It’s 3 a.m. outside of Massachusetts Hall. Six students are huddled on blankets in a circle around boxes of Pop Tarts and fruit snacks. They speak in hushed tones as a police officer stands by wearily. Inside the building, through a lighted window, other people sometimes wave cheerfully to the students outside. From out here it looks warm and cozy inside the office of the president of Harvard University.

The protestors, members of the living wage campaign of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), have been occupying the president’s office for 13-and-a-half hours.

The students outside the building speak about the need for Harvard to live up to its responsibility as a member of the Cambridge community. They burn with the idealism of youth, even in the cold morning hours.

But they also speak about their frustration at apathy of other Harvard students.

It has always been puzzling, why Harvard students have always been so dismissive of student protests. At other universities, students love to protest. At the University of California—Berkeley there’s always a vigil, a sit-in, a march or a rally being held. Students don’t just occupy the president’s office; they string themselves up on the campanile and hang in tents hundreds of feet off the ground for days on end. Harvard students, on the other hand, tend to support dialogue with the administration.

However, over the last several years dialogue has led, at least in the protestors’ eyes, to nothing. The more radical actions of students like those at Berkeley, however, have reaped large rewards. In the spring of 1999 Berkeley students staged an eight-day hunger strike in which 100 people were arrested in order to save their ethnic studies department. The costs were high—five students were put on trial for their activities during the strike—but their demands were met.

With examples like these, the calculation for most student activists is dangerously simple. Higher escalation leads to greater concessions. But escalation has its costs, not just for the students involved—they claim to be prepared to face the consequences, whether they be arrest, expulsion or the Ad Board—but for the University as a whole. One need only look to the strike of 1969 for an example of how quickly things can get out of control.

In 1969, 200 students occupied University Hall. Students were dragged out and beaten by police officers, an escalation ordered by then-President Nathan M. Pusey ‘28. After the expulsion of the students from University Hall, 2,000 students joined in the strike. The escalation backfired for the administration, just as this escalation could backfire on PSLM.