Sheehy-Skeffington agreed with the sentiment. “Occupy enabled all of the student activists to come together,” she said. “I got involved because the issue drew me, and then I made friends with all of these people.”

“We all share that vision because we all hung out at that campsite together,” she added.

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

Though they acknowledge their debt to Occupy Harvard, this year’s activists say that the movement’s tactics—the way it went about starting conversations and bringing people together—alienated much of the undergraduate student body.

Welton said she thinks the lack of student support for Occupy resulted more from disapproval of the movement’s methods than from apathy about the fundamental issues.

“I remember talking with people in my dorm, and they were really annoyed because the Yard was on lockdown, and it was really inconvenient,” Welton said. “But if you talk to them about economic inequality or the issues that the movement was dealing with, they were really sympathetic and they cared about those things.”

One reason for this disconnect, Welton said, was that the insularity of the movement may have intimidated potential supporters. Another problem, she said, was the movement’s rapid escalation. She said that if Occupy had tried to make progress little by little, instead of jumping immediately to occupation and disruption, it might have enjoyed more broad-based support from the student body and left a broader impact.

“I think it taught me a lot about what escalation should be in a movement,” said Welton. “What I saw with Occupy was that they escalated from day zero. You can’t just show up from day zero and try to take over Mass Hall. You have to do the groundwork first of building a broad base of support.”

While Occupy Harvard activists had worked outside the system to build a movement and make their demands, three undergraduate activism campaigns this fall employed a different strategy. Working within the system, they utilized the referendum process buried in the legislative business section of the Undergraduate Council constitution, a process that had not been used since 2006, to generate widespread student support for their causes.

In accordance with this philosophy, RI launched the Fair Harvard Fund, an alternative fund designed to withhold donations that would go towards Harvard’s endowment until the creation of a social choice fund. The method was part of an effort to prove that the movement could quantify support for its cause. To that end, RI secured 450 donations.

“Our theory of change was if we show the administration the broad support on campus, then the University, having seen the withheld money and the massive support from people, would create the social choice fund,” Wohns said.

Sheehy-Skeffington said she believes the activist’s choice of whether to work within or outside of the system is culturally rooted. Reflecting on the differences between student activism in her home country of Ireland and in the United States, she suggested that Harvard students tend to seek to achieve change by working cooperatively within structures.

“I kind of buy the story that how people get to Harvard is they work really well within the system,” Sheehy-Skeffington said. “It’s part of the American ideology that you can work hard, get ahead, and you can get to the top and that’s how you change things.”

COMMUNITY SUPPORT

Occupy Harvard and the new activists both claimed success in achieving their movement’s goals. Occupy Harvard took credit when custodians negotiated a more favorable contract with the University in October 2011 and when Harvard announced in April 2012 that it would no longer reinvest in HEI Hotels & Resorts. Similarly, the activists who advocated more recently for a social choice fund claimed victory when the University announced the fund’s creation in December 2012. Though administrators ultimately acted on both of those issues, however, they did not specify that their changes were directly in response to student activist efforts.