A Yard Persepctive

I have appreciated the student dialogue on Occupy Harvard in the Harvard Crimson. One perspective I'd like to add to the discussion: those of us who live in Harvard Yard and are now, effectively, "occupied" in our homes.

I live in Thayer Hall with my husband and our six-month-old son, and, of course, our thirty awesome freshmen. It felt profoundly unsettling to be inside the Yard last Wednesday night with several hundred people outside the gates. I wasn't sure whether to feel displeasure about the sudden locked gates, restricting the rights of those outside to assemble and express their views, or relief that I was safe from individuals who - in contrast to the goals of the Occupy movement - might potentially mean more harm than good. Days later, I remain a confused mixed of sympathetic, ambivalent, and hostile to the tents that purport to occupy this space I've come to call home.

Galvanizing individuals around an anti-Harvard sentiment might be an effective means of changing the university, but it might also have unintended results. I felt sharply aware on Wednesday night that the building my family and I live in might be a target for someone looking to express rage and frustration at a broken political and economic system and Harvard's perceived complicity in our country's problems. When forty individuals who do not live in Thayer had a meeting in our basement, I felt an unease I don't think I would have before having my son. I feel deeply the responsibility to keep my family and my freshmen safe, and I'm worried that the Occupy Harvard site might attract people who want not to change the university but to damage it, either for the catharsis or symbolic power of that damage. I realize that the organizers of Occupy Harvard mean no harm (they say so on their website, of course), but hearing that a group recently showed up to the gate in masks and holding bats has made it hard for me to sleep.

The Yard has been a site of political debate for hundreds of years, but it is also a place where many people sleep, including ten small children. Though the Occupy movement is spread throughout the globe, I am not aware of another site where it is a residential community being Occupied, 24 hours a day. I wish that the Occupiers had considered what it might mean to Occupy not a public site but a space that is also home to many members of their community.

Kristi L. Jobson '06, HLS ’12, is a Freshmen Proctor and former magazine associate editor at the Harvard Crimson.