Black and White and Crimson All Over: Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

LEGALLY BLONDE

Occasionally, a story will come along that is too extraordinary for the press to ignore, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals embezzlement scandal being a notable example. There were nearly $91,000 missing on the hands of a blonde social butterfly—who had famously kissed Anthony Hopkins before dozens of cameras—who used the money to throw parties and go to spas, and her partner in crime was a DVD-hoarding, alleged drug user. Factor in an illustrious drag theater group, a parade of Hollywood celebrities, and a year of corporate misdoing, all at Harvard, and you had yourself a story. That it didn’t make bigger headlines was probably only the function of the lack of follow-up news available.

But no matter how scandalous the story, internal affairs within the University will almost inevitably get amplified to a global scale, provided they’re in any way applicable to the outside world.

“Only when there are implications outside Harvard can you ever get this attention,” says Chopra. “The movement for cable TV is not going to stir up anyone at The Washington Post.”

What will? Free speech and the Middle East, to name the underlying issues of the bigger Harvard stories of the past year. Summers was alternately praised and reviled for his speech at Memorial Church, in effect linking anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. The Commencement address of Zayed M. Yasin ’02 and Tom Paulin’s invitation to deliver an English department lecture might have been controversial anywhere last year; but buoyed by the Harvard name, the players were forced to deal with an entirely new set of concerns.

For Yasin, whose speech entitled “My American Jihad” made him an instant celebrity last June, the attention came as a shock. “I thought and hoped that [my speech] would raise some eyebrows and get people thinking,” Yasin wrote in an e-mail from Pakistan, where he is currently working, “but had absolutely no idea that it would become the national news item that it did.”

The Globe picked up The Crimson article about the opposition to Yasin’s speech, and that day, Yasin got a call from an early morning call-in radio show in Texas. After the local television news in Boston wanted interviews, Yasin says he thought that would be it. But within days, Yasin had to stop giving everybody that called his time; it simply wasn’t possible to fit them all in during Commencement Week.

He did MSNBC, CNN, “The Today Show”, “The Early Show”, and “Nightline” on TV; on the radio, he was interviewed by Voice of America, BBC News, and Voice of Israel. He talked to the Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Metro and even squeezed in time for his hometown papers and “as many of the Muslim news sources as possible.”

At the center of the opposition to Yasin’s speech was Hilary L. Levey ’02, who says that while she contacted a few Harvard alums she knew in the media to get the message out, the bulk of the press requests she received were unsolicited.

“I stopped dealing with second-rate news sources, because I didn’t want to deal with biased coverage that I knew only really wanted to smear me,” Yasin says. “I was especially disappointed with the Boston Metro, which ran my photo on the front cover with the title ‘Harvard Grad a Terrorist Supporter?’ I can deal with bad coverage, but my family lives in this area, and I did not want my mom to have to deal with people thinking that her son is a terrorist.”

Yasin adds that without the wider media coverage, he probably would not have gotten a death threat signed “One Shot, One Kill.” Still, he says he continues to get e-mails of support from Harvard alumni and strangers from around the world.

Besides propelling him into infamy, though, Yasin believes that the scandal did not ultimately change the course of events. “Harvard could not have censored me without compromising on many of its basic principles,” says Yasin. “The media coverage generated a lot of negative correspondence for the University, which put it under a lot of pressure to be as noncommittal as possible.  If you will notice, President Summers completely reorganized the commencement speaking committee so that nothing like this could ever happen again.”

As for Tom Paulin, internal student agitation played a significant role in the canceling of a lecture by the vocally anti-Zionist Irish poet. But it was arguably the national coverage of the incident that gave the English department the extra push to re-extend their invitation. While never the sole determining factor, the media attention nonetheless cemented the belief that free speech itself was at stake. Harvard’s English department could not be seen to compromise on those values.

“The publicity did have an effect,” says Sollors, admittedly judging from afar having been on leave during the debate. He says he received multiple e-mails from English professors during the controversy, “with web links to the news stories. That was very rare. The very fact that it had so many waves made people much more anxious about what to do.”

Buell maintains that internal concerns played a large role. “We did receive a good bit of e-mail and regular mail from people on both sides of the question of whether to hold or not to hold,” he says. “And a good bit of it was from outside Harvard, that’s true. But the department’s response was driven almost entirely by a combination of the sense of what was happening at Harvard and what the College thought about the situation.”

STEALING HARVARD

Who owns Harvard, its caché, its history, its resources? It isn’t the sole property of its students, that’s for sure. This becomes clear from the beginning of an undergraduate’s first year, when students cannot walk to the dining hall without contending with crowds of camera-snappers blocking the 50-foot radius around the John Harvard statue, and when minute details of campus events end up on CNN. But as some shrewd students have learned, this can be used this to their advantage.

“I find students can make a difference when using outside media,” says Chopra. “I said in Business Week’s profile of Larry Summers that study abroad was ‘half-assed.’ Not to say that that was all that motivated some change, but it helped build this image that Harvard doesn’t believe in international experience.”

“Students learn on their own how the game works,” agrees John Trumpbour, editor of a 1989 anthology of left-wing essays critical of Harvard, and now research director of the Harvard Trade Union program. “Still, people say the media is very critical of institutions, but they’re actually quite complacent unless you yourself develop a movement. They will very rarely stir things up themselves.”

The most famous, and arguably the most successful, example of students taking advantage of the media hunger for Harvard was the campaign of the PSLM for a Living Wage. The group’s 21-day occupation of Massachusetts Hall in 2001 gained momentum from a public strategy that was honed for months.

“Part of the leverage was in effect making Harvard the Nike of higher education,” says McKean. “From the beginning we were cognizant that we had to build a strong base on campus, be accountable to the workers, and run a campaign in good faith. But the administration had no incentive to pay workers more. Part of creating that incentive was always going to be publicity.”

McKean says that during the sit-in, there were at least 10 people working on public relations, doggedly calling reporters for hours each day, and writing and sending out press releases. He adds that they even persuaded a Times reporter to enter the building with them, though it wasn’t until one week into the sit-in that the Times printed any coverage.

“The idea of a sit-in is attention,” says Madeleine Elfenbein ’04, who was involved in the sit-in. “It’s also a certain tactic to exercise human power against the administration’s institutional power.”

“They had a media room in Mass Hall that was far more sophisticated than anything we have,” says Wrinn, who had the task of dealing directly with the public relations disaster. He recalls one student whose task was to follow him and poke holes in his statements as he spoke to reporters. He says he half-jokingly offered her a job. “I would go to some of the kids and say, ‘nice touch.’”

Organizers were frustrated at the relative lack of media response in the first week of the sit-in. That changed with the visits of high-profile labor leaders and politicians, and a sense on the part of journalists that the occupation was going to last. Soon, the story was everywhere, and Times opinion columnist Bob Herbert dedicated two whole columns to the topic. “Looking at it now, it looks like wall-to-wall media,” says McKean. “But we worked for every inch of it.”

PSLM deftly took advantage of the dramatic storyline that the world’s richest university was mistreating its impoverished workers.

“The media loves a hypocrite, and it loves a Goliath, so students who find a good storyline about how the university is saying one thing and doing another will always find a good reception,” says Bai, who says he got many calls from PSLM at Newsweek, where he was a national correspondent at the time.

Wrinn acknowledges that the administration was put in an impossible position. “The issue was portrayed in a very simplified way, good vs. evil. I thought that was very savvy on their part. But it just wasn’t that simple.”

“Maybe we had the upper hand,” McKean concedes, “but I wouldn’t have thought we won until I saw a worker’s paycheck with higher numbers on it.” How much of an effect does he think the media attention had on the sit-in’s resolution, which ended with an administrative commitment to investigate employees’ wages. “It wasn’t simply Harvard looking bad, it was they were losing control of the campus. We were building an enormous amount of power. For me, the greatest effect of the media has been in the larger world, which now knows a lot more about Living Wage and the possibility for social justice campaigns on campus.”

The Living Wage campaign’s tactics are a model for a new generation of activists who see media finesse as integral to effecting change.

Members of the Coalition Against Sexual Violence (CASV) cite PSLM’s example in attempting to get the word out about their opposition to the change in the University’s sexual assault policy last year. “We definitely did try and follow the advice of people who had been involved in PSLM, like how to contact the media and how to make press packets,” says Alisha C. Johnson ’04, a member of CASV.

Last April, when CASV organized a protest against the Faculty’s vote to require corroborating evidence before the Administrative Board will investigate peer dispute cases. They went through the main talking points, called their press contacts the best they could, and went out with their posters and slogans. “We weren’t in the position to have The New York Times at our beck and call,” says one CASV member. The Times bit, though, and the change did get extensive coverage. Photos of protesters bearing signs reading “Rape Happens At Harvard” were internationally disseminated.

But CASV faced challenges that the Living Wage campaign did not. For one thing, its cause was reacting to a surprise action by the administration, as opposed to creating an event. Some say there was always the fear of antagonizing the administration to the extent that they would no longer listen. For another, unlike Living Wage, CASV lacks the backing of a nationally organized movement.

“Harvard thought it could get away with the corroboration rule. It hedged its bets, raised its finger to the political wind and said, ‘We can get away with this, because women aren’t noisy enough to do what the Living Wage campaign protesters did,’” says Wendy Murphy, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School who is handling the Office of Civil Rights complaint filed against the University earlier this year. “Harvard’s not stupid. I don’t want to make them sound intentionally sinister, but I think they knew that the response to this would be less problematic for them because of the political status of women. Harvard cares about its reputation.”

So far, the University hasn’t yielded. Still, CASV and other student advocacy groups plan to continue their media strategy. As Johnson says, "Harvard has this pattern of not working to change things until it gets to the media and they get bad press coverage."

For Harvard to gripe about its bad press is a bit like a celebrity complaining about paparazzi stalkers. It is an institution that willfully courts prominence and enjoys financial benefits and competition for faculty members and students, partially on the basis of its fame.

Wrinn takes a philosophical approach to the negative cast of some recent coverage. "Most of the bad things that have happened here over the years have been the reflection of the history of the world," he says. "I remember one of the Globe editors a few years back saying confidentially, "We're gonna poke you on this, we're gonna call you on that—but by the way, how do I get my kid into Harvard? Can you make a call for me?

Seth H. Robinson contributed to the reporting of this story.