Harvard-Feints at Revolution

...The upshot of the emotion is the certainty that practically every college and university will have something called a Black Studies program...

...Popular professors like Stanley Hoffmann of the government department and Juan Marichal of Romance Languages were cheered even though they were urging their audience to return to their classes and terminate the strike...

...A generation ago Robert Lynd's Knowledge for What...

...What is one to say...

...Students realize, even if their teachers frequently do not, that social scientists who pride themselves on the "value-free" quality of their work actually choose problems, modes of investigation, and consequent research outcomes which support existing institutions and the distribution of political and economic power within them...

...One can hold assorted opinions about the social value of business, legal, or even medical training but what is undeniable is the "hardness" of each curriculum—the HARVARD-FEINTS AT REVOLUTION difficult, specific techniques which must be mastered and the equally specific vocational and financial targets which successful command of the techniques equips students to hit...

...Government of universities by this combination of authoritarianism and inattention endures just so long as practically nobody cares very much...

...I see no special reason why students who elect to do so should not have available to them the opportunity to become officers...

...Blacks quite justly blame the white intellectual community which until about yesterday grossly neglected the black man in American history...

...The students, as later court proceedings found, were guilty of trespass and no doubt deserved their $20 fines...

...is the tone of rational civility which adorns both student and faculty relationships...

...President Pusey exercised the right he legally possessed to invoke legitimate authority against illegitimate action...

...One simply hopes that the frantic efforts now underway to train scholars of black history and literature will speedily produce a flow of Ph.D.'s adequate to meet the demand...

...They did it with their usual impartiality among leaders, followers, newspaper reporters, and curious bystanders...

...My impression coincides with Wicker's that...

...Harvard is an example of the harder variety of cases which, fortunately, are also the more frequent...

...Within the building SDS had voted nonviolent resistance to removal...

...The crisis of legitimacy through which the universities are now passing is partly an issue of who is explicitly to govern...

...The "it" at issue is the same dreary sequence of SDS building occupation, police bust, "radicalization" of moderates, faculty unhappiness and guilt, and general turmoil...

...The medical students concentrated on the consequences of medical school expansion to the community...

...Before the University Hall occupation, the Harvard faculty, responding to earlier student pressure, finally got around to an alteration of the status of ROTC on the campus...

...It is platitudinous to repeat that universities which function only through consent and some sense of shared objective are defenseless in the face of violence if that violence is condoned by a very large proportion of the university's own community...

...The administration might well have taken SDS at its word, sent in a force of the rather fatherly campus security police, and then lifted the demonstrators out bodily...

...An unsympathetic outsider might well respond, what is new about university acceptance of low quality, nonintellectual courses that carry the same credits and eventuate in the same diplomas as does more respectable academic fare...

...The suites shared by two students at Harvard would be cut up among four to six Stony Brook students...

...But if all of this is accurate, how could "it" have happened here...

...Many moderates among students and faculty are uneasily aware that they have not devoted enough of their time and energy to the topics the SDS agenda has rudely thrust upon them...

...It is the complacent tendency of the specialists to busy themselves endlessly with the tedious refinement of techniques that answer the sort of small questions asked by scholars who are content with the society in which they work and live...

...George Wald had it right in his New York Times piece when he criticized faculties for what he called a severe shortage of adult unrest...

...All the same, there is a fair prospect that in the coining years something like a diffusion of responsibility among the major university constituencies will take place...

...After all, by comparison with Cornell, Columbia, or Queens what happened was quite mild...

...Pusey with the only cheers that he could have received during the weeks after the bust, at least from the Harvard community...

...Such as they are, the police are the legal agents of law enforcement...

...Neither group believed that their administrators had exhausted peaceful remedies...

...There is a gentleness of manner, a courtesy toward opposing opinion, a human respect and tolerance which, alas, I have not elsewhere encountered in anything like the same degree...

...It helps not in the slightest to say that SDS ROBERT LEKACHMAN itself cares little if anything about such issues and quite cynically grasps at those which are handiest in order to "politicize" and "radicalize" fellow students and their teachers...

...This is the automatic membership on the Harvard faculty which is enjoyed by the commander of each ROTC unit...

...If, as was subsequently alleged, Harvard officials feared that the rebels would reproduce and circulate the juicier items (as in fact the local New Left paper, The Old Mole, did), and if this fear overrode all conflicting considerations, then the thing to have done was call the police just as soon as it became certain that the demonstrators would not leave their prize voluntarily and instantly...

...For their part the business students greeted Mr...

...faculties, boards of trustees and school administrators to have the backbone to stand up against this kind of situation...

...I have had my say and I offer this pledge to anyone who has stayed with me to the end...

...The crowd heard SDS quite attentively even though its spokesman declared that SDS would not be bound by the decisions of the assemblage...

...Anyone in Harvard Yard at five in the morning of a chilly April day was ipso facto guilty of something...

...Armed blacks filing out of academic buildings (reputedly their leaders had arranged to sell pictures of the exit to Life), rowdies overturning catalogue cases and heaving furniture through plate glass windows, white bullies clubbing elderly professors (or even young ones), such events, should they become commonplace, will truly shut down the universities...

...But its legal position is also totally irrelevant, for the simple reason that the violence against property which SDS committed seemed trivial to the campus community in comparison to the violence against persons which the University's Iegal response entailed...

...Why not...

...Nobody cheerfully surrenders power...

...He had simply turned the problem over, as he later observed, to the professional handling of the police...

...In fact, how could such a body do other than yield to the demands of black students for a powerful voice in the selection of the faculty of the new Black Studies program...

...I agree with Tom Wicker's judgment in the May 1 New York Times that "They had the alternative...

...What concerns students is nothing novel in the criticism of American social science...

...At Harvard faculty and students like both each other and their university enough so that it is hard to take seriously the existence of any real threat to the place...

...It is to their credit that the young radicals working within the professional societies in the social sciences are not content with shaking plums from the money tree of federal and private subsidy...

...I for one am uneasily conscious that in querying the legitimacy of much that passes for social science, they have a point...

...The same observation applies to students in the natural sciences and, to a degree, in economics—the most "scientific," the "hardest" of the social sciences...

...In what I write for future issues I shall comment no further upon the academic scene...

...This is partly because the place is truly richer than other universities...

...Life to the contrary notwithstanding, the students responded in good humor to the plaintive plea of a youngster who asked the chance to return to "his physics...

...On the face of it Harvard's legal position was impeccable...

...At least in DISSENT, I shall sin no more...

...Practically, the police action produced the consequences quite cynically anticipated by SDS groups everywhere in the country...

...All parties listened respectfully to each other's positions and resolutions...

...Equally disastrous is the sort of calculated disruption of classes in which King Collins and his supporters engaged for a time here in Cam bridge...

...All the same, it is a pity that black students will again be getting shoddy merchandise...

...At Harvard the consequences of opulence are to be seen in the brilliant quality of its faculty, its ability to restore a flagging department to the first rank by calmly making offers to the best people at other institutions (who rejects a Harvard offer...

...The immediate, possibly even the proper, price to be paid by the white academic community for its past delinquencies and complacencies is the addition of some low-grade educational activities...

...So long as we have an army there is something to be said for filling its officer corps with Ivy League rather than Texas A and M graduates...

...As the New Yorker described the event, a student trailed behind the dean, solicitously picking up the objects that fell out of his ROBERT LEKACHMAN pockets and restoring them to his possession...

...For someone like myself, a visitor for a year whose academic associations in the past have been with Columbia and Stony Brook, what is still more striking than the sense of ease and spaciousness (there are windows in the Widener stacks...

...In most places the programs will not be intellectually reputable...

...I agree...

...Almost everywhere the faculty to be recruited will be chosen as much by reason of empathy with their black students as by any other criterion...

...Trembling in the air was a yearning for a better community, a sense of very attractive, intelligent, young people trying to do something to improve their immediate environment...

...castigated his colleagues on these grounds...

...There was a second nonpolice response possible...

...I have seldom been so warmed by a university occasion as I was by the mass meeting organized by the Memorial Church group of moderates on the Monday following the police action...

...I find it much harder to be cheerful about the general academic prospect than I do about Harvard...

...HARVARD is no more like other Ameri can universities than rich people are like the rest of us...

...The other possible courses of action were three...

...It is stuffed with confidential correspondence and records...

...To object that SDS yearned for the police bust and treasured the brutality of the cops is simply to underline the boneheadedness of the university administration's meek compliance with SDS's assignment of the role of political villain...

...Save in a narrow vocational sense, the social sciences have failed their more concerned students...

...Police violence horrified moderate students and faculty and caused them quite to forget that SDS had started the whole affair by occupying University Hall...

...They are likely to employ better standards than the Pentagon...

...SDS grasped very early in its spectacular career what many college administrators still appear not to have realized: the critical importance of moderate faculty HARVARD-FEINTS AT REVOLUTION and student opinion...

...The surge of demands for Black Studies programs, deriving from the entirely comprehensible black aspiration toward the creation of a usable past, clashes with the intractable or apparently intractable fact that there are pitifully few scholars who by conventional criteria are qualified to conduct such programs...

...But the faculty debate did reveal to me a condition that was outrageous...

...D D TSCONTENT among white students is something else...

...At the peak of attendance there must have been at least 10,000 people in Soldier's Field, on a glorious spring day...

...What is one to think of a body of scholars so indifferent to its own membership rules that it accepts into the club a man selected by the Pentagon on grounds quite irrelevant to the usual scholarly criteria...

...At the time of occupation, the Harvard administration had a problem grimly familiar to other university officials but so novel here that no advance planning had apparently been performed despite the abundant warning SDS had given of its springtime intentions...

...Violent methods, assert President Pusey and his admirer James Reston, have no place on university campuses...

...It is not that universities are autocracies, but that in crises formal powers become real powers...

...the high ratio of space to people, and the quasi-luxury in which the undergraduates live...

...But once the store and its mode of operation become themselves objects of concern, the explicit lack of democracy in the formal charters of universities becomes an urgent and quite genuine topic of controversy...

...Examples abound, but let me cite just one comparatively minor Harvard illustration...

...Here at Harvard the situation seems stabilized and the outlook is quite promising...

...It was a great meeting, stylishly conducted by a young history instructor...

...It is during the crises that academic communities realize with a sudden sense of shocked astonishment that the seven members of the Harvard Corporation (who are recruited in the same manner as the College of Cardinals) can really execute their delicatelyworded threat to close down the University in the face of repeated disorder...

...University Hall is no ordinary building...

...of waiting five more hours until a mass meeting of moderate students called for 10:00 A.M...

...This is a matter of the redistribution of the formal powers now entrusted to trustees, administrators, and, more ambiguously, to faculties...

...I wish that I could feel equally cheerful about another aspect of legitimacy, at least as defined by many students...

...The administration could simply have outwaited the demonstrators...

...More recently C. Wright Mills's Sociological Imagination addressed itself somewhat intemperately but extremely perceptively to the same issues...

...This the Harvard administration arrogantly disregarded...

...Unfortunately these are the easy cases, not of course in the sense that there is agreement on how to handle them but in the sense that almost everybody in the academic community, save the perpetrators themselves, can be brought to condemn vandalism and violence against persons...

...And I must say that I agree with the judgment...

...Whose fault is this...

...But this was not done, and the failure to do so casts considerable doubt on the University's rationalization of the choice that it did make...

...SDS, which has done poorly among black students, has displayed a canny talent for arousing the consciences of white students about a range of issues stretching from war and peace, through university democracy, ROTC, and Black Studies, to university real estate and investment policies...

...At Harvard the law students paid little heed to the student strike and spent their time discussing their own grievances...

...this meeting might well have condemned the students who seized the building," and that such condemnation might have persuaded the far-from-unified rebels to give up...

...I should go further in the direction of affirmative statement...

...but it is an affirmation of the absolute necessity, in view of both police habits and campus opinion, of prior exhaustion of nonpolice solutions...

...It gives one pause to realize that the students who are most militant seem to come overwhelmingly from the humanities and the social sciences...

...Already too many have written too much too soon...

...So it was that the cops came, after centuries of restraint, free at last to club the uppity college kids...

...Bully for Harvard, but what about lesser institutions not so favored by fortune...

...Whitey's, naturally...

...In the event, President Pusey and thenDean Ford anticipated the sermon that President Nixon delivered, when he urged...

...This is not to be interpreted as the equivalent of a flat ban in all circumstances upon the use of police on university grounds...

...As long as students content themselves with study, romance, and frisbees, and teachers entertain themselves with research and consulting, the administration can tacitly be trusted to run the store...

...For my part the presence of an ROTC unit on a campus does not seem outrageous...

...domestic affairs in every other issue.—En...

...The results were a general student strike and a faculty resolution that stopped just short of open, public criticism of the Harvard administration...

...I shall approach my own interpretation of the events through the issue of violence...

...The two or three hundred students who occupied University Hall in the middle of Harvard Yard did so with no more violence against persons than was entailed by the gentle carrying out of a popular dean from the building after he refused to leave voluntarily...