Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist: Now You Can Watch the Lectures

NOTE: As of July 22, we updat­ed this post to include the videos from the class ses­sions. Watch the playlist of lec­tures above.

I have my doubts about whether we should call reg­u­lar acts of civic duty “resis­tance,” rather than Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-pro­tect­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic free­doms.  Yes­ter­day we remem­bered Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. on the 49th anniver­sary of his assas­si­na­tion (and the 50th anniver­sary of his speech oppos­ing the Viet­nam War). As King and count­less oth­er civ­il rights and anti-war cam­paign­ers have demonstrated—some at the cost of their lives—civil dis­obe­di­ence is very often required and moral­ly jus­ti­fied when legal appeals for jus­tice fail. But for bet­ter or worse, “The Resis­tance” has become a catch-all media term for a loose and very often frac­tious col­lec­tion of main­stream Democ­rats, pro­gres­sives, and rad­i­cals of all stripes, whose tac­tics range from polite phone lob­by­ing to brawl­ing with white suprema­cists in the streets.

Mil­lions of peo­ple who for­mer­ly had lit­tle to no involve­ment in pol­i­tics have thrown them­selves into activism, and vet­er­an orga­niz­ers have been over­whelmed with new recruits. Just as quick­ly, those orga­niz­ers have met the chal­lenge by dis­sem­i­nat­ing guides for lob­by­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives, run­ning for office, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in more direct forms of action.

Every move­ment has its res­i­dent schol­ars and edu­ca­tors, whether they be eru­dite laypeo­ple, pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics, or enter­pris­ing col­lege stu­dents. A group from the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, “pro­gres­sive stu­dents,” writes CNN, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, begin today what they’re call­ing “Resis­tance School,” a “4‑week course in anti-Trump activism… open to peo­ple across the coun­try and the world.” (You can watch the video from the course above.)

At their site, the stu­dents bill “Resis­tance School” as a series of “prac­ti­cal skills for tak­ing back Amer­i­ca” and open their online syl­labus with a quote spu­ri­ous­ly attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son: “When injus­tice becomes law, resis­tance becomes duty.” It’s pos­si­ble that who­ev­er said it had blood­i­er things in mind. Resis­tance School sticks to peace­ful means, with four ses­sions that teach, in order, “How to Com­mu­ni­cate our Val­ues in Polit­i­cal Advo­ca­cy,” “How to Mobi­lize and Orga­nize our Com­mu­ni­ties,” “How to Struc­ture and Build Capac­i­ty for Action,” and “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” Instruc­tors are drawn from the ranks of acad­e­mia, labor orga­niz­ing, and the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, and you can stream the ses­sions on the school’s site or on Face­book, or attend in per­son.

The Resis­tance School is sure to attract crit­i­cism, not only from the expect­ed sources but from more anti-estab­lish­ment fac­tions on the left. But that may be unlike­ly to deter the more than 10,000 peo­ple who have reg­is­tered for the first class. Orga­niz­ers have encour­aged peo­ple to attend in groups, and cur­rent­ly have about 3,000 groups enrolled. “Some are com­ing with groups of 700 peo­ple,” says co-founder Shanoor Seer­vai, “some are small­er groups, potlucks, gath­er­ing in people’s kitchens.”

Ser­vaai and fel­low Kennedy School stu­dents have been tak­en aback and are now, writes CNN, “grap­pling with ques­tions of scale.” How, they won­der, will such large num­bers of peo­ple coor­di­nate; how to mea­sure the impact of the pro­gram?.… ques­tions, per­haps, they will resolve by the fourth ses­sion, “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” But they’re cer­tain­ly not alone in try­ing to steer a mas­sive surge of new inter­est in activism and elec­toral pol­i­tics. As the mil­lions now plan­ning and par­tic­i­pat­ing in civ­il actions across the coun­try attest, peo­ple have begun to take to heart sen­ti­ments recent­ly expressed by orga­niz­er Alice Mar­shall: “If we wait for some great leader to save us we are lost. We have to save our­selves.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Watch The March, the Mas­ter­ful, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored Doc­u­men­tary on The Great March on Wash­ing­ton

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness