Springtime at Harvard-our

...Although Dean Ford's slight stroke is unlikely to do more than create personal sympathy for a man who has obviously suffered over the decisions he helped to make, any number of events could either reinforce or diminish the obviously widespread desire to heal present wounds and proceed to the constructive business of orderly change...

...On university campus after university campus, it has been sds which has called visible attention to the brutality of the local police, the obruseness if not worse of university behavior to surrounding communities, the selfishness of university real estate operations, and the questionable character of some of the universities' entanglements with Pentagon projects...

...For it is truly a harsh comment upon our society that a university administrator cannot sensibly expect policemen to perform their jobs in a professional manner by using the very minimum of force necessary to the completion of their mission...

...Although these are matters of genuine substance, they tend in quiet times to excite relatively small groups of students and faculty...

...On that beautiful sunny spring day (how the administration must have prayed for rain...

...A university president who unleashes policemen who have been waiting for a century or two for just this chance to crack the skulls of a few uppity college kids is in effect an accessory to the assaults and batteries committed by his agents...

...On April 9 it acted, seizing a building, issuing the traditional set of non-negotiable demands, and challenging the administration to call the cops...

...But such discipline cannot properly consist of assault and battery, administered by the police on a more or less random basis to leaders, followers, reporters, and bystanders...

...You favor, accordingly, containment of illegal sds action and appropriate disciplinary action administered by the appropriate disciplinary authorities against offenders...

...Suppose that you dislike confrontation tactics and building occupations...

...To say this is to point out the considerable weaknesses of moderates and mild radicals...

...So great is the pressure for human solidarity that even the business school students, Harvard's most self-centered group, are considering some expression of corporate support for change in the university...

...Whatever explains the completeness of Pusey's failure, it seems susceptible to constructive use by moderate members of his university...

...Harvard might well have taken sds at its word, sent in an unarmed force of deans, tutors, proctors, and campus security guards, and calmly removed the revolutionaries...

...I shall try instead to reflect on some of the possible meanings of these repetitive confrontations, with special emphasis upon the Harvard example...

...The shock in the atmosphere testified to the crowd's first emotional realization that the buildings, the libraries, the laboratories, the very salaries of their instructors, were under the complete, formal control of a self-perpetuating committee of seven elderly Establishment types...

...What happened on April 9-10...

...Nobody consulted anybody but a dean before calling the police...

...The police bag on this occasion was 40 injured, two of them seriously, and 196 arrested...

...In his letter...

...There is wide agreement that such a tactic would probably have succeeded...

...As for the faculty status accorded military officers, about the kindest comment one might make upon the Harvard faculty is that they were unaware that their military colleagues enjoyed this privilege...

...On the face of it, too many Harvard people love their university, too many have achieved something like personal joy and identity here, and too many are moved by the ideal of closer community to allow for very much pessimism about the ultimate ability of Harvard to pass the sort of severe test other universities have already had administered to them...

...At Harvard as elsewhere, divisive issues are always plentiful...

...When asked to leave, the trespassers refused...

...Even though the problems and the issues have reached the crisis stage somewhat belatedly here, what happens at Harvard is likely to have enormous demonstration effects upon the rest of the country's universities...

...They listened with equal attention but less sympathy to a statement of the sds position which manifested that group's suspicion of all meetings (like the one under way) organized by moderates and declared sds's intention to continue the strike regardless of what the current meeting voted to do...

...For their part, moderate students—who came to be called the Memorial Church group—voted a strike and focused their rage upon the administration rather than sds...

...But once this shameful joy in the misfortunes of others has been repressed, one thinks inevitably about the similarities among these campus disorders at institutions otherwise so different...

...They recommended (and the administration concurred) that charges of trespass be dropped, and they appointed a committee to oversee university disciplinary action...

...Short of surrender, the only possible response was the support of the police, and the sooner the better...

...In these circumstances, it is hard to exaggerate the sheer stupidity of the Harvard administration...

...This favorable faculty situation is strengthened by a possibly unique Harvard characteristic, a comparative scarcity of acrimony and personal bitterness that characterized the Columbia disorders...

...For unlike unhappy Columbia, whose faculty got acrimoniously involved on several sides of complex and escalating controversies spread over space and time, the faculty at Harvard begins with the advantage of innocent noninvolvement...

...And this response to Harvard's April Follies was reinforced by recollection of the somewhat superior tone in which Professor Archibald Cox, of the Harvard Law School, had reproved the errors of Columbia's faculty and administration in his Cox Commission Report on the difficulties in New York last spring...

...Shock was genuine and very nearly universal that violence of this sort had fractured the traditional composure of Harvard life...

...Their decision seemed much less a product of emotion than of the rational calculation that the way to get things changed in any community is to maintain rather than diminish the pressure?something any trade union leader knows...

...Nevertheless, all spring it has been sniffing the wind, awaiting the right moment for confrontation...

...Under the circumstances, I consider it understandable though not commendable that my initial feeling about the sds takeover of University Hall and the massive overreaction of the Harvard administration to this act of Use ma-jeste was one of pleasure that even mighty, wealthy, complacent Harvard had fallen prey to the alarms and fevers afflicting lesser institutions...

...At that moment, Harvard's leaders faced a choice among three courses of action...

...With innocent glee, they impartially club not alone the trespassers but also any handy bystanders and stray reporters who happen to be in the vicinity...

...Indeed I do...

...The Harvard Crimson later printed the entire document...

...If the police turned out to be a bit rough, well, the demonstrators brought the police clubs down on their own heads...

...As usual, such low-intensity debates are raised in voltage by outrageous action...

...The Harvard chapter is estimated to have possibly 250 members out of a student body in excess of 15,-000...

...I shall try to stop short of the maudlin, but when I try to describe the tone of the mass meeting at Soldier's Field on April 14, I may fail...

...It may be that for the first time moderate faculty members and students have begun to realize some of the glaring inadequacies in their customary way of handling (or mishandling) the governance of their great university...

...The meeting was beautifully orderly...

...It is a sign of the situation that very few persons appear to know what either the original contract or a possible new contract might contain...

...It was the final course of action, rapid recourse to the police, which Pusey and Ford preferred to the alternatives...

...I cannot conclude even so hasty a set of reflections as this one without some word of appreciation of sds...

...When the cops come, they notoriously do their thing...

...these seven old men"—to close "our" university...

...If they resisted and broke their own pledge, they would have made it plain to one and all exactly where the only source of violence was located...

...It does not exaggerate the case to say that the argument at Harvard has been gentle, almost sweet...

...I shall not try here to make an orderly chronicle of the confusion of events, meetings, resolutions, and strategies which an inventive and intellectual community naturally resorted to...

...Few students or faculty have been willing to accept this rationale at Harvard or anyplace else...

...This sds initiated...

...A good place to start is with the police...

...And they are quite right to reject it...

...Military science is probably a less respectable academic discipline than animal husbandry...

...some 10,000 people—some of them faculty and others from surrounding universities, but the overwhelming majority Harvard and Radcliffe students—assembled...

...The crowd loudly applauded two popular professors, Stanley Hoffmann of political science and Juan Marichal of romance languages, even though both men eloquently urged the students to trust the faculty to act properly, terminate the strike, and return to classes...

...Fair is fair...

...One senior social scientist, intimately acquainted with both Columbia and Harvard, unkindly described President Pusey as stronger but dumber than Grayson Kirk...

...Springtime at Harvard-our Articles The Brighter Side By Robert Lekachman Although I have been spending this year at Harvard, my durable university affiliations as student, alumnus and teacher have been with Columbia and Stony Brook, neither of them recently or currently a haven of peaceful contemplation...

...But it is well worth observing that if an rotc unit can nominate its commander as a member of the Harvard faculty, there is no logical reason why the black students should not nominate their own faculty...

...A relatively new series of controversies rage around the place in the curriculum of Black Studies, the rights of black students to design their own courses and select their own faculty, and the special relation between blacks and the university administration...

...Or, President Nathan M. Pusey and Franklin L. Ford, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, might have dithered, postponing police action but in the end yielding to it...

...After more than three hours of quite rational discussion and resolution presentation, the 6,000 who remained to vote split nearly evenly over continuing or suspending the strike, opting finally to continue it for three days...

...The yearning of this appealing group of young people for a better community was very nearly palpable...

...Suppose further that sds authoritarianism, manipulation and simple-minded rhetoric turn you cold...

...It is instructive to recall that the most emotional moment of the April 14 mass meeting ocurred when a young teaching fellow rose (somewhat out of order) to read a resolution, passed instantly by acclamation, condemning the "threat" made by the Harvard Corporation...

...Let me rub in the point...

...Following the successful Brandeis and Chicago model, the administration might have chosen to wait the radicals out, using the time in efforts at negotiation and attempts to win the support of moderate students and faculty...

...As for the bystanders, who told them to be standing in Harvard Yard at five o'clock of a chilly morning...

...It may be that I am exaggerating the lasting impact of the Harvard events and the immediate responses of faculty and students to them...

...Although I care as little for the illegal occupation of buildings as I do for the clubbing of mules, I must also note the obvious: Both techniques do genuinely attract the attention of their targets —mules or university administrators...

...The rotc issue is a convenient example of just how badly a controversial topic can be managed...

...Is any good likely to come out of this demonstration that Harvard administrators are approximately as bright as other university administrators—a dreadful thing to say about anyone...

...Well, a bunch of authoritarian radicals, a tiny minority of the community, expelled several deans and occupied a building vital to university functioning and embarrassingly stuffed with confidential records and correspondence...

...As I write, the Harvard situation remains highly fluid and susceptible to sudden change...

...It is a yearning which is also manifesting itself in an incessant round of faculty meetings—now almost routinely attended by student representatives—ad hoc student-faculty discussions, and even such events as the study-in conducted by law students in the huge library of Langdell Hall...

...One suspects that until very recently, say April 10, almost nobody took seriously the "arbitrary" powers of the Corporation, the Board of Overseers, President Pusey, Dean Ford, or anyone else...

...But now the Harvard community has become suddenly aware of just how formidable are the legal powers vested in their administrative leaders and supervisors...

...This was all bad enough, but much worse followed...

...When reproved by a humanitarian bystander, he replied that the first necessity of the case was to get the animal's attention...

...Alternatively, they focus upon Harvard's real estate operations, relocation arrangements, expansion plans, and role in the community...

...Last month the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to turn rotc into an extracurricular activity, deny academic credit for its courses, and deprive the commanders of the campus rotc units of their faculty status...

...The law holds a person legally responsible for the natural and probable consequences of his acts...

...Presumably the Columbia example was sufficient to rule this tactic out...

...What is still more damaging is the fact that university administrators are taking to calling the police not as a last, but as a first resort...

...sds has played the role of the farmer who clubbed his balky mule over the head with a two-by-four...

...Then everybody's attention turned to speculation about what was wrong with the university...

...The audience audibly reproved the very few attempts that were made to interrupt speakers and reacted sharply to any attempt by the chairman, a history instructor, to enforce the time limits on statements so strictly as to cut off interesting points of view...

...It is quite possible that these fresh emotions will be dissipated in a round of tedious committee meetings...

...In the wake of the faculty action, Pusey made a series of unfortunate statements which in effect pledged the university on patriotic grounds to renegotiate the rotc contracts with the Pentagon in such a manner as to preserve rotc presence on the campus...

...Now on educational grounds, this action was culpably overdue...

...On the whole, I think the outlook is more cheerful and that there is a real chance that Harvard in the coming months will give some intelligent impetus to the nationwide attempt to convert universities into at least approximately democratic institutions, responsive to the wishes of their several constituencies...

...A still tinier minority has been deeply involved in questions of university legitimacy?the rights to govern of overseers, corporation members, deans, and president...

...In the next day or two, the faculty condemned impartially the illegal seizure of University Hall, the tactics of the police, and the wisdom of the administration in summoning them...

...To quote Dean Ford, their tactics were those of "storm troopers," though to judge from every account, exceedingly courteous examples of so grim a species...

...This too is a cause for cheer, for if there is any place where a close examination of a more legitimate structure of power has a chance to result in real change, it is right here in Cambridge...

...They concern, first of all, the university's relations to the Pentagon and the cia...

...The note of contempt for his colleagues that ran through the letter, as well as Ford's evident preference for a role as an agent of the president over that of faculty representative, rather suggest that Ford's pasage will be rocky in the months to come...

...Dean Ford reported his disagreement with his faculty's action, regretted that his position compelled him to report to the President faculty decisions with which he disagreed, and then suggested four possible ways of subverting the faculty's decision on rotc...

...So they do me...

...Possibly, even probably...

...And while the faculty resolution after the bust stopped short of outright personal condemnation of Pusey, it was sufficiently critical to start the faculty off in a good moral position, and it conspicuously refrained from the sort of reflexive support of the president accorded Pusey by the Board of Overseers...

...The behavior of the police and the hypocrisy of university administrations to the consequences of seeking police aid are significant arguments in support of the sds position...

...After the University Hall occupation the Old Mole, an underground radical paper published in the Boston area, published excerpts from a confidential letter by Dean Ford to President Pusey...

...They came to consider whether to strike indefinitely, extend the strike for three days, or suspend it for the same period while keeping a close watch on action by faculty and administration to abolish the rotc, check university expansion, install Black Studies, amnesty students, and cease financial reprisals against participants in an earlier demonstration...

...When asked to negotiate, they demanded surrender...

...Anyone who agrees with Pusey, Ford, or James Reston of the New York Times is likely to see police action in terms simple enough to be accessible to the meanest academic intelligence...

...If the building could have been peacefully evacuated, Harvard's traditional civility would once more have been vindicated...

...The likely beneficiaries of sds action will be the moderates and, if one is optimistic, the universities themselves...

...If President Pusey was unwilling to out-wait the demonstrators, he had a chance to break new ground and try yet a fourth technique, sds had voted nonviolent resistance to arrest or removal...