Why I’m Pro-Protest

Harvard students are codependent on authority: We need authorities to underwrite our internships, write our recommendations, and evaluate our comp performance. An ambitious sociologist might even make the argument that Harvard students, so desperate to be in a position of power someday, are less than eager to constrain power’s reach today. Now, some students have proven far too eager to defend aspects of the administration’s proposals for economizing Harvard’s budget against student activists, who have allegedly engaged in what one writer on this page deemed “hyperbole, rudeness, and radicalism.”

Everyone has the right to his or her opinion, but we ought to recognize that even a well-meaning Harvard administration is not a neutral arbitrator in this debate. In campus politics as in national politics, debate is necessary for shaping a satisfactory resolution.

While “Harvard is Rich: No Layoffs,” might seem an unconvincing oversimplification, efforts to force the administration to recognize layoffs as ruinous events in individual lives rather than mere statistics have a place in this debate. That those individuals may be recent immigrants with limited education makes it more urgent. A publicly traded company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders—by law, it must care only about their good; a nonprofit organization has made a commitment to be run for the general social good. As such, the meaning of this goal is a matter for public, not private, debate, and having a valuable opinion on it does not, as was implied in a recent editorial, require full access to Harvard’s balance sheet.

Proposals for a nonprofit organization to trim its workforce in light of a recession are rightly controversial, even from economic point of view. In the Keynesian model, a recession can lead to a vicious circle of self-perpetuating cutbacks unless the government steps in to buttress demand. Under this logic, any actor claiming to act in the public interest (including but not limited to the government) ought to buy more goods (and labor) in a recession than a for-profit corporation under comparable constraints in order to maintain employment and demand levels.

Finally, well-meaning Harvard administrators—led as they are by a social historian—undoubtedly recognize that the future leaders who pass through this university will shape the institutions they go on to run after the institutions that raised them. One of President Drew G. Faust’s original, now quaint, initiatives was to inquire into why so many students were accepting unfulfilling jobs in the financial services industry after graduation. A case that students should instead follow their hearts and work to build a better society is inherently less convincing coming from a university that is run like an investment bank.

Students shouldn’t get the final say in Harvard’s decision-making process, but the thoughts of students, faculty, and staff have a place in making a case to administrators to look beyond a narrow view of the school’s objective. It seemed that the budget-cutting process would be closed to students, and it is heartening that two recent administration-student forums constitute an improvement in transparency compared to last month’s invitation-only town hall. This improvement is due in part to student activism at that event.

FAS Dean Michael D. Smith’s assurances on May 3 that no “specific plans” for layoffs had then been made within FAS, and that students would have greater input in forthcoming aspects of the budgeting process, were heartening. But Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds’s indication at the same forum that official student input in the process would primarily flow through already established committees ought to give some pause. These committees and their selection procedures may not be well-designed to express student interest in this moment of debate over core values—at a time when many more than the “usual suspects” have an interest in how student voices are expressed to the administration.

Today, Smith will make a major announcement about Harvard’s budgetary priorities for the next fiscal year, as well as the procedures to decide future budget cuts. While Smith has many concerns to address, I (and many others) would urge him to take the needs of Harvard’s lower-income workers into account. At an institution in which values such as diversity, sustainability, and public service—none of them “core” to Harvard’s educational mission—nonetheless inhabit the niche of respected priorities, where on the totem pole do we place the struggles of Harvard’s least fortunate?

For concerned students, the proper strategy in such a debate is not to trust the “appropriate authorities” to properly weigh interests against values through their own beneficent intelligence. If students don’t subscribe to a decision, the proper response is to shout our values from the rooftops. Indeed, facing a college administration that came of academic age in the sixties and seventies, little else but “radicalism” would suffice to convince such college functionaries that an opinion is indeed deeply held. It may ultimately be that some limited quantity of layoffs is a necessary evil in this economic storm, but at the richest university in the world, the “radical” and irresponsible thing would be to not make a stink about it.


Max J. Kornblith ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House.