Daniel R. Morgan '99, a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement, said that the Harvard name could wield influence on growers that individual students could not.

"I think that it's wrong to say that it's an individual choice--I think that if the Harvard name decides not to serve grapes, that's a big support," he said.

"The issue is at a much larger level, with the fact that a few grapes per person multiplied by everyone here become a large factor," he added. "[Harvard's] purchasing grapes again at an institutional level breaks down the support that the union has worked for decades to build up."

Harvard will purchase the grapes from Costa Fruit and Produce, a distributor based in Boston.

"We've been doing business with Harvard for several years now," said Brad Woodgate, vice-president of Costa. "And it's always just been a forgone conclusion that Harvard didn't purchase grapes because of the Cesar Chavez situation, and nobody's ever pursued it."

Through the Grapevine

Harvard was not alone in boycotting grapes in the early 1990s.

"In the fall of 1994, students asked us to boycott table grapes, and they had a petition that was signed by a majority of students," said Alan R. Kenny, director of dining services at Yale University. Yale's boycott is still active, to a large extent because "there hasn't been any demand for grapes," Kenny said.

Stanford University introduced a boycott against table grapes in 1995 after four students began a hunger strike demanding a boycott.

Duke University lifted a 1988 ban on grapes in the spring of 1993 but reintroduced the boycott after pressure from student activist groups in 1995.

Many other schools never implemented a boycott at all. According to Woodgate, all of other schools served by Costa currently include grapes in their menu, including Northeastern, Lesley and parts of UMass.

Nevertheless, the possibility remains that students at Harvard may protest the reintroduction of grapes as students did at Duke.

"If there were an overwhelming concern from students about our desire to serve grapes, we would weigh that against the desires of the students who do want us to serve grapes," Miller said.

The Grapes of Wrath

Technically, almost all grapes from California are still under the 1984 boycott called by the United Farm Workers (UFW), the union formerly led by Chavez. The boycott was the third such economic sanction in a series of UFW boycotts dating back to 1965.

However, Mark Grossman, director of the UFW's press division and Cesar Chavez's press secretary from 1975 to 1993, said that UFW has not in recent years "been actively pursuing" the grape boycott and has instead been focusing on organizing strawberry workers in California.