Making history, making democracy un-extraordinary: Harvard students make history

Radical Teacher, Fall, 2002 by Paul Lachelier

Something historic happened at Harvard University last year.

On April 18, 2001, around 1pm, forty-six students (including the author) packed down with food and sleeping bags rushed into Massachusetts Hall, one of Harvard's main administrative buildings. Thus began what was the longest sit-in in Harvard's history, all in the name of living wages for the university's lowest paid workers.

The modest proposition was that Harvard--the wealthiest university in the world with an endowment of over $19 billion--should pay its workers a living wage of at least $10.25 an hour, the same wage paid to city workers in Cambridge, where Harvard is located. (Cambridge recently adjusted the wage upward to $10.68 to account for inflation). Led by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), thousands of students, workers and area residents gave of their time and energy for twenty days. On May 8, the protest's twenty-first day, Harvard administrators agreed to consider the recommendations of a newly-created living wage committee composed of faculty, administrators, students and workers.

Seven months later, on December 18, that committee issued several recommendations: it called on Harvard to pay its lowest-paid workers a living wage but fell short of the activists' call to adjust the wage annually for inflation to prevent erosion. One month later, Harvard President Larry Summers approved the committees recommendations, but without annual inflation adjustment, these living wages will soon once again be outpaced by the costs of living. (For more information on the sit-in and the committee's recommendations, see www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/.)

Aside from its duration and destiny in some Harvard history books, the sit-in was "historic" in other, more important ways. Harvard students made history in so far as they became agents in their own world, acting upon rather than passing through the institution which forms them. However, despite the congratulation that follows such activism, these extraordinary ways of making history--such as sit-ins, strikes, and walkouts--pose a fundamental problem. Just as such activism confirms the power of ordinary people to resist and challenge elite power, it also confirms the fleeting nature of that power: it reaffirms the power of elites to daily determine our lives and shows us the paucity of democracy.

On Wednesday May 9, 2001, one day after the living wage sit-in ended, the Harvard administration quickly cleaned, deodorized and reclaimed Mass Hall, and cleared Harvard Yard of all traces of politics; the area returned to its status as a silent, faceless space on the way to somewhere else. Harvard became Harvard again, an elite-controlled institution through which students pass.

In this essay, I will first rethink activism's relationship to democracy from the standpoint of extraordinary acts like this sit-in. Then I will examine activism which can and does counter this fundamental problem every day but in more ordinary; and therefore less publicized, ways.

RE-DEFINING DEMOCRACY: CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN HISTORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

In Making History (1988), 1960s activist turned sociologist Richard Flacks makes a simple yet significant observation: in elite-dominated societies, "those positioned to participate in elite transactions can influence the terms and conditions of a collectivity's daily life as an inherent part of their own daily routine. Those without such position can influence history to the degree that they have the ability to disrupt elite plans or the processes of daily life" (70). Those of us without elite position have power for as long as we are collectively willing to upset our daily routines (and those of elites). We can create social change, we can make history before we return to our daily lives and elites resume their routine control of history.

Flacks defines democracy as "a social arrangement in which the gap between history and everyday life is permanently closed because society's members achieve the ability to make history (i.e., to influence and decide the terms and conditions of their lives) in and through their everyday lives" (87) not by suspending their everyday lives. Here we gain a stronger conception of democracy defined not in terms of everyday potential or "ability" but in terms of everyday actuality. For democracy, self-determination is ordinary rather than extraordinary. History-making activism is not a support for democracy; but rather at its core.

This theory brings a fresh and consequential perspective to centuries of debate over democracy; stretching from Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville to contemporaries like Jane Mansbridge, Robert Dahl and Jean Bethke Elshtain. If we accept this everyday; active definition of democracy; the trouble quickly becomes apparent: our elected politicians' disappointing decisions are not by themselves diminishing our democracy. We too are responsible, because we pass through rather than determine the institutions which determine our lives.