proseminar paper on the 2001 pslm sit-in at harvard

a bit from my final research paper:

One very minor protest incident at Harvard in the late 1960s may have gone unnoticed at the time, but would prove a formative experience for one particular member of the community. In 1967, Neil Rudenstine was a junior faculty member at Harvard. Walking on campus one day, he passed protesting students who had blocked a Dow Chemical recruiter from exiting a building. Disturbed by this, Rudenstine commandeered a bullhorn and gave a speech to the small crowd, passionately declaiming the use of such uncivil tactics on a civil campus. His point may not have been well-received by the students, but it marked a turning point in Rudenstine’s career. He later credited this one incident for crystallizing his thinking about respect for civil rights on campus, which had to be upheld even in the face of serious protests; but even more importantly, this incident sparked the interest of Princeton University, which invited him to leave the professoriate and join them as Dean of Students. It was this career move that eventually led to his ascendancy to Provost at Princeton, and later to President at Harvard (Harvard Gazette, May 24, 2001). Thirty-four years after that first confrontation with protesting students, Neil Rudenstine would preside over the University during a three-week sit-in of his offices, the longest and certainly most public sit-in in the school’s history. The lessons learned in the 1960s would weigh heavily on his mind.

just 8-10 pages of analysis left to go!