To Catch A Fly

When Jeanne F. Theoharis '91 arrived at Harvard this fall, she was already a veteran of the Left.

Her mother is a full-time activist, and her father was arrested on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. died. She has always thought of protests as family outings.

While in high school, Theoharis started a leftwing student group, which built a shantytown and worked in soup kitchens--and she speculates that Harvard accepted her because of it.

Naturally, she joined protests and political campaigns as soon as she arrived in Cambridge, becoming an editor of the liberal monthly "Perspective," a leader of Stop Witholding Access Today (SWAT)'s fight against the final clubs and a volunteer in several Phillips Brooks House programs.

She was prepared to take outspoken positions. But she never expected that Harvard's brand of activism would involve so much tolerance on the University's part, and so much cooperation on the activists' side. She says Harvard activism is almost a cooperative effort between students and administrators, far from the direct opposition that characterized the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

"People at Harvard pay a lot of lip service to liberal and radical ideas," says Theoharis. "A lot of times I don't see people putting themselves on the line." She says many students are not willing to make sacrifices for their beliefs, not wanting to cross the University's threshold of tolerance.

"I don't think a lot of people are willing to be asked to withdraw from Harvard for a year," she says, adding that most undergraduate activists here would never seriously risk arrest. "I don't think that's true of activists around the United States."

The joint women's and Afro-American studies concentrator says students today also lack interest in becoming full-time activists after college because they do not consider it a "successful" career. She says Harvard's reputation encourages this attitude because it pressures students to seek traditional forms of success--in business, law or academia.

Tactics, too, have changed. Instead of protesting in front of the final clubs, Theoharis says SWAT sought endorsements from the Harvard administration, from Radcliffe and from the Undergraduate Council. She says modern activists now resort to confrontation only as a last resort, when working within the system fails.

And Theoharis says she even believes that foreign policy activism, protesting divestment or U.S. policy in Central America, has become a burnt-out case. "There comes a time when you say, `what is just one more protest going to do?'" she says. In Central American and divestment politics, she says students cannot understand all the issues at stake, and that pressuring governments can be ineffective and frustrating.

But if Theoharis believes foreign policy agitation may already have reached its peak, she does not believe activism in general is dying out. She says students are working for social and political changes closer to home, where students can make a visible difference--like the one sought by Lisa J. Schkolnick '88, who has charged the Fly Club, one of Harvard's nine all-male final clubs, with sexual discrimination.

"With divestment, with Central America, you never know how much [you are] chaning people's attitudes, you never know the whole issue. With SWAT we can say we are experts on the final clubs because we go to Harvard." Theoharis says she thinks activism has gained adherents by turning inward because "it's on an immediate level." And she remains confident that despite the problems faced by college activists, in the end their causes will prevail.