THE EXCLUSIVITY IS HARDLY IRONIC:

Out of the Yard: Occupy Harvard should move out (The Crimson, November 15, 2011)

Last Wednesday night, Occupy Harvard Yard--a local extension of the Occupy movement--set up camp in Harvard Yard, occupying the campus quite literally. Harvard and Cambridge police responded in kind. Around midnight on Wednesday, the entire Yard was closed off to any entrants, leaving a group of protesters circled outside the Widener Library entrance, sandwiched between a locked gate and a horde of police and onlookers. Since then, students and a handful of non-Harvard affiliates who did manage to get in have camped out in the Yard, enduring cold nights and the ire of many on campus. Meanwhile, the Yard remains closed to anyone without Harvard identification, so long as there remains the threat of larger or more unstable protest. Occupy Harvard participants declare that they will not move until the University begins to meet their goals, including that the Yard be reopened to the general public as soon as the sit-in ends.

In a bitterly ironic twist on the protesters' slogan of "taking back Harvard for the 99 percent," their actions have truly closed off Harvard's campus to all but a select few. Over the weekend especially, the Yard felt eerily quiet and lacking in the conviviality that typifies public enjoyment of the University's campus. 

Posted by oj at November 15, 2011 4:03 PM
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