An Analysis of the NEW ACTIVISM

Spurred by the choice of Judith H. Kidd as the assistant dean of public service, more than 700 Harvard students gathered in front of University Hall on a cold December day to protest a slew of grievances against the College's administration.

Balloons bobbing in the wind, six-foot speakers crackling, students cheered for Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) and denounced Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68. More than 10 percent of the campus population turned out for the demonstration, making it the College's largest student-run protest in recent memory.

Where rallies in previous years had been sparsely attended and ignored by the vast majority of students, the PBHA protest captured the attention of the mainstream, attracting a broad cross-section of the student body and garnering significant attention from administrators and the Boston media.

If the PBHA rally had been an isolated occurrence it would have had limited significance, but the December protest was only one of more than 20 protests this year at Harvard, a campus notorious for the political apathy of its students.

While the PBHA protest was the years largest, student attendance at rallies frequently hit triple digits. The demonstrations were better organized than in the past, drew support from an array of students, professors, alums and local officials and were often orchestrated as parts of larger political efforts.

Indeed, the increased visibility of activism at Harvard, combined with the volatile climate at schools such as Columbia and Yale, left administrators and the Harvard University Police Department nervous enough to post guards at the entrances to the administrative buildings, University Hall and Mass, Hall, throughout April and May.

Activists, students, faculty, administrators and authors interviewed agree that after a lengthy hiatus, activism is again showing its face at Harvard.

But today's isn't a resurgence of 1960s idealism. This time around, student agitators, particularly at Harvard, reflect a kind of strategic activism: students protest the issues with more sobriety, more experience, more pragmatism and a greater emphasis on the long run.

In the 1960s, activism had an enormous effect on college campuses. The fury of the student body at Harvard was a factor in a host of major decisions during that time, from the selection of Derek C. Bok as the University's 25th president to the move to kick ROTC off campus to the creation of the Department of Afro-American Studies.

It remains to be seen whether the new strategic activism will have a similar impact. Today's students are less inclined to attempt to intimidate administrators into submission. But many student activists hope that by keeping the past in mind and saddling up for the long haul, they can be just as effective in pushing universities toward the changes they desire.

Hitting Close to Home

Part of the explanation for the rise in student demonstrations at Harvard lies in the recent change in College leadership. Easygoing Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 was replaced last summer by the more hard-nosed Lewis, who has consistently provoked the ire of student groups.

Lewis is described by Macro B. Simons '97, Undergraduate Council executive and co-chair of the Burma Action Group, as a dean "who consistently seems to undervalue student opinion in the administrative decision-making process."

During Lewis' fledgling but already immensely unpopular tenure, he has supported randomization of the housing lottery, moved to enforce alcohol policies more firmly and helped stir the current public service brouhaha. All these issues have an immediate impact upon student life, affecting undergraduates more directly and profoundly than the tenure cases or administrative structural decisions tackled by Lewis' bosses.

While the current situation obviously doesn't rival the anguish surrounding the Vietnam draft or the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, students' sense of an overbearing, out-of-touch and insensitive authority has created a reaction reminiscent of that time.

Student activists say they are frustrated because their attempts to be heard have been consistently ignored by Lewis and other members of the administration and Faculty.

"Demonstrations exist because all other channels have been exhausted," says Jennifer Ching '96, a member of the Ethnic Studies Action Committee (ESAC) and former co-president of the Asian American Association. "After getting the same stock answers each time, you begin to realize that there are barriers."

And as students have continually felt avenues closed off, the tone of the rallies has changed. ESAC Chair Alex H. Cho '96 described the April 19 demonstration for ethnic studies, which attracted more than 100 students, as "angrier and less polite in a lot of respects."

Administrators considered the protest so angry that Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, who had been unceremoniously carried out of University Hall by protesters a generation earlier, requested increased security for the entrances to the administrative building.

While Lewis is the most immediate catalyst for student discontent, current national political tides have also sparked concern and response. The activism of the conservative Congress, particularly through the Contract With America, seem to have reinvigorated young leftists.

Pending cuts in financial aid and a proposed anti-immigration law hit particularly close to home for Harvard students, a majority of whom are on some sort of financial aid and some of whom are first-generation American citizens or immigrants themselves.

On a clear, crisp night in March, students shouted through megaphones to protest what they saw as the anti-immigration policies of Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) when he came to speak at the Institute of Politics.

And on October 29, the formerly apolitical Undergraduate Council passed a bill to door-drop materials promoting a Boston-wide student rally protesting the then-pending Congressional cuts in financial aid. Organizations ranging from the Harvard-Radcliffe Republican Alliance to the Progressive Action Network denounced the cuts, signed petitions, attended rallies and lobbied college administrators to continue their commitment to need-blind admissions in the event that the bills in question passed.

According to Paul R. Loeb, author of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus, the national economic climate may also have helped to stimulate activism at Harvard.

Loeb argues that in an increasingly uncertain marketplace, one where graduates of elite schools are no longer guaranteed good jobs, students feel a more personal connection to the plight of the less fortunate.

"Job insecurity, paying for school [and] economic problems, have spurred people to get involved," adds Kelvin E. Pranis, youth section field coordinator for the Democratic Socialists of America.

Human rights violations in other nations also provoked action from Harvard's students for the first time in years.

When the director of Harvard Dining Services, Michael P. Berry, announced that he was thinking about serving Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola in College dining halls, students were up in arms. Irate over a potential connection to PepsiCo, whose ties to a military regime in Burma have been heavily criticized by human rights activists, students poured two-liter bottles of Pepsi over the steps of Widener Library and begged Berry to think twice before switching to Pepsi.

Berry ultimately decided against the shift, and cited student response as one consideration, although he emphasized that finances and taste preferences--not international human rights buses--had been the basis of his choice. When PepsiCo announced its withdrawal from Burma late this spring, the national media credited the activism of Harvard students as one factor which had affected the larger decision.

Perhaps the most moving call for international activism comes from Hafsat O. Abiola '96-'97, the director of the Harvard Committee on Nigeria.

Daughter of the imprisoned president-elect of Nigeria and his recently-assassinated wife. Abiola speaks at university, local and state legislature meetings about the situation in her home country whenever the organizations have related resolutions pending. At Harvard, that means urging the University to divest from companies such as Shell Oil that support the regime in Nigeria.

"Either we do this today or in the future we will have a country that doesn't have any law and order, which is what Nigeria is becoming now," she says.

Not the 1960s Any Longer

Economic insecurity and a rejection of the naivete of 1960s idealism have driven these neo-activists towards pragmatism and, subsequently, a focus on long-term structure.

"The '60s were built on incredible energy for a very short period of time, but that energy left very few long-term structures," says Richard A. Cowan, the clearing house coordinator of the Center of Campus Organizing. "Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) collapsed right in the middle of the anti-war movement."

Cowan and others believe that students have learned from their predecessors.

"Students now have the advantage of what we've all collectively learned in the last 20 years," says former SDS member Judith E. Smith '70, now an associate professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts.

Rather than reeling with the excitement of rebelling against the older generation, students today are much more sober about the problems, Smith says.

As a result, students have moved towards coalition politics in an effort to present a unified front to the Harvard administration and to centralize information and resources.

"Students are coming together because of the understanding that there are too many obstacles and they have to come together to get anything done," Ching says. "There have been coalitions before but this is the first year they were so diverse."

Both the ethnic studies and the immigrant support rallies were sponsored by nearly every major racial and ethnic campus organization--more than 15 groups total.

This year, activist students attempted to gain control of the traditionally apolitical-Undergraduate Council. The Progressive Undergraduate Council Coalition (PUCC) gained more than a third of the council's seats and began to push a political agenda that included stands on student aid and involvement in Burma.

In the ultimate effort on this front, a UNITE! conference of campus activists was held in April in an effort to consolidate a wide array of campus into an umbrella organization.

At the conference, more than 100 students of all different races and class years packed the Winthrop Junior Common Room to hear Professor of Religion and Afro-American Studies Cornel R. West '74 and Education 4 Action Coordinator Faith E. Adele '86 speak about the necessity of an inclusive, and grassroots, approach to social activism. The students then clustered in small groups to get goals and brainstorm tactics.

Armed with permanent markets and posterboard, the UNITE! participants were the epitome of this new activism--organized, intellectualized and able to further a broad social agenda by employing tactics that could have been suggested by corporate consultants.

E-mail, for instance, has allowed student activists to coordinate their efforts and disperse information in a way that was impossible in the 1960s.

"In the past, a lot of students haven't known where to go and now there's a lot more resources," says Aliguma Kabadaki, a Tufts junior and an intern at the Center for Campus Organizing in Cambridge, a national clearinghouse supporting progressive activism and investigative journalism on college campuses.

This pool of information has allowed students to reach out to larger communities. The activism has moved beyond purely student-centered issues to unions, most notably the Harvard Dining Services Union and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, and the larger city community, with the recent controversy over the demise of rent control and expansion of the University's real estate.

Harvard: A Bastion of "New" Activism

Coalition politics and other "new" forms of activism are certainly not unique to Harvard.

Kabadaki points out that at Tufts, there have also been more coalitions and social activism this year. At Washington University in St. Louis, 20 activist organizations united last September to form the Progressive Action Coalition, the largest political bloc on campus. And at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 15 activist organizations merged recently to form the Coalition for Social Justice.

The more sedate Ivy League has also ben a hotbed of protest this past year. After an ethnic studies rally of more than 400 students at Columbia University, 22 students were arrested by police in riot gear after they took over Low Library and Hamilton Hall, the school's most vital academic and administrative buildings, for several days.

"The fight for ethnic studies has been going on for 25 years," says Irene Shen, a Columbia senior and one of the organizers of the Committee on Ethnic Studies in the Core Curriculum at Columbia. "We were really tired of being continually put off...so we made a coalition and we're really tired of waiting".

And at Yale University, students supported striking clerical workers in February and service and maintenance workers in March by picketing and protesting every week during the strikes. Several students even walked out of Yale's graduation ceremony last month.

While students agree that activism expanded at Harvard this year, most also say that activism at the College is still fairly mundane compared to activism at other schools.

Inner-directed and often unwilling to waver from a preplanned track, Harvard students may hesitate to devote a lot of time to activism, which does not always guarantee success.

And the resistance of three-and-a half centuries of tradition can seem daunting to students hoping to change the campus during their short stay.

"Harvard is such a slow-moving machine that it can often be really frustrating," says Amelia H. Kaplan '96-'97, a board member of Education 4 Action and a participant in UNITE!. "The calendar is planned years and years is advance. Repercussions of any change at Harvard are so great."

"We definitely have activism here but not to the same degree as in California or Berkeley because there are less activists here and a different mentality--activists here tend to do things more pragmatically because it's harder to do huge, attention-grabbing rallies here", says Ghihee Suh '97, past president of Harvard-Radcliffe Amnesty International.

Despite the difficulties endemic to activism at Harvard, students vow they will continue to organize and protest for social change. And experts believe that this persistence is actually part of a larger trend.

"We haven't reached the point yet where everybody thinks this generation- the students of the '90s--is the activist generation", Cowan says. "[In the 1960s], everybody knew they were very active. Political activism defined the generation, but the '90s are not like that yet."

Still, he says, student activists seem more grounded in the mainstream, and more willing to pursue activism over an extended period of time their picketing predecessors did.

"In the '90s, if students make their mark, if will be by becoming experienced as student activists and moving on from that experience to work in political organizations after they graduate," Cowan says.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign for continuing activism at Harvard lies in the enthusiasm of first-year students who were involved this year.

Jessy J. Femandez '99, co-president-elect of the Minority Students Association, says she is convinced the efforts she and her fellow student activists embarked on this year will continue.

"I feel like we have the ability and we have the confidence and the faith", she says. "In the coming years we'll use this tradition of struggle and of activism to achieve our goals".