The Harvard Incubator
GILDER, GEORGE F.
Writers &Writing THE HARVARD INCUBATOR BY GEORGE F. GILDER s M teven Kelman is not very good at student politics. One gathers from his book, Push Comes to Shove (Houghton Mifflin, 287 pp.,...
...Though clearly absorbed in recording every hysterical inanity of that manic year and though generally self-effacing, they, together with whrb...
...The removal of rotc from campus might bring some ephemeral relief to student tenesmus...
...Kelman's inadequately documented case against the contemporary Crimson editors (they disregarded ypsl) seems motivated by personal animus and is further discredited by a tendentious critique of the Crimson as an institution...
...What does Kelman lack...
...It is hard to imagine a more balanced or more thorough account of the event...
...These questions are not as facetious as they seem...
...other less conscientious developers would exploit the growing Cambridge housing market...
...Its only weaknesses are inadequate analysis of the sds demands...
...He focuses on the strikers' self-indulgence: "Most of those who occupied University Hall, not to speak of virtually all of those thousands out on strike, positively enjoyed the experience...
...The strikers joined almost unanimously in declaring that they just would not tolerate the intervention on campus of crude lower class beings like the police, enforcing laws applicable to inferior social strata with far more compelling grievances...
...Harvard, like all universities, is economically dependent on subsidies and tax exemptions and needs the indulgence of the political order...
...but it would afford no more substantial benefit...
...M M is book is also briskly and entertainingly written on the whole, but perhaps has been too briskly and opportunistically published...
...or try to excel the can-you-top-this rhetoric of fbi infiltrators...
...Yet an apparently balanced and exhaustive chronicle of 1968-69 politics at the college, The Harvard Strike (Houghton Mifflin, 381 pp., $6.95), by four reporters from the student radio station, whrb, never so much as mentions Kelman or his organization...
...Stretches show too little attention to craft, and one chapter????the pseu-dohistorical analysis of the Crimson????is unfortunate...
...One waits with some trepidation as the larger incubator of affluent suburbia prepares to hatch its own elitist idiocies in 1972, to the predictable hostility of the rest of the country...
...One gathers from his book, Push Comes to Shove (Houghton Mifflin, 287 pp., $5.95) that he tried hard to break through on the Harvard political scene with his Young People's Socialist League (ypsl...
...Kelman is also trenchant in revealing the upper class orientation of the protesters, who substantially exceeded the average Harvard student in their family incomes...
...Kelman may possibly be right in his contention that it has always been as abjectly conformist a paper as it was in flacking for sds...
...Yet the absence of a repeat performance at Harvard this year does not indicate the triumph of Kelman's approach, ypsl remained incapable of effective competition with sds...
...There is a distinct New Left flavor, for example, to the belief of Democrats like Eugene McCarthy that their party????now that it is in a position to nominate andwar liberals and win????has become unworthy of the support they gave it in 1968, when it backed the war...
...and a bromidic final chapter that concludes that on the one hand there may be renewed violence at Harvard in 1969-70, but on the other hand, there may not (there wasn't...
...Nonetheless, no observer has captured more vividly the phantasmagoria of the New Left and its fellow-travelers????or related their activities more acutely to the real issues in American society????than Kelman in Push Comes to Shove...
...or tackle the swivel-hip ideologies of the Black Panthers...
...Idiocy may be nurtured in the isolation of our warm [Harvard] incubator, until finally, to the disbelief and incomprehension of the rest of the world, it hatches...
...then, of course, they could enjoy a new siege of protests against the university as a slumlord...
...The editor at Houghton, whom Kelman describes as a "good friend," would have served him better by saving him from such excesses...
...Beyond this sentiment, Kelman shows, the protests lacked any strong unifying motivation...
...A halt to the physical expansion of the university would merely hurt Harvard...
...The Harvard eruption, like many such university protests, would have brought material advantage to absolutely no one even if every one of its demands had been satisfied...
...For it appears that the kind of rational radicalism Kelman offers is decreasingly respected on the American Left...
...But the Harvard Leftists prefer to imagine their commodious Cambridge sanctuary is a product of immaculate conception that bankers, financial administrators, and businessmen are trying to contaminate by participation in the capitalist system????which, sds would have it, is actually dependent on Harvard...
...American radicalism, in fact, is now pervaded by the style of irrationality and self-indulgence which was manifested in the Harvard strike and which confounded and enraged Kelman and so many other citizens...
...they mar an otherwise devastating polemic with language that might well be quoted in some future speech by Spiro Agnew...
...qualified 17 times for the index of their book...
...Where students get pleasure from their mistakes (even if far-off others are paying the price), mistakes can accumulate without accountability...
...The result of third party efforts, moreover, will most likely be the reelection of Richard Nixon...
...excessive solemnity in reporting the inherently ridiculous...
...What is the future of a Harvard Socialist who is published by the Chicago Tribune but not by the student daily, the Crimson...
...This will allow the New Politicians to return to private life morally unscathed by electoral success...
...Student power in the university administration might gratify a few student politicians, but would bring debatable improvement to the educational process...
...It seems that despite his eminence as the most widely and prestigiously published Harvard '70 student, Kelman made less of a dent on his striking classmates than even Laurence E. Eichel, Kenneth W. Jost, Robert D. Luskin, and Richard M. Neustadt, the authors of The Harvard Strike...
...Kelman is most penetrating when he treats such discrepancies of pretenses and results...
...There they can regale cocktail parties with accounts of how their campaign demonstrated its moral and cultural superiority over the voters, whose sons????As a result, incidentally?may continue to be sent to Vietnam...
...Their argument for a third or fourth party usually focuses on "old politics" and bossism????i.e., the presence in leadership positions of poor and middle class Americans with bad taste in neckwear and insensitivity to the niceties of Jerry Rubin's constitutional exegesis...
...As he graduates he may find little more receptivity for his approach than he found at Harvard...
...The New Politics, one gathers, will see bright young suburbanites accede to the positions of power for which they are so clearly qualified by their moral superiority over union leaders and big city "bosses" who cannot finance campaigns out of their own pocketbooks????And who notice that William Kunstler is taking off his clothes to campaign for emperor...
...The students conveyed the impression that they would not be truly happy until the Harvard endowment was entirely devoted to low cost public housing...
...Is there any hope for him as he approaches his early 20s still unloved by his fellows and still unpublished in The Atlantic, Little Mole, Sports Illustrated, Carleton Miscellany and a number of other journals...
...But his case is presented so sweepingly and stridently that one wonders about his judgment on other questions, such as the neo-Nazi characteristics of sds leaders...
...Finally, Kelman won a speech competition and was chosen by a faculty committee to serve this June as a commencement speaker...
...The students' blithe ignorance of economic and political reality is most salient in their attitude toward university finances...
...But according to newspaper reports, even most of those seniors so insensitive to Harvard's role in the Mylai massacre that they attended graduation ceremonies sat silently as the faculty and parents applauded Kelman's attack on the New Left...
...Though published by Houghton Mifflin, too, The Harvard Strike is a work of nearly flawless professionalism...
...The "hatching of idiocy" from the Harvard incubator described by Kelman thus bears a heavy portent for our politics...
...If the strikers' purposes and assumptions were fantasy however, the results of their actions were all too real????further public hostility toward students and distraction from their one legitimate grievance: a monstrous and futile war...
...And the fantasy spirit of the strike goes marching on through American politics, even while the strike leaders return to the virility rites of their karate classes...
...It seems to have been rushed forth without scrupulous editing...
...To a great extent they were motivated by the proposition that Harvard students comprise an elite, imperiously exempt from the legal system of the society as a whole...
...Above all, one gathers, these financiers should avoid investment in enterprises that might show a profit...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 14
