“We’d have issues that had the [Students for a Democratic Society] in one article and the Young Republicans in another,” said James Vaseff, 1984 Harvard Graduate School of Design LOEB Fellow and early contributor to the Harvard Independent.
Vaseff used photojournalism to further one of the Indy’s foremost missions: to deliberately provoke university-wide commentary and controversy. Morris Abram, Jr. ’71, Roland (Rollie) Cole ’70, Richard Paisner ’70, and Mark Shields ’70, founded the Indy in 1969, serving as a space to cover both sides of campus issues, such as the turmoil and impact of the Vietnam War in student activism. Over the past fifty years, the novel counterculture newspaper has continued to give all Harvard students a platform to share their (often opposing) political, cultural, and artistic viewpoints.
As Paisner described in a 1970 article for Harvard Magazine, the Indy made its readers question their own opinions, debate new topics, and feel comfortable expressing their own stance when it contradicted the majority. “A major theme of [Mark Shields’] pitch was ‘Counterpoint’—an editorial-page feature bringing together students and faculty, radicals and conservatives, in debates over current campus controversies,” he wrote, contextualizing the Indy’s role as a platform for more comprehensive political and social discourse.
Richard D Paisner’s ’70 1970 article for Harvard Magazine regarding the founding of the Independent, Harvard Magazine.
In the late 1960s, it was clear to the founders that Harvard students had an appetite to legitimize and validate their passions for advocacy. Still, the college did not offer a platform to put their opinions into print.
Queue the Indy. Organized by President Morris Abram, Jr., the first mission of the newspaper was a response to a general dissatisfaction with The Crimson. In an interview with The Crimson regarding the Independent’s founding, Abram discussed the Indy’s founding. “The Crimson in 1969 was very good in many respects,” he said. “The impetus [for founding The Independent] was to try to breathe some air into the system and to invigorate a spirit of debate.”
In his 1970 Harvard Gazette interview with Paisner, founding publisher Mark Shields explained, “There were widespread feelings that [The Crimson] had allowed a radical perspective to color its news columns.” After garnering enough funding and public support, the Indy pledged to contradict the mainstream.
An early advertisement for the Independent calling for public opinion of the newspaper.
On August 13th, 2023, Shields, Paisner, and Vaseff joined current Indy editors to discuss the initial and perpetuated spirit of the newspaper and how, over the past fifty-three years, the newspaper has maintained its role on campus as a counterpoint. In conjunction with the interview, Vaseff provided a plethora of original Indy photos from the 60s and 70s, including landscapes from Cambridge, Boston, and original ads from inside The Harvard Independent.
In the wake of radical student response to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, The Harvard Independent was founded to represent and circulate discourse that The Crimson failed to publish. Its first content directly responded to The Crimson’s coverage of Harvard students who opposed the Reserve Officer Training Corps. On April 9th, 1969, students seized University Hall and were evicted by the police 15 hours later.
Rollie Cole explained that during the building takeover, he was kicked out of the basement of Lamont Library while doing research for an economics professor. “The coverage of the event,” Cole wrote in an email, “appeared to me and others as so focused from a single viewpoint that we felt the campus needed more expression of alternative viewpoints…. Although [The Crimson] was not the most radical, it was way to the left of the ‘median’ among the student body at the time.”
Harvard Stadium, May 8, 1970. Image credit: James Vaseff.
In reflection of Harvard’s campus environment during the spring of 1969, Paisner recalled the takeover of University Hall, the march through Harvard Square, and even the release of tear gas in his room at Lowell House. “It was truly an astonishing time…even looking back 50 years, it’s hard to believe,” Paisner said.
Image credit: James Vaseff
Fifty-three years later, Shields’ sentiment remains the same. “We knew there was a real hunger for official news sources… And The Crimson was not very interested in publishing Op-Eds, or letters to the editor…So having a point-counterpoint section, or basically having your variety of news was a good concept for a paper.”
“For me, the appeal of the Indy was not to be the opposite of the Crimson,” Paisner continued. “It was not to be a place where the only thing you heard about was right-wing stuff. It was really to try to get…people with different views to opine on challenging issues. And I think the Point / Counterpoint thing was the quintessential,” he said.
Image credit: James Vaseff
To respect the spirit of the Independent’s founding mission of political autonomy, the newspaper was established with the principle of refusing donations from parties with any pressing political association. Today, the Indy continues this commitment to publishing a diverse array of viewpoints, operating solely from the donations of alumni and associated contributors, in addition to funds raised by the Indy’s business staff.
Shields noted that the founders were obliged to turn down large sums of donations if the benefactors wanted to instill a political agenda. “There were some potential donors who wanted to have a specific viewpoint and were outraged that there’d be a Counterpoint section, whether it be people on the far left, who would actually be allowed to write a section.”
In addition to soliciting funds from prospective donors, the original Indy members employed numerous advertising techniques to sustain the paper. Cole explained that Shields and Abram acted as the primary fundraisers. Every Wednesday before print, they would work from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm to layout the paper, write headlines and captions of the articles, and organize ads and photographs for the printer.
“Years later,” Cole added, “the Indy created a T-shirt saying ‘Thank God for Thursdays’, which I took to mean the ‘work’ was done and the paper was out.” While most of the content and design formatting is now done virtually, The Independent still publishes every Thursday morning during the academic term.
As was the case in its founding years, the often unsung heroes of independently-funded student newspapers, the business team, is responsible for raising the necessary funds to cover operating expenses. These include office rent, printing and publicity costs, merchandise, and other initiatives to keep the spirit of the Indy alive.
Original ads placed within the Independent. Image credit: James Vaseff.
Over the past fifty years, the role of the Indy has shifted very little. Though not necessarily centered on the same political content, the Independent has intended to serve the student body as a place where writers are free to pitch article ideas and publish opinions entirely on their own without feeling censored or held back by what may be the “norm.”
“For tradition’s sake, if there’s a certain amount of lack of openness, politically on campus,” Paisner noted, “We would probably want the Indy to go back to old times and push for openness.” While the state of Harvard’s political campus looks much different now than it did fifty years ago, the importance of comprehensive discourse, notably in an academic or activist setting, has not lost its significance.
“Having aggressive discussion of ideas is a critical way for us to move ahead as a society and as a species,” Shields asserted. “We’ve learned … that it is an arousing of emotions that creates progress, which is a problem. Currently, there is a real focus on arousing emotions versus having a discussion of key ideas. I would hope the Independent can contribute to the discussion of ideas and probing ideas and covering them and not lapse into just arousing emotions.”
Vaseff continued, in regards to the monumental transition of news and discourse to social media, that “it’s all emotions and it’s very thin…there’s no chance to sit back and let it settle in and have some depth to it.”
“That’s a little frightening,” he added. “Many of these people are talking about these things without having any historic roots to it, and that’s a little frightening. Whether it’s culturally, economically, politically … they just don’t know what’s been there before.”
As journalists, there is a responsibility to understand where the world is today. The Indy’s legacy will continue to live on through its mission to “push for the new [and] resist the temptation to settle,” as Paisner urged it to do. By fostering a community that pushes the boundary of culturally acceptable opinions, the Indy presents itself as a forum that is not confined to social norms and is truly independent. “I think that’s probably what has kept us going for fifty years,” Paisner continued. “This sense that there’s a spirit to it, which is an Independent spirit.”
Layla Chaaraoui ’26 (laylachaaraoui@college.harvard.edu), Eliza Kimball ’25 (elizakimball@college.harvard.edu), and Marbella Marlo ’24 (mmarlo@college.harvard.edu) belong to no one but themselves.
*All images credit James Vaseff