On The Rack

Irwin Ross's leading article in the current number of the "Harvard Progressive" is one of greatest interest to the Harvard community. Discussing "The Strange Case of the Assistant Professors," he gives vigorous expression to a student view of the vital changes being wrought by the administrative appointment policy. This view, which has found similar expression in other student publications, can hardly be better put than in Mr. Ross's own words: "Undergraduates are naturally concerned with the threat to Harvard education, rather than with the more remote issues of faculty security and academic democracy. We are disturbed at the abrupt departure of many of Harvard's outstanding teachers. We dislike being deprived of brilliant lecturers and stimulating tutors. We resent the consequent impairment of educational standards. We feel, to put it bluntly, that we are being cheated." In developing this theme, Mr. Ross indulges in little special pleading for the known victims of what he calls "President Conant's slide-rule"--rather he looks into the future warning that "the elimination of an entire age group in the faculty is threatened--one which provides most of the experienced teaching available to undergraduates." While Mr. Ross devotes a good part of his analysis to this threat, he does not neglect other disturbing aspects of the administration's policy, including those he considers of less immediate concern to the student body.

Apart from the matters of emphasis Mr. Ross's article can be taken as expressing opinions widely held in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Members of the Faculty naturally feel special apprehension over matters directly involving their responsibility to the future of the University as a whole--all the more, perhaps, because they have been pointedly reminded that "when a department makes recommendations to the Dean on matters of personnel it is not acting as a faculty committee but as an informal group to whom the administration has turned for advice." At the same time the majority of them believe Harvard College to be the vital core of Harvard University and accordingly feel a primary responsibility to the undergraduate body. Of necessity many are now deeply troubled on this score.

Throughout his discussion Mr. Ross assumes that responsibility for Harvard's appointment policy rests upon President Conant alone. The assumption seems to be correct. It is clear at least that this policy differs at many points both in spirit and in method from that suggested in the report of the Committee of Nine. Though it is true that President Conant may find partial support in the Committee's recommendations, any insistence upon citations from the report can only make clearer that however admirable in substance, it was in form and in timing a political blunder of the first magnitude. Looking back upon the brief history of President Conant's "concentration-quotas," no member of the University should now feel surprise at the present unhappy outcome of the Committee's devoted labors; and none should despair that President Conant may, in due course, view the appointment problem in a wider perspective than appears to have been the case last year when he felt a need for action