At first, it seemed like Harvards response would be overwhelming. Within eight days of the destruction of the World Trade Centers, a new student group calling itself the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice (HIPJ) had organized a 600 person rally on the steps of Widener Library. Standing opposite the church built by Harvard to commemorate its World War I dead, a procession of speakers deplored terrorism and implored the United States to exercise self-restraint. The speakers, like the crowd, included both the usual suspects and some surprises: two left-wing professors, a student representative of the Harvard Muslim community and a Harvard union leader. During the rally, the organizers distributed hundreds of green ribbons for peace and signed up what seemed like a large part of the crowd for their emailing list.
After the rally, students and student groups began to argue back, saying that the rally had been unpatriotic (why was there no US flag?) or that it was an apology for terrorism. This hot debate over the proper US response echoed in the dining hall and in casual conversation everywhere. The moral and political questions raised by 11 September seemed only to become more contentious, more contested, as those first two weeks unfolded.
The chloroform of patriotism
But from those hopeful beginnings, today very little seems to have grown, or even survived. The green ribbons and antiwar signs are all gone now. The conversation in dining halls has shifted back to the quality of the food and the upcoming break. More tellingly, since the bombing of Afghanistan began, there has been little or no significant demonstration of any kind either pro or antiwar.
To be sure, HIPJ has still been organizing passionately, but theyre having very little success. They produce a newsletter, and sponsor a weekly speakout (that is, an open forum) in which everyone is encouraged to participate. But talking to any of the main organizers of HIPJ, its clear they feel that theyre marginal and ignored on campus, and with good reason. Todays is a surprisingly muted debate about the morality and politics of Americas response to terrorism here, in what is arguably the leading campus for American public policy.
There is, of course, some informal debate still taking place, and as usual Harvard is somewhat to the left of the US population at large. Ive encountered very few people, for instance, who have suggested torture as a way of getting information from terrorism suspects, or who have suggested using nuclear weapons. Both these ideas, according to some polls, have significant support among ordinary Americans. But I find this vaguely liberal sentiment almost more disturbing than I do full-throated warmongering. More than anything else, this vagueness indicates a comfortable sort of politics that is minimally considered and maximally agreeable. Protected by patriotic platitudes and soft expressions of concern for human life, it is at once heavily armored and almost totally devoid of content.
One clear source of this politics is the kind of patriotism, sadly trumpeted by Democrats and Republicans alike, that defines love of country as unquestioning agreement with the Administration. Such thinking forces people to withdraw into their political shells, afraid to think the thoughts and have the conversations that might lead to a lack of patriotism. This attitude, to my great regret, has also been endorsed by Harvards new President and former US Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. In a much publicized speech, he called on the academy to rethink its relationship to certain mainstream values in America. With such encouragement to conformity is it surprising that Harvard students have chosen to stick to a vague liberalism rather than tackle the issue head on?
People need to emerge from such shells before we can have a real discussion about the merits of the US war in Afghanistan. Theres nothing wrong with consensus or agreement, but it has to have been arrived at by argument, conversation, disagreement in other words, from initial division and polarisation. At the moment, a superficial consensus reigns at Harvard. It is, perhaps, slightly to the left of center. It may be a bit more inquiring about the nature of the war and its stated aims than much of the press. But mostly, people just dont talk about the war.
In this environment, the key step that needs to be taken is polarisation, however unpleasant that may sound. For real debate to begin taking place, something or someone has to jolt us out of our complacency and precipitate a real argument, a debate with alternatives posed and merits discussed.
Information circles an absent center
HIPJ, already mentioned, is trying to do exactly that, to get people to speak out. Another effort was made by Harvards Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. It hosted discussion panels, most attended by around forty to sixty people, covering various subjects: Afghani history and politics; history of Islam; Islam and terrorism; Islam and the West. As the topics suggest, the organisers intended them to be informative, and presumably also to spark debate and questions.
I wouldnt denigrate them: they certainly informed some people, and quieted some anti-Muslim hysteria. But with one exception (17 October), the panels all circled around the central political and moral questions of what a just response should look like.
The end result was that instead of historical education leading to informed political debate, we got historical education leading to nothing at all. We ended up in what Michael Lewis, a professor at Williams College, called in another connection the region where a well stocked college can operate indefinitely on cruise control. The panelists, because they took few risks, did little to sharpen the debate or move it forward.
Even the right-wing groups on campus, at this moment of their power, have largely refrained from being divisive. Harvards token right-wing magazine, the Salient, has not managed to produce any coverage vituperative enough to get noticed. The Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) has had a few talks by US Army officers to discuss the issues, but they have been explicitly non-political. There is also some talk of a move, in the wake of 11 September, to reintroduce ROTC to the Harvard campus (it has been banned since 1969), and that would certainly be a polarising catalyst for discussion. But it seems, for the moment, that that is only idle talk.
The Harvard Republican Club, to round out the list of conservative forces on campus, has not held any events related to 11 September that were potentially divisive. In short, the right on campus has not provided any grounds for debate. So the question remains: given the failure right, left and center to catalyse debate, how can we expect to begin a real debate, and reach real agreement, about the war in Afghanistan?
The legacy of earlier protests
The obvious place to look for such activity at Harvard is the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), the parent organisation of the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. Long before the Campaigns much publicised sit-in last year, PSLM was by far the dominant activist group on campus. It is a slightly more respectably cousin of the Student Labor Action organisations at other schools, and the closest thing at Harvard to an anti-globalisation group. It was founded, like many of those groups, with the understanding that it would work for all kinds of progressive and left-wing causes. But so far, not a peep has come out of it about the new war in Afghanistan. Why this inactivity?
The answer is simple: PSLM has become a single-issue group. Although the group theoretically encompasses all manner of left-wing activism, in fact it has focused almost exclusively over the past three years on the issues of a living wage for Harvard workers and eliminating sweatshop apparel at Harvard. In particular, the Living Wage Campaign has for the past three years been by far the biggest, best organised and most successful of PSLMs various efforts.
In the wake of the sit-in last spring, the Campaign all but eclipsed both Harvard Students Against Sweatshops, and PSLM itself. PSLM and the Harvard Living Wage Campaign became totally synonymous on campus and in the national media. And in this respect, Harvard is typical. At many other schools, where the campus United Students Against Sweatshops affiliate is the activist ombudsman, a substantially similar situation has developed: activism has become synonymous with a particular issue, not a general world view.
In the months following last years sit-in this was hardly a problem at Harvard. There was simply too much Living Wage Campaign work to be done to leave any time or energy for any other issue. But now that we have this new crisis and this new opportunity for activism, the identification of PSLM and the broad activist agenda with the living wage is proving problematic. In a nutshell, the difficulty is this: it simply doesnt make sense for the Campaign to be opposing a war in Afghanistan, unless it relates somehow to the living wage.
There have been some feeble attempts to make that connection, by arguing that it is workers being killed in Afghanistan, and the Campaign is for workers, and so it should oppose the bombing. But its obviously a stretch. A far more effective strategy than trying to twist the Afghani war into a labor issue would be to reclaim the ideals of a broad-based progressive student organisation from the single demand for a living wage which has at present consumed it.
Only connect
This will not be easy to achieve, here or elsewhere. Uncoupling the name PSLM and the idea it stands for from the single issue of the living wage is going to take a lot of publicity and internal discussion, and above all, time. But there are some positive signs that the process is beginning. At several recent PSLM meetings, called explicitly to discuss the organisations relationship to Peace and Justice and anti-war activism, the majority seemed to think that PSLM needed to take immediate action to oppose the war. This decision, in and of itself, has helped to move the internal debate and transformation forward.
Although the majority of the Progressive Student Labor Movement members think that anti-war activism is a necessary part of PSLM, there is a sizeable and vocal minority that disagrees. Some think that the war does not fall within PSLMs purview; some feel that criticism needs to be muted when troops are in the field; some are deeply ambivalent about the war.
But all of them, finding themselves in the minority, have been forced to articulate more clearly their thinking about the war. They have made common cause with one another in many cases, and seem to be working towards some more unified ideology. In the coming weeks it seems likely that they will begin organising outside of PSLM around their developing common values. And that group, many of whom are experienced activists, will add a new and sophisticated voice to the debate at Harvard.
At the same time, the discussions about the war have helped to precipitate a much larger discussion of what PSLMs values really are. The traumas of 11 September and the new war are helping what is effectively an issue group develop a broader social and political world view. In particular, the effect of the war on civil liberties at home and human rights abroad has meant that people in PSLM now can and must make common cause with a much broader group of people.
Instead of working mostly with unions, left-wing community groups and left-wing religious leaders, PSLM now finds itself in a position to work with civil liberties groups and rights groups that may not espouse a clearly left-wing ideology. By embracing those new coalitions, and by incorporating their ideas into its own world-view, PSLM may be able to grow far beyond its base in the Living Wage Campaign. Could this lead to a new version of the Students for a Democratic Society, the broad-based leftist student group that drove so much of the movement in the Sixties?
A tremendous amount of good could come out of such a transformation, and I have high hopes that it will. As the war lengthens, and the infringements on the civil liberties of both citizens and non-citizens increase, the strength of broad-based student organisations will become increasingly important. At Harvard and at other campuses, the reputation and respectability of PSLM and other issue groups can help break the wall of public silence about the war. And from there, one hopes, university communities can begin to draw the analytic lines that will make deep thought about the war possible.
In this dark period, college students and university communities may again need to act as the conscience of the nation. As it always has, the activist left will play an important part in that effort, and in the process will have to expand both who it includes and what it stands for. Perhaps the most tantalizing prospect is that by encountering and absorbing new people and new ways of analysing the world, we will be forced at last to develop a coherent world-view, and a political vision for our generation. Armed with this, the New New Left might become not merely a collection of issue organisations, but a real movement committed to the perfection of every dimension of our flawed society.
