Harvard Students on Trial

We should not be too proud. We talk of our dedication to democratic ideals, to the "free market place of ideas," to freedom of speech and of the press. And that of course is what we are here at Harvard to do: talk, think, understand.

Many great men have dedicated their lives to thinking, talking, and understanding and in the process have opened a route for others, the activists, to act intelligently on the basis of their perceptions. The eternal conflict between the activist and the academic in each of us will never be neatly resolved; at best we will be a little of each.

The activist glorifies the act: man is the sum of his acts, what he understands doesn't count, it's what he does which is the ultimate measure of the man. The academic protects his vested interest with equal fervor: the action must be subordinate to understanding.

Living in the confines of academia tends to frustrate the activist in each of us. We are here to learn, they argue, later we will be able to act intelligently. But now is always the moratorium.

Some students, according to President Pusey, are dangerously close to forgetting their academic nature and falling into unthinking activism. Pusey uses the recent Mallinckrodt demonstration as conclusive evidence. But is the academic community in general really so active, or do we simply make a great deal of a few symbolic gestures?

Martin Peretz asked why there was no American Student Union against the draft and the war of half a million students at the least. It was a disturbing challenge. Why, indeed, is there no massive student protest of the war? The CRIMSON poll suggests that a significant number of seniors were considering either leaving the country or going to jail in order to avoid induction. These are pretty drastic acts. The poll also showed that 94 per cent of the sample was against the present U.S. policy in Vietnam. But why are Harvard anti-war demonstrations so meager, so self-conscious, so temperate?

I suggest that the answer is that we students at Harvard are academics first and activists second. But that's logical you say; after all, the college experience is primarily intellectual. Here we are back again at the internal dialogue between Thought and Action. It's not that easy. The real world eventually invades the sanctity of academia: military training on campus, defense grants, weaponry courses at the Business School, the draft ranking system, and the threat of induction immediately following graduation. The student is being acted upon, why should he refrain from acting?

"They," The Man, whatever you want to call the representatives of the Establishment, doesn't want you to act. He's worried about the potential of organized student protest. There are a lot of students in the United States and it would be hard to put them all in jail without disturbing their parents. Besides, once out of college, where is the Left in the United States? It's hard to find; Socialist candidates are something of a joke, and many radical graduates return to the campuses because they aren't appreciated in the outside world.

At this point, American students are probably the only organized constituency of a radical movement; they are the great hope and greater disappointment of the anti-war movement. Why is this, how have they been bought off? We have been hoodwinked by the Puseys of the world who say that this college experience is to increase our understanding and to act on only later. But many of us understand that the war is wrong. We promise that we will act as soon as we graduate: we will go to jail or leave the country, or feign mental or physical sickness, pretend to have "got religion" and go to the Divinity School, or really put one over on them and promise to be teachers, go to the Ed School, and then quit when the war is over. Let's be honest with ourselves, we've been bought, and bought cheap at that.

Why wait until we have graduated? Why wait until they have us dispersed, spread out all over the country. Why wait until they can pick us off one by one. Why pretend that the time isn't now. Of course, it's inconvenient: there are exams and theses to write, but then one could ask why there are exams?

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Harvard students should not be too proud. They have us so well trained that even when we see all the ideals we are taught to respect and cherish broken and flaunted in our faces in our own backyard, we don't act. I refer to the manner in which Cambridge and Boston police have managed to arrest 32 people for selling Avatar without so much as a whimper from the Harvard community. What were they arrested for? For not having a peddling permit? But didn't I hear that they had tried to obtain the permits? Oh, but it's obscene is it? Who are you kidding? Do you mean those colorful four letter words in the center-fold a couple of weeks ago? How long has it been since you've been into any of the newspaper stores around here and taken a whiff of the girlie magazines, the lesbian photo-replays, the glossy paper-back business? Why are they still being sold if Avatar is supposed to be obscene? Oh that's it, there is a lot of money tied up in the glossies and there are powerful publishing tycoons behind them.

Did you see the most recent Avatar, the Children's Issue? Because if you didn't you should buy it and decide for yourself whether it is obscene in comparison with the girlie mags. If it isn't obscene then the police are cracking down on political obscenity and not literary obscenity. Perhaps local officials want to crack down on the mouthpiece of the hippies. But where is there a law that says you can harass a segment of the population you disapprove of? Haven't we been fighting that kind of thing in the South? Oh, but local politicians get mileage out of cracking down on hippies--those evil people who push and slip things to innocent little girls.

There is another, more subtle, more insidious excuse for not worrying about Avatar's fate. "It's a bad magazine, the writing is poor, and there's that kook who thinks he's God in it." To begin with Avatar has improved immensely and personally I really like the rag. Go into the University Restaurant some afternoon when a new issue has just come out. Everyone has a copy and many a professor has been caught chuckling over its refreshing tone.

But that isn't the point. Whether or not Avatar is written well or not is not grounds for its being suppressed. Important issues never come conveniently packaged. Let's suppose that Avatar is the worst written of the underground newspapers (which it is not). Who is to say that tomorrow some Cambridge magnate might not decide that the CRIMSON is offensive and badly written. The parallel is admittedly a bad one because Harvard University wields a big stick in town and the local officials wouldn't want to tangle with Harvard Law professors over the issue. The point is, however, that the reason they would never crack down on the CRIMSON is because it doesn't deserve to be cracked down upon (a pity) but even if it did represent an affront to public mores, they wouldn't dare touch us because of the power behind us.

Avatar does not have the power. They have little or no backing. They are in trouble financially, all their editors have been arrested, they are at the end of their shoestring operation. And they looked like an easy target for repression. I'm first Harvard undergraduate has been arrested for selling Avatar, and there is some talk about getting together a group of students and Faculty to bring attention to the clear infringement on the freedom of the press.

What interests me especially about the Avatar case is that students who participate in disruptive demonstrations are constantly asked by more moderate elements of our society why they don't present their complaints through regular channels. The people who built Avatar from nothing were using one of these legitimate channels of expression which are guaranteed by the bill of rights--the freedom of the press. And then all of a sudden these hippies, these malcontents find that the legitimate channels are clogged with petty political hog wash and pedantic restrictions. If every effort the anti-Establishment makes to express itself through legal channels is thwarted, let's not be surprised next time it resorts to illegality.