ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS: Letter From Harvard: Dow Shalt Not
Rudenstine, Neil
UNIVERSITY DEMONSTRATIONS against Dow Chemical erupted in the weeks immediately following the Washington march on the Pentagon on October 21. The Harvard sit-in took place on October 25. Dr....
...It was all the more offensive because the victim was only remotely connected with the war effort, and his immediate business was something as innocuous as jobrecruiting...
...Proposals will be tailored in order to be made acceptable, and many projects may be conceived largely because one knows that money can be obtained for them...
...But sit-ins by their very nature need and create more limited, specific issues...
...Criticism of the Vietnam War had shifted, on one more occasion, from dissent to what is loosely called resistance...
...While secret research seems an indefensible activity for a university, the case of federally financed nonsecret or "basic" research is much less clear...
...University officials were allowed free access to the recruiting room, and people who chose to address the crowd (even in opposition to the demonstrators) were listened to...
...Nearly 300 members of the university blocked the corridors outside Dr...
...Equally, one hopes that academics may begin to think much more persistently about the relation of their own institutions to those of the government and the society as a whole...
...ALTHOUGH THE PURPOSES Of the Harvard sit-in were ambiguous, and its methods dubious, the action still deserves to be judged on fundamentally substantive grounds...
...There were other reasons why some of us had ambivalent feelings about the Harvard demonstration...
...It tacitly offers demonstrators carte blanche in their choice of resistance methods—or at least it provides no obvious 74 ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS means of evaluating the moral basis of one form of resistance as opposed to another...
...If the government does in fact exercise strong preferences, it seems clear that applicants will quickly learn what these are...
...The impossibility of developing rational criteria for exclusion (or inclusion) seems obvious enough...
...There was neither personal abuse nor violence...
...Such resistance can be an extremely effective kind of protest...
...If this reasoning is persuasive, it is also disturbingly simple...
...The purposes of the sit-in were so ambiguously defined as to be confusing and misleading...
...The question, inevitably, is what strings are attached to such aid...
...INSINUATIONS are much less useful than information, and one hopes that committees such as the Harvard one may shed some light on the subject...
...The focus of protest unobtrusively shifted from the war to the university, and this was not at all what many of the participating students had either hoped or bargained for...
...Many students who began the day protesting against napalm and the war were disturbed to discover that they were, willy-nilly, also protesting against the university...
...In all three of these instances, the university is said to be compromised by an unjustifiable involvement with the military-industrial sector of American society...
...Harvard acted several years ago to obviate one potential danger: it voted not to accept federal money for classified research...
...Leavitt was asked to guarantee that his company would never again recruit on the Harvard campus...
...The Harvard sit-in clearly contributed toward all these ends...
...The argument was that secrecy in academic work is antithetical to the free purposes of a university...
...When a group of students can bring this about, one can scarcely deny at least a degree of effectiveness to obstructive demonstrations...
...At the moment, Harvard does in fact deny facilities to firms who are known to have discriminatory hiring practices, but here the criterion is simply the law of the land...
...The policy of allowing organizations of all kinds (excepting political organizations) to hold job interviews on campus is a legitimate enough extension of ordinary university concerns...
...In the Harvard affair, Dr...
...THE MOST CRITICAL ISSUE raised by the students is that of federal funding...
...The refusal to do classified research was not based, of course, on the premise that government and military activities are tainted and must therefore be avoided...
...How significant are the actual issues raised by the demonstration, and how important a case do the students have against the university...
...In any event, we now know much too little about this entire, very murky area...
...The support of an ROTC program is another symptom, and the reliance on federal research funds ($55 million last year) is the most serious of all...
...At the same time, if the program is genuinely offensive to a significant portion of the community, there is no compelling reason why the university shouldn't defer to those offended members...
...What factors, one would like to know, make some applications more acceptable to the government than others...
...Like all such demonstrations, it produced some backlash, but probably a minimal amount compared to the galvanizing potency of its frontlash...
...In the light of the war's enormity, can one seriously worry, for example, about the temporary, harmless imprisonment of a Dow recruiter...
...The question is whether the university has not in fact surrendered a significant portion of its freedom of inquiry, decision, and even speech by having become a tacit partner of government and industry...
...What has been charged, of course, is that Harvard's policy of open recruiting is only one symptom of a dangerous and widespread disease...
...Such a situation need not have sinister implications, but even the most sanguine among us could hardly regard it as entirely healthy...
...In theory, the government's basic research program is an unpragmatic venture...
...Latent antiwar feelings must be activated, and individuals be given concrete means of expressing those feelings...
...Yet, despite the size of the crowd, the sit-in was essentially orderly...
...Some are working for Eugene McCarthy's nomination, others have joined the Boston draft resistance...
...It may well be that the government investment in the universities can ultimately influence the general direction and nature of research in very critical fields...
...The university is in effect agreeing to re-examine its relationship to the government and the so-called military-industrial complex of America...
...So long as the program is fairly administered and genuinely "open," it is a harmless convenience...
...Of the three items cited as evidence of university complicity, the first two—recruiting and ROTC—seem to me to be relatively trivial...
...Meanwhile, the university administration and faculty are in the process of creating a joint student-faculty advisory committee to inquire into the substantive issues raised by the Dow sit-in, primarily the issues of campus recruiting, ROTC, federal research funding, and methods of campus protest...
...To some, the question may seem little more than a quibble...
...Frederick Leavitt, director of Dow's lab in Wayland, Mass., was confined for about seven hours in a room he was using to conduct job interviews...
...Harvard received approximately $4.7 million from the Department of Defense during the past year, and approximately $50 million from other government agencies...
...An extraordinary form of due process was thus used to deprive someone of his liberty for several hours...
...In other words, funds currently received from even the De75 ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS fense Department are used only to finance nonsecret projects whose results can be published openly...
...BUT THE PROBLEM, INEVITABLY, is whether effectiveness confers legitimacy, whether obstructive or "harassing" techniques are not seriously compromising unless they are used with much greater moral discrimination than has recently been shown...
...Napalm and the war were the large issues, the rallying cries...
...A great many people who disapproved of the tactics of the Dow incident have nevertheless been prodded into one or another form of action by it...
...That the campus should be either entirely open or entirely closed are arguable alternatives...
...It is an inconspicuous but deeply implicated partner in the policies of the government, including specifically the Vietnam war effort...
...When the government so frequently disparages and consistently ignores those who dissent, can one temporize about the use of more aggressive tactics...
...Some grants (particularly from the NIH or 0E0) have immediate practical' repercussions, but many are given for the general purpose of "advancing knowledge...
...Are successful applications noticeably similar in kind...
...At the moment, we know too little about either the actual nature of such research or its effects on the university community...
...The government needs continually to be reminded of the fact that a great many people are actively hostile to its policy in Vietnam...
...What has come to be called university "complicity" has thus emerged as the major legacy of the Dow affair...
...Imprisoning the Dow man at Harvard may have been intended as a symbolic gesture, but it was nonetheless a wanton and aggressive act that inevitably compromised the cause of those who carried it out...
...The Dow demonstration at Harvard had many regrettable aspects, but it also had the virtue of provoking such thought...
...He had neither the authority nor the inclination to do so, and his refusal ultimately prompted the demonstrators to redefine their immediate goal: if Dow would not agree to stay away, then the university policy of open recruiting must be changed in order to exclude the Dows of the world...
...The only unacceptable course would be for the university to act as moral arbiter, excluding some organizations while admitting others...
...Leavitt's office...
...This is obviously an enormously complicated question, and although its conspiratorial implications may be easy to dismiss, other implications are more deeply troubling...
...The demonstrators made their decisions by majority vote, and it was by voting that they finally disbanded...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
