Today's Activists Burdened by Legacy

In late February, 50 students from the Progressive Student Labor Movement surrounded Mass. Hall to present a letter of protest about sweatshop labor to University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

Their reception wasn't exactly high drama. Rudenstine wasn't responsive. He wasn't angry. He just wasn't there--and the door to Mass. Hall was locked.

This was in accordance with a University policy never to leave a door unbarred when a student protest is taking place. Harvard learned this lesson the hard way; 30 years ago this spring, anti-war protestors took over University Hall and held it for a day before they were expelled in a violent assault by state and local police.

That move backfired as the bloody bust won the radical protestors sympathy on campus. Ever since that incident, etched in the minds of administrators, the doors have been locked at the first hint of trouble.

Not all the repercussions of the '60s at Harvard--the wave of student protests and campus unrest that culminated at University Hall on April 9, 1969--are so tangible as Mass. Hall's locked doors or the post-1960s riot-proof dorms like Canaday Hall.

The takeover and the bust changed the way students and Faculty feel about each other, some campus observers say. A formerly collegial atmosphere was shattered by radicalism, creating an environment of distrust that only time has cooled.

But student activists have perhaps felt the impact of the '60s heaviest of all.

This year, as Harvard and the nation have witnessed a resurgence of campus activism, comparisons with earlier protestors have intensified. To some, the 1960s are the example today's student activists should strive to follow, but to others, they are an irrelevant and unfair standard, a 30-year-old albatross around the necks of today's student activists.

The Curse It Has Cast

For student activists like the PSLM members who surrounded Mass. Hall in February, the shadow of the '60s is an unavoidable fact of life.

The last school year has seen a re-emergence of student activism at Harvard and around the country. Sweatshop labor, a "living wage" for university employees, and graduate student labor has all inspired demonstrations.

After a protest outside a Faculty meeting on March 9 this year, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American studies department DuBois professor of the humanities, said "this reminds me of the late '60s. This is great."

A recent article in The Nation about the resurgent student movement began by noting that a meeting of campus organizers at Stanford bore "no resemblance to the old and gritty auto workers' summer camp at Port Huron, Michigan, where SDS was formed in 1962."

And comparisons like this one are part of why the example of the '60s can be a burden for today's activists.

"It's a legacy that is hard to live with at times," says Living Wage campaign member Daniel R. Morgan '99. "It's overpowering. You're constantly reminded of the fact of the takeover."

Social historian Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and author of A People's History of the United States, says the contrast is unfortunate, but inevitable.

"That comparison will always take place," Zinn says, "[but] it should be resisted. Take the high point of any history and then...try to measure everything against it and it will always seem too low. I don't think it makes sense to do that. It creates the wrong impression--and also is sort of discouraging."

Zinn says it is unfair to expect student protests of the same magnitude of those in the '60s without a single, unifying cause to stir action.

"In the '60s, there were two very central, very dramatic, very black and white issues. One was racial segregation, one was the war in Vietnam," he says. "Since then, there hasn't been a single issue that has been central enough."

Dean of Student Archie C. Epps III also attributes the more broadly based student activism of the '60s to the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights. Epps says comparisons between today's activism and '60s activism are unfair.

"Because you don't have the special dynamic of the war, plus the counterculture movement. Those two things are missing today," Epps says. "That movement was informed by the counterculture movement, which questioned prevailing norms of behavior and all forms of authority. It tended to be dismissive of College administrators. That is a major difference."

Epps calls today's protests more "collaborative."

"At the moment, the students seem to be willing to work in partnership with the institution to try and find solutions," he says, citing PSLM and the Living Wage Campaign as groups willing to work with the administration.

"It also reflects the willingness of the administration to be a partner in finding solutions and to acknowledge that these are important social questions," Epps says.

PSLM member Daniel M. Hennefeld '99 says that references to the radicalism of the '60s can undermine students' ability to get things done on today's campuses.

"Some people are actually kind of turned off by that kind of thing," he says, "because they think it makes contemporary activists look out of place, or seem stuck in the '60s."

Or, worse, using the imagery of the '60s, he says, can lead to accusations that protestors aren't as sincere as their predecessors--merely enamored of a kind of protest chic.

"That's a kind of bad aspect of comparison with the '60s, the idea of activism for activism's sake," Hennefeld says. "We don't want to be associated with that."

The Present Now Will Later Be Past

To some extent, though, student activists bring the comparison onto themselves. The imagery of the '60s is a powerful weapon and, at least at Harvard, student activists have been willing to exploit it.

Protestors recycle chants from the '60s. Even this winter's anti-impeachment rally ended with a rendition, by Carly Simon, of the protest anthem "We Shall Overcome."

In a February op-ed piece in The Crimson, Aron R. Fischer '99-'00 and Benjamin L. McKean '02, two PSLM members, began by describing a wave of anti-sweatshop sit-ins and protests at universities nationwide, then asked, "Is this a scene from 1969 during the opposition to the Vietnam War?...No these protests happened in February 1999."

Activists stress that while their cause is different from the anti-war protestors at Harvard in 1969, they are part of the same tradition.

"A lot of us look back at the history of activism at Harvard--not just to University Hall but also to anti-apartheid in the '80s--to know that we're not just isolated, and we're part of a continuing tradition," Hennefeld says.

Times They Are A-Changin'

But the '60s may be an unfair standard for today's students because

campuses are less conducive to activism than they once were, according to Nicole A. Morse, development director of the Boston-based Center for Campus Organizing.

Morse says the rising cost of college, paired with increasing reliance on loans instead of grants in financial aid, could be affecting students' desire to protest. Previously, she estimates, 80 percent of financial aid packages came from grants and 20 percent were loans. Today the numbers are roughly flipped at many schools.

As a result, Morse says, students "have less time and are more tied into the system."

Morgan says he feels that especially at Harvard, changes in students' career goals have affected activism on campus. While students have always aspired to positions of power, he thinks fewer students now are interested in academia and politics--aspirations that have often coincided with student activism.

Instead, Morgan says, students are gunning for the business elite. "Over the past 30 years, [it's] shifted more and more to economic control."

Zinn says holding today's activists to the standard of the '60s can create the wrong impression--that students today are more apathetic than their predecessors.

"There's nothing inherently active or passive in any student generation," Zinn says. "It all depends on what happens in the world."

Keep Your Eyes Wide Open

Striking a balance between respecting the legacy of the '60s and establishing an independent identity for today's activists is a tough task, Morgan says.

The best compromise, he says, is to keep the '60s as an inspiration but not an exact model to follow in modern times-- "something to hold onto without having it dominate the conditions under which you operate."

Zinn echoes Morgan, saying protestors shouldn't see the '60s as a standard for radicalism to which all later activists should be held.

Student activists "should see the '60s in an inspirational way," he says, a reminder that "it's possible to have a great student movement, and it's possible for students to have an impact on society."