Apartheid at Harvard

...More important, his letter attempted to answer the perennial question: What is the purpose of a university...

...Clearly, these students want to have their cake and eat it too-receiving the benefits of a Harvard education while at the same time condemning the monstrous administration for refusing to knuckle under to demands about the sale of Nestle products to the Third World...

...Harvard is properly concerned about the campaign against it for refusing to collapse before the pieties of some members of the student body...

...Such a warning is no idle threat...

...Harvard was closed down by its students in 1969, the faculty got involved, and there was almost a civil war...

...Half a century ago there was a cause celebre in the U.S.-the conviction of Tom Mooney for a San Francisco terrorist bombing in July 1916...

...That is why universities repudiate "proposals that would lead them to establish an official morality by taking institutional positions on ethical and political questions...

...2) The goal of the university, unlike organizations such as political parties, en vironmental lobbies, or civil-rights groups, is not to reform society in specific ways...

...There is a picket line and there are large signs detailing the demands of the tenants, most of them Communists, who are parading outside the building shouting their slogans...

...That President Bok has found it necessary to try to persuade some students that the University should not adopt political orthodoxies suggests matters have not improved much since 1972...

...Specifically, Harvard students "harassed and in some cases forcibly denied an opportunity to speak'' to a spokesman for South Vietnam, a critic of liberal policies toward the ghettos, a scientist who claimed that intelligence is largely inherited, and a corporate executive who denied that his firm was morally responsible for the regime in South Africa...

...There is a growing feeling, according to reliable sources, that there may be a tenth anniversary attempt to disrupt its commencement this month...

...A 1971 Harvard committee on governance warned that "an institutional political commitment, especially when carried into active support, imposes an orthodoxy upon individual members of the university community which is prejudicial to the open-minded search for truth...

...There was a good deal of agitation on Mooney's behalf and an anecdote grew up about the case which went like this: During the Depression, a rent strike Arnold Beichman is the author of Nine Lies About America...

...It did not occur to them that there is more relative freedom for minorities in South Africa than in the Soviet Union, whose government has expelled its greatest living writer-the man who was at that very moment addressing the commencement audience...

...This question is particularly a problem at prestigious universities like Harvard, where political issues are churned into moral dilemmas...

...Yet this commitment has not always been fulfilled at Harvard, according to James Q. Wilson, a professor of political science at Harvard and a noted scholar...

...The University administration must either submit to demands for immediate action or else face a takeover by outraged students...

...I was reminded of this story when I read a recent public statement by Derek C. Bok, president of Harvard University, entitled, "Reflections on the Ethical Responsibilities of the University in Society: An Open Letter to the Harvard Community.'' His letter was a response to student demands that Harvard divest itself of any stock in companies doing business in South Africa, refuse a large gift from a man who had made a substantial part of his wealth in South African mining, and cease dispensing Nestle products in Harvard's dining halls (because the company is said to endanger the health of infants by promoting the use of powdered formula in Third World countries...

...2) If universities wish to preserve their independence, they should remember that "society respects the freedom of aca demic institutions only because it assumes that they will devote themselves to the academic pursuits for which that freedom was extended They cannot expect to remain free of outside interference if they insist on arrogating to themselves the right to use economic leverage to influence the activities of others 3) A university's refusal to sever rela tionships on moral or political grounds can rightfully be based on the fact that such actions-refusing gifts, selling stock pre cipitously, or turning to more costly al ternative suppliers-will often cost the university money...

...But if Harvard is as awful as some students seem to feel, they could transfer their educational ambitions elsewhere (or they could even have refused to apply for admission in the first place...

...3) Whereas the university hasn't the capacity to solve society's problems, it makes possible the knowledge without which few of these problems are likely to be solved...

...In an article in Commentary magazine entitled "Liberalism versus Liberal Education," Wilson wrote that at Harvard in 1972 "the list of subjects that cannot be publicly discussed...

...Many Harvard graduates wore black armbands as a symbol of their protest against Harvard's refusal to sell its stock in corporations which do business in South Africa...

...Another aspect of this political myopia was visible at last year's commencement, where Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke...

...In answering the question of a university's raison d'etre Bok argued that: 1) The special mission of a university is the discovery and transmission of knowl edge...

...In part, Bok's letter recalled the poor Bronx landlord-how could Harvard end apartheid in South Africa or infant malnutrition in the Third World...

...4) In carrying out its functions, a univer sity like Harvard must affirm a commit ment to the right of individual members of the university community to "express the most unconventional and unpopular views, even if they offend other members of the university community or arouse the anger of powerful groups in society...

...Bok's argument includes three fundamental principles: 1) Intellectual freedom is a condition which is more than merely desirable...

...occurs in a Bronx, New York, tenement...

...in a free and open forum has grown steadily, and now includes the war in Vietnam, public policy towards urban ghettos, the relationship between intelligence and heredity, and the role of American corporations in certain overseas regimes...

...it is essential to the discovery and transmission of knowledge...

...Financial costs," writes Bok, "are relevant to ethical deci sions " Being a tactful and kindly man, Derek Bok refrained from discussing the underlying hypocrisy of those students who seek to politicize Harvard...

...This time, however, there may not be the failure of nerve on the Harvard campus that there was in spring 1969.ve on the Harvard campus that there was in spring 1969...

...The landlord, who has been watching the picket line with a look of frustration on his face, turns to a friendly bystander and says: "Okay, alright already, I'm ready to give them what they want- hot water day and night, a 10 percent rent cut, steam heat, electricity and no gas, anything, but-" pointing to a slogan on a sign held aloft by a tenant picket "-how can I free Tom Mooney...

...His case was seized upon by many radical groups, including the Communist Party, and a good many stalwart liberals, who believed that Mooney and a somewhat lesser involved associate, Warren K. Billings, were victims of a miscarriage of justice and that Mooney's death sentence (later commuted to life imprisonment) was based on perjury...