Harvard and Protest

IN THE aftermath of Columbia's turmoil, an obvious question arises: Could it happen here? Could Harvard have an explosion of similar proportions? At Columbia there was an appalling lack of flexibility on the part of the president and trustees; the university also had no machinery for involving students and faculty in the planning and decision-making processes. Yet would Harvard's Corporation be any more flexible in the face of reasonable opposition from the community, and from students and faculty, to a policy-decision? Harvard's decentralized government and its community-minded Office for Civic and Governmental Affairs would probably never permit an apartheid-gymnasium issue to reach the Corporation in the first place. But in the face of general increase in student agitation, does Harvard need to adjust its constitution? Or does the current decision-making system provide adequate means for any community member to express his thoughts?

Harvard's nearest brush with disintegration occurred last fall when over 200 students sat-in and imprisoned a Dow Chemical Company recruiter. The immediate situation and the later disciplinary response were both potentially volatile, but in the end both reached settlements satisfactory to the great majority of everyone involved. If a few radicals had hoped the Dow episode might ignite student demands for structural change in the University, they were disappointed. If they expected that participation at the sit-in would radicalize the students' outlook on society, they failed. For Harvard authorities did not permit the confrontation to become angry, violent, and a means of polarizing opinion.

Fred L. Glimp, Dean of the College, handled this immediate situation with the help of some students, senior tutors, House Masters, and junior faculty. (President Pusey and Franklin Ford, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, happened to be out of town that day, but upon learning of the sit in neither man attempted to take control of the situation away from the hands of the amiable, patient college deans and their House helpers.) Glimp rejected offers to bring in Cambridge police, tear gas, and other forms of mechanical coercion. He felt the use of police would only inflame the situation and decided to use it only if the sit-in continued indefinitely. As it turned out, after seven hours, the students voted to leave.

The Administrative Board, which handles all major student disciplinary and academic problems, next had to determine an appropriate disciplinary response. Its one precedent was the obstruction of Defense Secretary McNamara the year before, and in that case no one was punished. John U. Monro, then Dean of the College, avoided action because this type of political protest, though "intolerable," represented a first for the College; and students had no way of knowing what reaction to expect. Monro told the Faculty that another such protest would be handled severely, but he failed to communicate this message to most students.

By recommending probation for 74 Dow demonstrators but severance for no one, the Administrative Board meted out a sharp warning rather than real punishment. As Dean Ford said at the time, "The imprisonment itself was reprehensible; but there are a number of mitigating circumstances for the demonstrators, and so I would like to see the most lenient possible action that will serve as an effective deterrent against this sort of thing in the future." The Board's decision passed the Faculty by a 5-1 margin and proved to be a practical and politic decision. It balanced leniency with a reaffirmation of the Faculty's liberal protection of free speech and free movement.

The Dow episode indicated how the Faculty, practically speaking, can function only as a ratifying body during such a crisis. As one Economics professor recently remarked: "We're all amateurs at parliamentary procedure; we have no caucuses, no ad hoc committees to handle crises, no system of feasible debate."

Initiative responsibility, then, rested with the deans and the Administrative Board. During the five-day period between the demonstration and the disciplinary decision, pressures fell upon the Board from all sides. Some Faculty members threatened resignation if any students were severed; others demanded punishment. Students were equally ambivalent, but nevertheless expressed their opinions intensely, frequently, and loudly.

THE communication among students, Faculty, and Administration was more free-flowing than at any time in recent years. These factions shared a common hope that the Dow controversy would not expand into a larger conflict. Very few people wanted the issue to tear up the campus, nor did anyone wish to leave Harvard despite its imperfections. Barrington Moore Jr., Lecturer on Sociology and a demonstration supporter, wrote:

As students and teachers we have no objective interest in kicking down the far from sturdy walls that still do protect us. For all their faults and inadequacies the universities, and especially perhaps Harvard, do constitute a moat behind which it is still possible to examine and indict the destructive trends in our society.

There is no indication in this statement, nor in the opinions and actions of the vast majority of students during the remainder of the school year, that reconstruction or revolution in the University structure is a serious goal. No student has yet defied the Dow julgment with similar obstructionist tactics, despite the Administration's refusal to spell out guidelines on unacceptable demonstrations and their consequences. Dow was primarily a symbolic protest aimed against the Vietnam horror and against the unresponsiveness of established authority to anti-war demands. The students' basic target was the war, not the University.

The Columbia conflict, in contrast, was not at all symbolic; the demonstrators' grievances at the university were real and targets included university decision-making in real estate, discipline, and accessibility of senior faculty. Columbia's self-perpetuating Board of Trustees exerts control over faculty and students on most university issues of consequence. Thus Columbia's enormous real estate ventures, which, according to James Ridgway, account for at least half the university's endowment funds, were not open to public or faculty scrutiny, review, or advice. Nor was there any faculty intermediary authority between the administration and the President and Trustees when the students began to protest real estate practices in Harlem. Disciplinary decisions came from the top, rather than from a faculty accessible to student viewpoints. And the President was the one who called in the New York police who inevitably proved to be unmanageable.

(Students and Faculty at Harvard do not participate in investment decisions either, but here the situation is not inflammatory. Investments are controlled by the treasurer, George F. Bennett, who is responsible only to the Corporation, which may merely fire him if it does not like his investments. It so happens that none of Harvard's past three treasurers have been real-estate minded; the University's total real-estate investments, loans, and mortgages amount to $16.5 million, or 1.6 per cent of its total endowment investments. And these holdings, according to University tax manager Henry H. Cutler, are scattered around the country and based on Government credit or Federal guarantees rather than on mortgage benefits.

Harvard does publish an annual financial report, specifying where its investments are. Although community influence does not directly participate in determining investment questions, there are indications that Harvard may currently switch its low-return Federal bonds to roughly comparable investments in Roxbury. The treasurer's job is made difficult by Harvard's system of financial solvency for each school: his decision to switch specific endowment investments from an unpopular company to a popular one might lower the revenue of the unlucky faculty that had originally received the endowment.)

EXTRALEGAL protest over Columbia's investment policies differed from the symbolic Dow demonstration; Columbia's faculty, students, and trustees have held irreconciliable opinions on basic questions in a community where there was little confidence in the capacity of the President and trustees to govern. In this climate of mistrust, a participatory democracy (i.e., various student-faculty checks on the trustees) must exist to prevent extralegal action.

At present, Columbia's 23 trustees are accountable to no one but themselves. All except the six alumni-elected trustees serve life terms. Unless real power is delegated down to faculty or students, then the whole body of trustees should be elected for set terms by faculty, administration, students, and alumni. Otherwise, this board, in which all real power is located, will never make decisions reflecting a changing university and community, and inevitable, ugly, confrontations will arise.

Columbia's students had reached the point where they recognized that polite and relevant protests got nowhere with the authorities; faculty and students alike had bristled over the Morningside gymnasium issue for years. When they were not listened to on a reasonable issue, the students resorted to force.

At Harvard, there is no concentration of power in the hands of the President and Governing Boards. The Corporation, which holds ultimate au- thority, primarily approves faculty budgets; matters of educational policy and budgetary priorities rest with each faculty and dean through a system of committees and departments.

It is hard to tell exactly where power lies within the Administration and Faculty departments because of their interchanging roles as proposer and approver. Administrators' dependency upon the goodwill of the Faculty, and the Faculty's ultimate sanction through threat of resignation, tend to make the system operate without consistently devisive controversy. (The Corporation, which delegates away its policy-making role, also operates on a consensus basis--some Fellows cannot recall a single vote within the body.) This system is sensitive and vulnerable to pressure; as the Dow solution indicated, majorities do not necessarily matter so much when a minority is strongly aroused.

In this system of delegation and checks, student opinion can have considerable weight on any given issue. The sources of substantive power--the Administration and Faculty members--are accessible to students with only a few exceptions. Black students this spring have obtained a new field of concentration in Afro-American studies; the Harvard Policy Committee has successfully promoted a fourth-course pass-fail plan, an extension of the independent study program, a reduction in the language department, and an elimination of the junior general examinations in History; an ad hoc committee issued a report recommending weekday parietal extensions from 2 p.m. to midnight and had the plan approved.

There are of course other areas in which students have not been so successful, notably in inter-departmental and more socially relevant programs. But current student frustrations do not stem primarily from these shortcomings. One result of the delegation system is that it foils efforts to obtain power, run the College, or at least be an integral part in the decision-making. A student subcommittee, for example, will never be independent of the full committee's judgement regardless of the merits of a decision, just as a full committee containing students will not be independent of the Faculty's vote (which would usually be rubber stamp if students did not participate).

In addition, the Faculty and Administration both generally agree that students should remain in advisory capacities anyway. If a student has relevant opinions on a specific proposal, a committee may invite him to testify, but never to remain later and join in a binding vote. The HPC this year succeeded in all its substantive educational proposals before the Faculty Committee on Educational Polity, but it failed in its attempt to gain regular membership on the CEP.

FOR students who advocate "democratic" control of the University, not even this unattainable committee representation is sufficient. For they do not want a part in the decision-making process unless it would help produce a transformation of the University into a new and independent force against the trends of today's society. This collective program--of turning the University into an entity for coordinated social good--falls flat because Harvard is not a political or even a functional entity.

Its decentralization assures that decisions on most matters except physical growth (which is handled largely by a University-wide committee) are not applicable to all parts of the University. (One University-wide policy is Harvard's ban on classified research.)

As one professor aptly stated during the Dow discussions, "The University is a hyperheaded thing if not a monster." No one can speak or act for it in a political fashion, and this reality is frustrating to direct-action reformists.

Advocates of community responsibility in the University often contardictorily espouse support for a student's democratic utopia also, in which the individual may decide his own social regulations. For Harvard to permit as many students who wish to live off campus to do so, for example, would be detrimental to Cambridge families who are least able to afford the rent-competition.

The heavily black areas to the south in east of Dunster House would be hardest hit by the student influx into the market. The President's Assistant for Civic and Governmental Affairs constantly receives concerned letters from Cambridge residents and politicians over student off-camplus living. The student accepts a community responsibility when he enters Harvard, just as Harvard can be said to accept a responsibility to the Cambridge community for housing the 1200 minors it invites here every fall.

The needs of student power in this case, as in many others, are peculiar to students rather than something shared with all people.

Harvard's size and complex nature makes it impractical to have a participatory democracy in University affairs for students and, to some degree, for Faculty. That is not to say that student pressure should not be exerted. Nor does it mean that protest over substantive differences is not a valid part in the University's decision-making process.

It does mean, however, that the smallness of Harvard's full-time professional administration and the ease of student-Faculty-Administration dialogue are a major reason why Harvard holds together in times of crisis and functions flexibly otherwise. Without its decentralized framework, Harvard would need a larger non-academic administration which would result in greater isolation of students.

The Dow protest, which demonstrated the value of a loose administrative structure, also illustrated the difficulty of predicting what issues will be provocative enough to generate students' use of force. The protest against University "war complicity" was definitely secondary to opposition against the destructive war itself.

Because there was no deep split on a University issue over Dow, the student use of force can be attributed to the University's failure to clarify in advance what its sanctions were. Yet even now, the Administration does not want to define the limits of protests and their consequences because it would rather rely on students memory than on tight rules that may backfire when students collect together out of strong feelings. Therefore, as memories fade, a new crisis may arise.

James Q. Wilson's words about riots hold relatively true for student obstruction, too:

Since people are most likely to feel strongly about symbolic or intangible issues, and since government [or the University] can only deal slowly [if at all] with such matters, the probability of at least disorder and possibly violence is likely to increase over time.

Protests of this nature, then, are bound to recur. It is a truism that the lack of democratic voice leads to illegal student force, which in turn leads to changes in the University. Neither student power nor student freedom is a guarantee against student force. "It is naive to think that student feelings can be channeled into institutions," one University official remarked recently.

The case for dealing with reform within Harvard's system of government is not to be made on grounds that it will stop further protest. It should be made on the grounds that the basis for changing conditions are reasonable.

Harvard is not under pressure to change its system of government for the sake of change. Most students have given no indication that the University structure should be rebuilt, and no students--not even the "red-hot radicals" have demonstrated any tendency since Dow to step beyond their rhetoric on campus matters