But despite their adoption of the rhetoric of the national movement, many of their goals were specific to Harvard. They called for a fair contract for custodial workers and a commitment from Harvard to not reinvest in HEI Hotels & Resorts, which had come under fire for repeated allegations of failure to comply with labor regulations.

As the weather grew colder and the campus’ patience for the locked gates grew thin, the tent city teetered on the brink of decampment.

Winter break spelled the end of the occupation. In mid-December, occupiers elected to remove their residential tents, leaving only their weatherproof dome and information tent still standing. The ID checks at the gates stopped.

At the time, occupier Summer A. Shafer, a teaching fellow in history, characterized the decampment as a transition into “a new phase of activism.” The protesters called it Occupy Harvard 2.0.

In January, the last physical vestiges of the encampment disappeared. Forty-five-mile winds blew the dome into the tent, causing the tent to collapse. Administrators then removed what was left, out of concern for the safety of passersby.

Looking back, former occupiers said that without an encampment serving as a physical embodiment of their ideas, the movement began to lose steam.

“Occupy lost its edge when it failed to move on from occupation,” Bayard said.

The announcement at the end of January that library workers might face layoffs served as a rallying point for a movement in need of a new focus.

After a series of protests failed to draw substantial attention, the occupiers returned to their namesake tactic—they occupied Lamont Café.

But there were noticeable differences between this manifestation of Occupy Harvard and the original. The group that occupied the undergraduate library was smaller in size and made up almost exclusively of graduate students.

Lamont Café was more isolated; freshmen no longer walked out of their dorms to a daily reminder of Occupy’s ideas. Many former occupiers felt that the new occupation, which seemed to be focused almost exclusively on library issues rather than other concerns of the national movement, held less appeal.

“I think that the numbers have dwindled because of an inflexibility that prevented us from moving on,” said Bayard, who said he was significantly less involved in Occupy 2.0. “The undergraduates that were sympathetic felt that there was no room for them to expand.”

UNWELCOME GUESTS

A tent city, a geodesic dome, and locked gates made one thing certain—Occupy Harvard got noticed. Students and occupiers agreed that the movement was a polarizing presence on Harvard’s campus.

“It got a huge negative reaction, especially in the undergraduate community,” Narefsky said.