how he would have felt about communism, but I am quite certain that he believed that people should aggressively put forth their positions and argue fervently for them.

A few more Marxists and Leninists would at least challenge us to defend our basic beliefs and values, and liven up the dole drum nature of debate on campus. The great thing about commies is that they may always be wrong, but they are never boring.



John W. Hastrup ’06 is a government concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.