Why Occupy Harvard?

A good leftist friend of mine recently suggested that there are “two good reasons” for occupying Harvard Yard — and that the occupiers had, sadly, “chosen the wrong one.”
I was intrigued. For the question bearing down on me (on all of us), is why, one week later, is Occupy Harvard so unpopular? Why has it failed to excite our sympathy?
I’m skeptical of the typical tropes. Is Occupy Harvard unpopular simply because the administration locked the gates? Is it really because we’re so un-self-conscious about our privilege? The problem demands an explanation, for Occupy is a broadly popular movement and Harvard is a broadly progressive university. What’s gone wrong?
My friend’s answer begins by noting that there are roughly two different cases for setting up tents in Harvard Yard: either to express our community’s support for the national Occupy Movement, which is righteous and in need of all the help it can get; or otherwise, to express our community’s disgust at Harvard itself, our administration, and all of its inadequacies. Both cases are cogent, but they diverge rather sharply.
If Occupy Harvard had chosen the first path, instead of the second – if they had designed their mini-“tent city” as a platform for exploring progressive alternatives for America; for dreaming up institutional change and excogitating on the future of capitalism; and for attracting young progressives to The Cause – “I’d be living in a tent right now,” my friend remarked. “I agree,” I said. “That would be extraordinary.”
But of course, Occupy Harvard didn’t choose that path. They opted instead to fight against the Harvard community (its administration; those students getting finance jobs) on behalf of local concerns (union negotiations; legacy admissions; and the transparency of the endowment management company), rather than doing the opposite — that is, rather than mobilizing our community on behalf national change.
In an almost-cynical way, the Harvard occupiers have “occupied” the Occupy brand. They’ve reduced a rich national movement, likened by some to the first rumblings of a “progressive era for our time,” into a special interest campaign for a few.
Are Harvard unions important? Yes. Is legacy admissions unjust? Probably. But during this worldwide “crisis of capitalist democracy,” to quote one otherwise reserved commentator, are workers with unionized jobs, who bring in salaries far above market rate (NB: as Marina Bolotnikova has pointed out in The Crimson, “the salary of every Harvard service worker is greater than or equal to the US median household income.”), or talented high school students who were forced into far inferior, but still Ivy League, schools because their spots at Harvard were lost to legacy admits, rightly the centerpieces of our activist consciences? Setting the smallness of their campaign against the largeness of our problems has an almost dizzying effect.
To ask another question: Is an insistence on the moral purity of our home, even at the costs of ignoring greater injustice, an indicator of the same sort of privilege that the occupiers officially detest? Or more simply: Can any institution be perfect, when so many are patently cruel?
Dylan Matthews has suggested that Harvard deserves our ire because it “ushers its students into jobs as socially respectable gamblers at banks and hedge funds to line its own endowment” and because it “helps perpetuate a ‘merit’-based caste system that is morally beyond defense.” These are interesting ideas — that Harvard selects and trains bankers to fill up its own coffers; or that the meritocracy is simply discrimination by another name. But soft conspiracy theory, and a Rawlsian argument about the giftedness of merit, are lonely ice floes on which to build a social movement.
Hence the unpopularity. It’s not that Occupy Harvard is wrong, per se; it’s that the fight they chose to pick is significantly harder to justify, and ultimately much less important, than the fight they chose to ignore. They’ve taken an easy case – that America needs help! – and made it into a harder and less popular one – that Harvard is the problem, or synecdoche for the problem, rather than the solution. In doing this, they’ve alienated so many young progressives who could have otherwise been recruited to the cause.
We should be careful. The left has a history of self-immolation. We’re killed by our own conceits: our belief that “perfect justice” (in Amartya Sen’s phrase) is more important than measurable steps to remediate cruelty and immiseration where they’re most obviously manifest; our belief that critiquing power, all power, is more important than soliciting power’s support on behalf of positive ends.
The Harvard student body knows we can do better than this, and I hope Occupy Harvard does too. Thankfully, the alternative path is clear enough. My suggestion: see above.