A fact from Occupy Harvard appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 November 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Occupy Harvard provoked administrators to lock down Harvard Yard for six weeks in 2011?
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According to the article, some Harvard students wrote:
As the Harvard community confronts this transition, the New Harvard Library Working Group of Occupy Harvard has acted autonomously to open a persistent community space for critical thought, engaged learning, and insistent action in the Lamont Library Café. In doing so, we strive to fulfill the promise of this library space as an open and participatory forum for learning. […]
We think of the proposed Harvard library transition as a manifestation of the University's accession to neoliberal imperatives. Occupy, whether at Harvard or Wall Street, challenges and refuses the devastating willingness of our broken society to view humans as expendable resources and systems as ultimately beholden to profit. A future cannot be imagined in the absence of its past, present, or future constituents. A library needs the workers who are its lifeblood, its circulatory system, just as a functioning democratic society needs the voices of the 99 percent. Systems built with profit imperatives can only serve to further perpetuate the patterns of destruction and unequal power structures that we denounce. The proposed library transition not only fails to address these systemic problems, it replicates them.
I've spend four decades around Harvard and, while undergraduate writing remains just as wretched (if not more wretched) than ever, never have I been confronted by such word-salad nonsense as this emanating from a student pen. I predict that, if the source is checked, the truth will turn out to be that this was written by someone from Yale. "A library needs the workers who are its lifeblood, its circulatory system..." -- get me a barf bag, please. EEng (talk) 13:20, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
