Word: sds
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...administration buildings has been part of the campus protester's handbook since the mid-'60s, when anti-war students discovered how powerfully symbolic seizing the heart of a university could be. Harvard has its own famous example; the University Hall takeover by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in spring 1969, the first and most violent of the building seizures on campus during the Vietnam era. Other takeovers followed, including a weeklong occupation of Mass. Hall in April 1972 by students protesting the University's investments in Angola...
...radical romanticism of the 60s, but they--along with anti-sweatshop groups across the country--are clearly trying to inspire comparisons between themselves and protesters of an earlier era. In their haste to emulate their predecessors, however, sweatshop protesters seem to have forgotten that some of the tactics SDS used in the '60s--taking over buildings in particular--are indefensible and shouldn't be used as a model for future student activism...
...most famous episode from Harvard's history of student activism teaches a better lesson in the dangers of building takeovers. SDS occupied University Hall to press the Harvard Corporation to abolish the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and to give in to five other related demands. Though the great majority of students at Harvard were against the war, most were also against SDS--and were aghast by the violence at University Hall, where deans were accosted and pushed from the building. The afternoon of the takeover, close to 1,000 students rallied outside the occupied building, many of them opposing...
...opinion turned against the administration, when then-president Nathan M. Pusey '28 showed that his own judgement was even worse than that of the student activists by sending in Cambridge cops at the break of dawn to remove protesters from the building. Without this backlash, the tactics used by SDS could very well have doomed their cause--a possibility current protesters dabbling in confrontation should keep in mind...
While Cambridge Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci lashes out at Harvard for failing to consult the city government about its preference, students protest police brutality against blacks in Cambridge, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) criticizes Harvard's minority and female hiring practices...