"That comparison will always take place," Zinn says, "[but] it should be resisted. Take the high point of any history and then...try to measure everything against it and it will always seem too low. I don't think it makes sense to do that. It creates the wrong impression--and also is sort of discouraging."

Zinn says it is unfair to expect student protests of the same magnitude of those in the '60s without a single, unifying cause to stir action.

"In the '60s, there were two very central, very dramatic, very black and white issues. One was racial segregation, one was the war in Vietnam," he says. "Since then, there hasn't been a single issue that has been central enough."

Dean of Student Archie C. Epps III also attributes the more broadly based student activism of the '60s to the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights. Epps says comparisons between today's activism and '60s activism are unfair.

"Because you don't have the special dynamic of the war, plus the counterculture movement. Those two things are missing today," Epps says. "That movement was informed by the counterculture movement, which questioned prevailing norms of behavior and all forms of authority. It tended to be dismissive of College administrators. That is a major difference."

Epps calls today's protests more "collaborative."

"At the moment, the students seem to be willing to work in partnership with the institution to try and find solutions," he says, citing PSLM and the Living Wage Campaign as groups willing to work with the administration.

"It also reflects the willingness of the administration to be a partner in finding solutions and to acknowledge that these are important social questions," Epps says.

PSLM member Daniel M. Hennefeld '99 says that references to the radicalism of the '60s can undermine students' ability to get things done on today's campuses.

"Some people are actually kind of turned off by that kind of thing," he says, "because they think it makes contemporary activists look out of place, or seem stuck in the '60s."

Or, worse, using the imagery of the '60s, he says, can lead to accusations that protestors aren't as sincere as their predecessors--merely enamored of a kind of protest chic.

"That's a kind of bad aspect of comparison with the '60s, the idea of activism for activism's sake," Hennefeld says. "We don't want to be associated with that."

The Present Now Will Later Be Past

To some extent, though, student activists bring the comparison onto themselves. The imagery of the '60s is a powerful weapon and, at least at Harvard, student activists have been willing to exploit it.

Protestors recycle chants from the '60s. Even this winter's anti-impeachment rally ended with a rendition, by Carly Simon, of the protest anthem "We Shall Overcome."

In a February op-ed piece in The Crimson, Aron R. Fischer '99-'00 and Benjamin L. McKean '02, two PSLM members, began by describing a wave of anti-sweatshop sit-ins and protests at universities nationwide, then asked, "Is this a scene from 1969 during the opposition to the Vietnam War?...No these protests happened in February 1999."