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Climate Activists Gain Seats on Harvard Oversight Board

Gay Seidman, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was the first person who ran by petition to win a Harvard Board of Overseers election, and who campaigned on an anti-apartheid divestment platform in 1986, said she had not expected to win; instead, she said, she saw the candidacy as “a way to start conversations about what’s an acceptable business practice.”

She said she would warn the members of the new slate that “change happens really slowly in institutions that are as complicated as universities,” but that “if you think of the goal as to start conversations, then they have already won.”