occupyharvard-blog

[occupyharvard-blog]

Why Didn't We Occupy Harvard?

Today's Ivy League student thrives in the embrace of an institution

(from The Harvard Crimson, 02/13/12)

As social movements go, Occupy Harvard could hardly have been more successful. It made headway toward all its main goals: making endowment investments more ethical, raising staff wages, and diminishing the power of on-campus interviewing for financial firms. Its leaders are now national figures. “When reading period is over, GS will still have Sandra Korn [’14, associate editorial chair] to contend with,” wrote the business blog Dealbreaker of Goldman Sachs’s decision to cancel an information session.

The amazing thing is that Occupy Harvard accomplished all of this without the support of the student body. In a Statistics 104 research project that yielded responses from one sixth of the College, students gave Occupy Harvard an average rating of 2.85 out of 10. Perhaps only the angriest students responded to this poll, but wider sentiment, expressed on sites like isawyouharvard.com and harvardfml.com was just as negative. “Who actually sleeps in those tents?” was a common question.

Nothing draws Harvard students like the smell of success, yet no one wanted to touch this national media darling. This school has entire courses devoted to social movements and even a strong social justice organization in the First-Year Urban Program. Yet the most relevant and important cause in a generation was met with widespread scorn.

Why is this? In Slate Dylan R. Matthews ’12, who is also a Crimson editorial columnist, suggested that it is because Harvard is made up of the one percent. In the Harvard Political Review, Josh B. Lipson ’14 suggested it is because “Harvard is not the bastion of radical leftism that second-rate social commentators describe.” I disagree with these views. The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid says that around sixty percent of the student body receives financial aid, while that figure is around fifty percent at UC Berkeley, a school that embraced the Occupy movement in a much greater way. Moreover, although I wouldn’t call Harvard a bastion of radical leftism, it is a still a very liberal place. This is a college wherepro-life posters get ripped off of bulletin boards with minimal reaction. Declaring that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich, rich would be a very controversial and unpopular sentiment to share at dinner.

Instead, the answer may lie in a decade-old article by New York Times columnist David Brooks. In 2001, Brooks set out to identify the distinguishing characteristics of the most accomplished of Princeton’s accomplished students. He returned dismayed; the students had breakneck schedules, could count the hours they slept on one hand, and had to schedule catch-up sessions with their best friends at dawn or dusk. In The Atlantic he wrote, “The young men and women of America's future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.”

I think this, in a nutshell, explains why the majority of Harvard undergraduates turned up their noses at the tents in the Yard. Harvard is a school made up of kids who sat in the first row of the class in grade school and probably ratted out those passing notes in the back. We got into Harvard by showing respect—nay, devotion—to social rules, and rebellion just isn’t in our blood. This is demonstrated by the careers students pursue post-Harvard. We jump from the arms of one established institution into those of another. We leave not just for Goldman and Bain but also for Teach for America, Stanford, The New York Times, and now the military. These organizations are places where we believe we can find mentors, networking opportunities, secure exit options, and all the other perks associated with joining a ship someone else has launched. Sure, there are exceptions—like Mark E. Zuckerberg—but these people are exceptions. Even those who say they are going to join a start-up after graduation are more likely to be joining a million-dollar investment featured in Wired magazine than a garage operation.

Obeying authority has brought us tremendous success in life, so it’s difficult to consider why this wouldn’t work for anyone in any situation.  Thus, students weren’t threatened by the ideas of Occupy Harvard—a Facebook status I saw read, “I support Occupy Wall Street unless Wall Street wants to give me a job”—as much as by its methods. Occupy Harvard sought change not through elaborate networks of emails, shared documents, year-long plans, and official sponsorships, but by screaming outside of Massachusetts Hall. It was so vulgar.

Although Harvard’s student body has gained tremendous diversity since our founding, we cling to a sense of social propriety that is downright antiquated. I am reminded of British soldiers reflecting on the American army during the revolutionary war. They didn’t march in lines! They crossed the Delaware on Christmas! Their general didn’t graduate from Sandhurst! They probably looked like a rag-tag bunch of tents, too.

Anita J. Joseph, an editorial chair emeritus, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.

[occupyharvard-blog]

(Video) Bread & Puppet Theater visits #OccupyHarvard - 1/25/12 »

 We invited Bread & Puppet for three performances of Occupy Calisthenics around the Harvard Yard. They performed three acts of street theatre; starting in front of the alleged John Harvard, moving onto Harvard Square, and ending in front of the Science Center, marching with the band from one act to the other.

The Bread and Puppet Theater (often known simply as Bread & Puppet) is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, currently based in Glover, Vermont. Occupy Harvard started 9th of November, 2011 and will continue to stand against the system of inequality harbored and perpetuated by the university. Visit us at: www.occupyharvard.net

[occupyharvard-blog]

A letter to my colleagues regarding the Occupy Harvard occupation of Lamont Library

Hello all,

I stopped by the Lamont Cafe yesterday to attend the “What is a Library? What is the Future of Libraries?” discussion sponsored by the students who have “occupied” the space. It was overall a really positive experience for me, and I’d encourage you to stop in and engage with the students if you have a chance.

You may perhaps feel ambivalent about the technique of “occupying” in this situation or you may (like me) find that you do not completely agree with some of the positions the group has taken. Don’t let that stop you from going. The people I met were really interested in engaging with libraries and library staff to further scholarship.

The way I see it is that some of our patrons have put together a week of informal focus groups … we should be paying attention. This is an opportunity for us to hear direct input from our patrons, establish new relationships, and imagine some creative ways that we can address their scholarly needs. It also seems to have brought together scholars from a range of disciplines. One of the things many of us want libraries to be is a meeting ground where scientists, humanists, and social scientists can encounter one another and cross-pollinate ideas. This is a concrete attempt at that.

The students have tried to create a space for collaboration and discussion in the Cafe, and have even started offering services like writing workshops. These are examples of exactly the kind of things we should want to see in our library spaces.

Please go visit if you have the chance. This doesn’t need to be simply a reaction to anxiety about the transition, it is also an opportunity to engage with and help create a successful transition.

Joshua

Joshua Parker Countway Library of Medicine

 “Letter from a Librarian” at Occupy Harvard

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

Chris Hedges addresses Occupy Harvard November 28 2011 (pt1)

pt2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugU6ELwbi_o&feature=related

pt3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKSUfCG7ax4&feature=related

[occupyharvard-blog]

RELEASE: Occupy Harvard's Next Phase

OCCUPY HARVARD FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 16 December 2011

Contact: Jeff Bridges, Fenna Krienen (617) 701-6224 occupy.harvard@gmail.com

OCCUPY HARVARD MOVES TO NEXT PHASE OF ACTION Occupation of Yard to Continue While Broadening Movement’s Focus

Cambridge, MA — On Monday, Occupy Harvard will launch the next phase of its occupation, with a focus on moving beyond mere physical occupation to occupying the hearts and minds of those beyond the university’s walls.

“Occupy Harvard 2.0 will focus on education, activism, and strengthening the connections between Harvard’s Occupy outpost and the world outside our university’s gates,” said Maggie Gram, a doctoral student in English. “It is our hope that with this action, Harvard administration will respond by returning access to the Yard to the larger community it belongs to.”

In moving to this next phase, Occupy Harvard will consolidate the footprint of its original encampment to a winterized geodesic dome—provided by Occupy supporters at MIT—serving as a hub of activity and growth for the movement.

“Our second phase will consolidate the footprint of our original encampment while broadening our movement’s energy, spirit, and base,” Gram continued. “We feel that Occupy Harvard has achieved what it set out to achieve with the original encampment by occupying the attention of students, faculty, staff, and administrators. The Harvard community is focused on issues of social justice in an entirely new way, and we hope to encourage that conversation even more with Occupy 2.0.”

In existence for just over a month, Occupy Harvard counts among its successes the negotiation of a better contract for custodial workers, increased attention on the social impact of the university’s multi-billion dollar endowment, and a teach-in where hundreds of participants heard faculty lectures on the economic, historical, and legal implications of the Occupy movement. With this next phase, Occupiers say they’re more committed than ever to making their movement impossible to ignore.

“Our visceral disruption of business as usual on campus would not have been possible without the physical presence of our encampment,” Gram concluded. “Our challenge now will be to find new ways to turn Harvard’s attention — and the world’s — to the transformative questions the Occupy movement asks.”

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

From The Harvard Crimson, 11/22/2011.

[occupyharvard-blog]

From The Harvard Crimson, 11/28/2011.

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

#OWS gets real. The #Occupy Vision Statement. Beautiful. 

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world…

[occupyharvard-blog]

[occupyharvard-blog]

Some Occupy Boston pictures I got today.

[occupyharvard-blog]