The Harvard Political Review was founded 50 years ago amidst student strikes at Harvard that rocked campus power structures, led to the arrests of many students, and created a legacy of activism that current student organizers seek to follow. Although the setting remains the same, many of the issues have changed — and some question whether these contemporary issues can attract as much attention and urgency as did those in the past. The issues that past activism centered around were more pressing for many students, while the current ones require persistent promotion by and exposure from activists.
In the years preceding the 1969 strike on Harvard’s campus that led to a bloody encounter between law enforcement and disobedient students, issues like civil rights protests, assassinations, and Vietnam War controversies personally affected students and forced them to take sides on many issues. Those faced with the choice to register for the draft or resist found themselves in an inescapable position.
The less explicit the applicability of an issue, the more work must be done by organizers to motivate potential activists. Whereas issues like the Vietnam War directly affected students who knew and were close with those required to register for the draft, in order to bear the same weight, many contemporary issues require students to consider indirect effects that might appear removed from their daily lives. Today’s activism organizers seek this introspection by facilitating internal discussion and creating a sense of urgency about climate change, labor relations, and discrimination, among other issues, through personal interactions.
Down In Pusey and Down In History
A flight of stairs below the Old Yard and Tercentenary Theater lies Pusey Library, where an exhibit on the campus tensions of 1969 is currently on display. “Through Change and Through Storm: Harvard, 1969” includes many relevant artifacts and documents from the period; together, they paint a comprehensive picture of the defiant origins of the HPR. For both former and current activists, the narrative of the exhibit shows how periods of national change offer opportunities for students to reshape society in a way that aligns more closely with their political goals. And according to the recollections of those present during the 1969 student strike, activists must also possess the level of personal conviction needed to take advantage of these opportunities for change.
As presented in the Pusey exhibit, national events precipitated the chaos that descended on campus. In the heat of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the Vietnam War continued, and clashes between authorities and protesters turned the Democratic National Convention into a nightmare. The national turbulence made its way to Harvard in April 1969 when around 70 students took over University Hall, evicting the administrators inside in the process. Eventually, Massachusetts State Police forcibly removed the protesters. However, a much larger group convened a few days later at Harvard Stadium to reaffirm several central demands, which included an end to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Harvard, the creation of an African American Studies department, restoration of the scholarships of several protesters, and a cessation of the Vietnam War.
Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer in leadership, organizing, and civil society at the Harvard Kennedy School, began his journey as a student at the College in 1960, but left a year before graduating to work with civil rights organizers in the South. In an interview with the HPR, he explained that the opportunity for change through activism comes in periods of social flux, “when things are unstuck.” When visible rifts and debates along racial, economic, class, or environmental divides dominate national discourse, the status quo is loosened, providing an opportunity to alter its course.
But the impetus for action in periods ripe for change, like the 1960s, exists not only because things are unstuck, but also because individuals are motivated to act. Ganz said that when people take action, they tell themselves that “there [is] something valued here at stake, something that I really care about. It may not be just my self interest; it may be values that I care deeply about. And so when it becomes real, in the human experiential kind of way, that’s where the motivation comes in.”
That anti-war demonstrators responsible for the 1969 strike shared real conviction and deep motivation against the Vietnam War rings true with first-hand accounts. In an interview with the HPR, Miles Rapoport, senior practice fellow in American democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School, former Connecticut secretary of state, and former president of the independent grassroots organization Common Cause, recalled, “There was a powerful sense among students that the war in Vietnam was destroying Vietnamese society, was in fact a genocidal war, was being continued by a Democratic administration, which meant that there was a relatively unified establishment support for the war, and that we as students, if we opposed it strongly, needed to organize dramatically against the war.”
In the case of the 1969 strike, in addition to the widespread perception of social flux, the topics of debate — civil rights, human rights, the draft — helped draw on emotions, ideals, and fierce opinions to generate support for action. The issues at hand during the time motivated students to do more than just formulate strong opinions; they organized around what they saw as moral crises. Confronted with choices about whether or not to resist becoming a part of the war and urgent feelings that the war violated their personal values, the political battle taking place in Washington, D.C. became real for them. The question facing contemporary activists is whether their causes can create the same sense of urgency.
Up To Date and Up To The Task
The current American political climate does seem to provide the atmosphere of “unstuckness” that Ganz discussed. Investigations, polarizing politicians, and high-profile attacks and deaths provide opportunities for activists to champion a variety of important causes; however, they do not guarantee that social change will happen. Ganz believes that the urgency to act can be less explicit: “Movement organizers face the challenge of how to make the important urgent. Sometimes like the draft, [the urgency] is there. Other times, it takes a lot of imagination and organizing to figure out how to bring some urgency to something that seems remote.”
Several organizations exist at Harvard to foster student activism on a variety of issues, and the HPR sat down with representatives from both undergraduate and graduate organizations to learn how they connect with potential supporters. Organizers seek to encourage students to think of their daily experiences as part of the larger political process, incubating an early form of urgency in the minds of peripheral supporters.
One of those organizations is Harvard Undergraduates for Environmental Justice. Presently, HUEJ is affiliated with a coalition protesting the nature of Harvard’s financial holdings. For example, while another member organization of the coalition demands that Harvard divest from the prison-industrial complex, HUEJ focuses on ensuring that the University’s investments are environmentally just. Such a mission represents the pointed passion and nuanced form which activism at Harvard can take.
In an interview with the HPR, sophomore Arielle Blacklow, co-president and founder of HUEJ, explained how, even though she feels most students do support divestment efforts, “getting the general students engaged and involved in activism work is challenging because students have so much on their plate already.” When trying to recruit students, providing information does not always suffice; as Ganz mentioned, there needs to be a deeper connection. Blacklow agreed: “I think social media in itself is not enough. I still think it’s really important to have person-to-person communication, face-to-face interaction, which is done through canvassing and other smaller actions at smaller events that [we] host.”
Other organizations with broader missions also feel the need for acute, experiential connection. The Harvard Graduate Student Union, a fairly young organization on campus advocating for graduate student workers at the University, built their support network through direct, evocative communication with colleagues. Niharika Singh, a fifth-year PhD candidate in public policy at Harvard, has been a central member of the HGSU organizing committee for the past several years. In an interview with the HPR, she highlighted the importance of individualizing her activist approach at Harvard: “A lot of my experience at union organizing was actually asking graduate students … to think critically about how politics affect them directly … [because] for a lot of us, politics is something we do externally but not in our own workplaces.”
Through The Past and Onto The Future
Contemporary activists seek to foster the sort of urgency that 1969’s crises created through conversations, pensive questions, and clearly defined consequences of inaction. This is not to say that organizers from 50 years ago did not make use of personal interaction when laying grassroots foundations for their work, or to say that modern issues are less important than those of the past. Whereas activism that led to the 1969 strike centered on issues with easily felt implications for both students and society at large, personal appeals today are a necessary avenue for generating that same enhanced sense of moral urgency. As Blacklow and Singh mentioned, activism today is not just about making students aware of a problem; successful activism includes helping students feel strongly about fixing the problem.
Fifty years may have passed since the 1969 strike, but the work of activists in problem-solving continues on campus today and will continue into the future. Of course, student responses to today’s issues vary. Some students will feel strongly opposed to a cause and actively fight against it. Others will join the movement based on their fierce conviction. Still more will be ideologically opposed to or in favor of the movement yet not be sufficiently inspired to take action in either direction. Change may be more difficult without conscription or riot-based violence, but the prospects for making issues real and actionable for individuals today continue to rise as activists strive to communicate the importance of personal connections and appeals.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Chensiyuan