Occupy Harvard Plans To Protest at Commencement

Members of the Occupy Harvard movement plan to demonstrate at Commencement on Thursday to protest potential layoffs of Harvard University Library staff, according to a press release distributed by the movement.

Occupiers plan to gather outside the Holyoke Center before making their way into the Yard, where Commencement takes place.

The protest, which is slated to include undergraduates, graduate students, and members of the Harvard Union for Clerical and Technical Workers, comes after 65 library workers took a voluntary early retirement package offer, which the press release called “limited.”

Although the library has not said for certain that it will lay off workers, Occupy Harvard is protesting because “administrators have never lifted their threats to cut even more jobs,” they said in the press release.

The release said that protesters will passing out leaflets to Commencement guests in order to “educate attendees about how much damage further job cuts in the libraries could cause.”

On the Occupy Harvard blog, Occupy leaders wrote that they convened the protest in order to reach people from across the Harvard community “to expose the damage that has been done to the libraries already, and how much more harm further cuts would inflict.”

—Staff writer Mercer R. Cook can be reached at mcook@college.harvard.edu.