Self-Delusion

THE 350th anniversary has passed, and while the rest of the world took some time out to examine Harvard, the University managed to delude itself again. But amid all the self-indulgent hoopla earlier this month, one protest managed to make an impact despite efforts by Harvard to ignore its implications.

On the second night of the celebration, about 65 students, alumni and staff blockaded the two Kirkland Street entrances to Memorial Hall. In this 19th century memorial to Harvard students who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War, President Derek C. Bok was planning to hold an anniversary dinner for some of Harvard's most powerful and wealthy graduates. Reporters had been forewarned by the protesters. The plan was that the media would record the arrests of the protesters--arrests that the University would have had to order if it hoped to get its dinner guests into Memorial Hall.

In the tradition of another Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837, these activists were using civil disobedience to express their dissatisfaction with the University's refusal to divest of its South Africa-related stocks. The protesters hoped their arrests would make an outside world--inundated by laudatory cover stories--aware that not everything was rosy in the land of Crimson.

BUT THE ARRESTS never came.

Instead University officials wasted close to an hour trying to decide what action to take. They told the guests, who had been drinking cocktails in the Busch Reisinger Museum, to make their way over to Memorial Hall, where these 600 individuals, all clad in evening wear, were directed toward a back door. But that door was locked, putting an end to Harvard's attempt at a diversionary tactic. Eventually the guests found their way to where the protesters were blockading, and a confrontation ensued.

Once these two very different parties confronted each other there was little choice but to cancel the dinner because both groups--especially the dinner guests--were becoming increasingly violent. But there was an option available to the University, before the cancellation became a necessity, which was ignored for the sake of illusion.

Arresting the protesters would have allowed the dinner to go on. More important, it also would have forced Harvard to admit that, yes, there is dissent on this venerable, ivy-covered campus--something the University had been loathe to do in all previous 350th anniversary press releases.

THE UNIVERSITY'S ENTIRE approach to protest has been one of disdain. The shantytown in the Yard last semester was looked upon as an odd extracurricular, and last spring's campaign for the Board of Overseers by three self-nominated candidates advocating divestment was viewed as an abomination of tradition. But pretending that there is no dissent and just hoping the protests will go away is not only poor strategy, it is precisely the sort of attitude that makes people so dissatisfied with Harvard in the first place.

At Memorial Hall, trying to ignore the protesters finally backfired, and Harvard got much more souffle on its face than if it had simply arrested those who wanted to be civilly disobedient. It is to be hoped that the University will now take activists a little more seriously. If Harvard administrators are embarrassed by the Memorial Hall snafu, then they surely will.