RAND_MR1382

Students at Harvard tapped into the Burma Internet network, and soon after, they were
successful in preventing a contract between PepsiCo and Harvard’s dining services.
Their activism also had an influence on the Harvard student body, by raising awareness
as well as passing resolutions in the student government that affected the university’s
investments in Burma.
One of the students who became a ring leader for the Burma campaign on campus was
Marco Simons. 57 The summer before his junior year at Harvard, Simons, who had
written a paper on the human rights situation in Burma while still in high school,
tapped into the Net via the newsgroup soc.culture.burma. Soon after, Billenness, who
worked at the Franklin Research Institute for Socially Responsible Investing, contacted
Simons. Billenness was trying to initiate a Burma group at Harvard. At this same time,
autumn 1995, the Free Burma Coalition (FBC) was first appearing online. The FBC’s
web site was able to attract numerous students across the United States, and it became a
hub for the network that would follow.
There were no Burmese undergraduate students at Harvard. There was one native
Burmese graduate student and a few students who had either visited Burma or lived
there as foreigners. For this reason, the three Harvard students who initiated the Burma
group felt their first order of business should be to raise awareness. They set up a table
at the political action fair at the start of the fall semester. They tested students who
came by on their geographical prowess by asking them where Burma was on a map and
which countries bordered it. Those who stopped to play the game were asked to leave
their email addresses. Between 40 and 50 addresses were collected that day.
Simons describes the culture on campus as one that is virtually interactive. The only
“real mail” (i.e., postal mail) he gets is from the university administration, he says. “Our
internal organizing was done through email meetings,” Simons said. The group
communicated almost exclusively by email. As the campaign developed to include
lobbying the student government on resolutions regarding Burma, Simons said, the
activists communicated with the student government via email also. Thus, they
combined the traditional avenues for social activism with the technology that the
university setting made available.
Once they had the student email addresses, members of the fledgling group began
encouraging students to join them in letter-writing campaigns calling for university
divestment from various companies. They also tried to organize an honorary degree for
Aung San Suu Kyi. Harvard became the first student government to pass resolutions
supporting the Burmese prodemocracy movement. Since then, many campuses have
passed similar resolutions, and many used the Internet to seek advice from Simons on
how to engage in this campaign. 58
Some of the resolutions passed by Harvard’s student government required that the