Occuppy Wall Street - if you've lost Harvard.... - Granite Grok

Occuppy Wall Street – if you’ve lost Harvard….

Frankly, Occupy Wall Street has pretty much left Occupy Wall Street (with, perhaps, the lone exceptions being San Francisco and Oakland as the only sites still making national news once in a while).  This did catch my eye – as there was an abortive attempt at Hahvahd University to have an Occupy outpost there as the Boston site tried to replicate it self:

For a Statistics 104 final project, a group of students asked 1,035 undergraduates to gauge their impression of Occupy on a scale of one to ten, with ten being most positive. They found that the average ranking of Occupy Harvard was 2.84 out of 10. Many Occupiers attributed the movement’s chilly reception on campus to what some called an “anti-protest culture” at Harvard. They theorized that this mentality was a result of Harvard students’ success within the current system.

“One explanation is that in order to get to Harvard, you have to be very good at playing the game and have a strong belief that the system is meritocratic,” said occupier Jennifer A. Sheehy-Skeffington, a teaching fellow in psychology. “That selects for the kind of people who do not look for solutions that are extra-systemic—it’s threatening to have a group come along and challenge that altogether.””

Now, I expect that if you aren’t from around New England or didn’t follow the OWS movement, you probably didn’t even know that there was an Occupy Harvard.   I laughed riotously when I heard about it – members of the 1% deciding to play at being the 99% protesting the 1%.  Sortofa “we’re protesting ourselves” moment.  When the tents went up in the Yard, officials locked the gates and only allowed those with Harvard IDs access to the site (yeah, a gated Occupy community – go figure).

Again, Harvard.  Supposedly smart.  Cream of the crop.  Future Masters of the Universe types – groomed to run the world.

A 2.84 ranking.  So, if la creme de la creme can’t make an Occupy site work, no wonder this movement has just dissipated into nothingness.  Intentions are nice, but results are better – so, the TEA Party results of Tuesday?  5 for 6  in Wisconsin: that makes it a batting average of 83%.  Better than 2.84

 

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