Word: pearling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Meeting after meeting all we did was debate whether there should or shouldn't be political parties in the assembly," Pearl remembers. "It was a time of great disillusionment. CDU completely collapsed, so a lot of us turned to planning for the boycott of classes...
...boycott was the pivotal event of Pearl's freshman year. On a balmy April day, hundreds stayed out of classes and marched around buildings to show their support for divestiture and Afro-American Studies. Two things stick in her mind about that day. One is that middle-aged men wearing dark suits carefully photographed the faces of all the boycott organizers, who were identifiable because they wore white armbands. And the other is that a minority group wanted to link arms and forcibly block students from going to classes...
...Older radicals told me how the FBI used to photograph students in the late '60s, so the men with cameras gave me this sudden feeling that we were opposing not just Harvard but the big order," Pearl says. "But what amazed me was that some people wanted to use force. That prompted me to want to know more about minorities on this campus and why they should be so angry. I mean really angry...
Despite the success of the boycott, freshman year ended badly for Pearl. Most of the constitutional conventioneers who had created the Student Assembly graduated. "There was a feeling that all the good people had left," she says, adding that the assembly "became much more of a resume activity, a status thing--if you can believe it ever had any status...
...Pearl also got quadded, while her closest friends went to Lowell House. And she began to wonder about the effect of Harvard's competitiveness on women. She describes one of her freshman roommates as "someone who was just too nice." "I began to fell sorry for all the nice people here who get abused because most people--myself included are pretty self-interested," she says. Although most of her good friends in high school were female, she found it hard to get to know women at Harvard. "I began to think about what women have to give up to become...