SLAM Strikes Again

In the war against Harvard staff layoffs, the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) has just chosen a new battlefront for its latest guerilla attack—the desktop backgrounds on Lamont computers.

Members have apparently been changing the backgrounds to display the group’s slogan, “Greed is the new Crimson,” prompting one student worker at Lamont to gripe in an email, “Note the absence of ‘constantly resetting desktop backgrounds’ in the above list [of my job responsibilities]. While I know you enjoy creating more work opportunities for others, please spare me the courtesy.” Ouch. Sorry, SLAM, we’re sure you meant well.

More on how the group’s been slamming Harvard, after the jump.

SLAM has a petition, that sets out its demands, including a meeting with university administration, the suspension of layoffs, and the recall of all workers let go since October 2008.

SLAM’s other strategies have included unfurling banners in public places—everywhere from Annenberg to Dean Smith’s town hall meeting

to President Faust’s lunch at Eliot. The group has also staged rallies against layoffs, most recently this past Thursday, in front of the Holyoke Center.

So is Harvard listening? Are the new desktop backgrounds working? We can’t judge yet whether or not SLAM’s tactics are actually helping workers, but at least students seem to be paying attention—kind of. Some were taken by the grammatical implications of the phrase “Greed is the new Crimson.” We were especially amused by this highly Harvardian response to a SLAM email:

“Perhaps they haven't responded because ‘greed’ unlike ‘crimson’ is not a color, and therefore saying ‘greed is the new crimson’ would be lexically similar to saying to ‘koala is the new circle’—a situation in which you are trying to include a member of a class of nouns (in my case animals) into a pre-existing class of nouns (such as shapes). Perhaps if you had refined your message into a nuanced argument comprised of phrases that made coherent sense instead of a mindless slogan, then the President and Corporation would be better able to understand and respond to your concerns.”

FlyBy isn’t by any means against labor rights, but we might have to agree—with a philosophy that seems to boil down to the poster slogan “Harvard is rich, no layoffs,”—nuance just isn’t one of the SLAM’s strengths.

Photo courtesy The Harvard Crimson/Zhongrui Yin