Questioning the `Majority'

I WAS EATING lunch the other day when a student armed with a sheaf of papers approached me. In a low and serious voice he asked, "Have you signed the divestment petition yet?" I said--with unnecessary harshness, I'm afraid--that no, I hadn't. With obvious chagrin he moved on to the other students at the long table.

I watched him traverse the entire length of Lowell House dining hall. At some tables he went slowly as he met with success; at others he struck out with entire groups and quickly moved on.

The episode caused an argument at my table about how polls, petitions and demonstrations have been used by campus activists, particularly by the divestment movement. For the first time in my four years here, tactics such as the intrusive shantytown and agressive petitioning have replaced the less invasive methods of teach-ins and speeches. These new or revived strategies reflect a frustration less with the intransigence of Harvard's governors than with the lack of a student groundswell in support of divestment.

INFORMATION ON campus sentiment toward divestment has come in three principal chunks in the last year--the Undergraduate Council (UC) referendum last fall, a random Crimson telephone poll last spring, and various Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC) petitions, like those now circulating in the dining halls and at the Law School.

The results of the admittedly ambiguous UC referendum and the Crimson sampling were quite similar in one respect. In both, roughly a third of the student body favored divestment.

However, The Crimson's random telephone poll revealed that a another third opposed divestment, whereas in the UC referendum taken in dining halls only about a sixth said they opposed it. This discrepancy says something about the two different polling methods. Clearly person-to-person methods, whether UC referenda or SASC petitions, misread campus opinion by discouraging divestment opponents from airing their point of view.

In SASC's current Harkness Common petition drive, a rough third of the Law School student body favored divestment, with almost no opposition. If the same apparently steady third supports divestment in the College dining hall petition, the trend will be even more strongly corroborated.

Whatever these numbers mean, they certainly don't indicate a campus majority behind divestment. When The Crimson and other groups declared after the UC referendum that a "majority" of undergraduates supported divestment, it was a technically correct statement. But the "majority" in this case was only a majority of those voting; it was a plurality of all those eligible to vote. The same holds true with the recent Law School petition.

One analogy--sometimes used to legitimate the "majority" results of divestment opinion polls--is that virtually everyone called President Reagan's re-election margin a "landslide majority" when in fact it was only a plurality of all potential voters. Nobody questioned the legitimacy of his election even though a majority of the American people did not say "we want you as President." So, activists contend, why should we question the legitimacy of divestment poll results?

However, a crucial difference between elections and the divestment movement is that members of SASC and other activists are asking for a fairly severe departure from the status quo by a private institution. Unlike the practice of electing public officials, the action of divestment would be unprecedented and unique. Given this, pluralities are not enough; a truly credible demand that the University divest needs a real student majority, which hasn't been forthcoming.

A GROWING FRUSTRATION with the University's lack of response is one of SASC's stated reasons for building the shantytown. But a deeper reason, it seems to me, is frustration over the continued absence of peer support. There has been no student groundswell, even after a year of increasing violence in South Africa, and visits to Harvard by Jesse Jackson and Bishop Desmond W. Tutu. After years of "consciousness raising" without divestment, no one seriously expects the Corporation to change its collective mind. Now the activist tactic is not to raise consciousness but to raise the ante--that is, to increase protest pressure.

So how does the earnest petitioner in my dining hall fit into this? It appears that SASC's frustration has caused the organization to see student apathy and/or opposition as fertile ground for more direct methods, such as person-to-person pollings in dining halls and Harkness Common. This tactic has already yielded a 90 percent positive response at the Law School from a sampling of about 30 percent.

Such tactics are increasingly desperate and consciously intrude on student's rights--whether the right not to attend class at the shantytown, as some section leaders have urged, or not to be accosted by petitioners. Like the shantytown, which violates the free use of a public place, aggressive polling is undertaken in the name of a "higher good." Both tactics are used by SASC activists to legitimate assertions of growing student support, of "overwhelming majorities" in favor of their cause.

A dozen years of teach-ins, rallies and occasional building takeovers hasn't swayed Harvard students very much. The whole trend on the issue has diverged from one of trying to convince both students and administrators of the need for divestment to one of browbeating, obstruction and intimidation. I salute the bravery of the student who approached me in the dining hall--and condemn the tactics he apparently feels compelled to use.