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ending or continuing the student strike.
Judge Edward M. Viola ruled that arrested demonstrators must stand trial on criminal trespass charges, despite Harvard's formal request that the charges be dropped.
April 20: At another four-hour meeting. SDS members voted to "mill in" at University Hall. The mill-in was proposed as a "building tactic, and not as an ultimate step, one of the proponents said.
Faculty members conferred over the weekend in efforts to draw up a compromise version of the Afro demands that the Faculty might approve. Alex Inkeles said he would present such a revised version at the next Faculty meeting.
Members of the Corporation spoke to student gatherings in the various Houses to explain to Corporation's stand on ROTC, Harvard expansion policies, and the other strike issues.
April 21: Four hundred students took over University Hall for the afternoon in a mass mill-in that made normal administrative business impossible. The students talked and argued with deans and Faculty members, and did not try to force any administrators out of the building.
Afro produced another revision of its demand for greater student participation in the Afro-American Studies department. The new plan deleted controversial clauses in earlier proposals that would have placed students on tenure review committees and made tenure hearing records public.
The Admissions Office said that it had accepted 109 black students for the Harvard class of '73--nearly twice as many as it took for the class of '72.
April 22: The Faculty approved the plan presented by Afro for increasing students' role in governing the Afro-American Studies department. Under the plan, six students would join the seven Faculty members on the department's Standing Committee. When the department got a full complement of Faculty appointees, a new student-Faculty Executive Committee would take over control of the department. The Faculty reserved the right to review the program in 1971.
SDS members decided at a meeting to continue a leafleting campaign for several more days and postpone any more militant action until the Corporation had clarified some of its positions.
April 23: Henry Rosovsky, chairman of the committee that drafted Harvard's original report on Afro-American Studies, resigned from the department's Standing Committee. Rosovsky said that the Faculty's vote to add students to the committee exceeded the traditional academic guidelines laid down in his report.
SDS sent a letter to the Corporation demanding clarification of Corporation policy on ROTC, Harvard expansion, and similar issues. The SDS letter said the Corporation had five days to answer.
Students in several departments began circulating petitions asking for postponement of general exams.
The Corporation decided to change its traditional draft-deferment policy and let individual Faculty members request deferments for graduate students. The Corporation had previously allowed only simple statements of fact about the nature of the students' work.
April 24: President Pusey, in his first public appearance since the occupation, told a symposium at the Business School that "disruption and coercion has absolutely no place on this campus." Pusey said that unacceptable tactics were the main issue in the crisis and that "the kind of disruption that we've just experienced will not stop unless the communities themselves insist that they do stop."
The Faculty held the last of its twice-weekly emergency meetings and postponed a decision on restoring scholarships to Paine Hall demonstrators. Dean Peterson introduced a motion to refer the Paine Hall issue to the Committee of Fifteen, but the Faculty tabled the motion after spokesmen from the committee said they were not yet sure whether the committee wanted to consider the question.
Several Faculty members and Law professors said that they had spent several nights in Widener Library during the last week in hope of discouraging any demonstrators from destroying library books. The Faculty members--including Archibald Cox, Donald Fleming, and Herschel Baker--said they gave up the vigil after the Faculty passed Afro's proposal for the Afro-American Studies department.
April 25: Shortly after 11 a.m., 150 SDS demonstrators marched into the University Planning Office and fired questions at planning officer Harold L. Goyette. The demonstrators stayed for nearly an hour, ripped model buildings from a planning office table map, and left before any of the University policemen present asked them to go.
Engineers began a study of the University Hall Faculty room, claiming that beams supporting the 100-year-old room had been dangerously strained by "exceedingly high occupancy rates in the room on April 9 and 10."
April 26: Four students from SDS appeared on a panel discussion with a member of the Corporation, a University administrator, and two Faculty members. After three hours of argument over ROTC, Harvard expansion plans, and University investment policy, the panel broke up still disagreeing on virtually all the points.
The Radcliffe Judicial Board said that the 19 Cliffies who had chosen to organize panel discussions instead of going on probation for the Paine Hall demonstration would have to go on probation anyway. A letter from the Judicial Board said that Board members judged the student-run panels to be "very unsatisfactory," and therefore ruled that the girls should be placed on probation.
April 28: Slightly less than 100 Harvard and Radcliffe students marched on Mrs. Bunting's Fay House office to protest the Radcliffe Judicial Board's decision to place the Cliffies on probation. The students trooped up the stairs into Mrs. Bunting's office, shouted obscenities at her, and left after an hour.
The Corporation said that it was "fully committed to carrying out in both letter and spirit" the Faculty's resolution to deny ROTC any special privileges. President Pusey also said he would name two students and several Faculty members to the Corporation's special ROTC negotiating committee.
The results of a University-wide referendum on reviving the student strike showed that 3222 student--about 74 per cent of the total vote--voted against a strike, while 945 voted for a resumed strike.
April 29: The committee of Fifteen divided itself into three "working groups"--#1 to study the causes of the April crisis, #2 to hold hearing on individual students offenses during the occupation, and #3 to recommend long-term changes in University governing systems. The committee also set out a hearing procedure under which Working Group #2 would receive complaints from the deans and then hear defense statements from accused students. But many students involved in the demonstration said they would not cooperate with the committee.
The trial of the 174 people arrested in University Hall opened with Prosecution witnesses--including Deans Glimp and Watson--testifying that the students had disobeyed orders to leave the building.
April 20: Defense attorneys for the 174 accused demonstrators asked trial judge M. Edward Viola to drop criminal trespass charges against their clients. The attorneys argued that the students had not heard warnings to leave the building before students had a chance to get out by themselves, and that the prosecution could not prove that all those arrested had actually been inside University Hall.
The Faculties of the Law and Business Schools gave final approval to a special four-year program leading to a joint JD-MBA degrte. The two schools voted to start the program in September.
May
May 1: Judge M. Edward Viola found all but four of the 174 University Hall demonstrators guilty of criminal trespass. Viola gave each of the convicted trespassers a $20 fine; 140 of them said they would appeal. Viola freed two students who said they were arrested outside the Hall and postponed judgment on two others who had not entered the Hall until several hours after Dean Ford's warning about criminal trespass charges.
SDS voted nearly unanimously to take mass action to obstruct the Committee of Fifteen's disciplinary hearings.
May 2: After SDS had voted to support a Teamsters' Union strike against Gordon Linen, 40 SDS members and sympathizers unloaded packages of line from an HSA truck trying to make linen deliveries at Dunster House. Several students also jostled an HSA representative in the Dunster House courtyard. Cambridge police began preparing criminal complaints against students allegedly involved in the incidents.
President Pusey went to television to answer question from "Meet the Press" panelists. Pusey reiterated his frequently-stated stand that the use of violence was the central issue in Harvard's crisis, and he urged the Federal government to stay out of campus affairs.
May 5: A pre-dawn fire charred part of a classroom in Shannon Hall--the ROTC headquarters at Harvard. City fire officials said that the fire was deliberately set.
A second Faculty member of the Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies quit the committee as a result of the Faculty's vote to give students a bigger role in running the department. Daniel M. Fox, assistant professor of History, said he was leaving the committee not because he opposed the idea of student participation, but because of "distaste for the process by which the Faculty's decision [on Afro-American Studies] was reached."
May 6: The Corporation announced plans to construct about 1100 units of low and middle income housing in Boston, and said that similar plans for Cambridge would be forthcoming soon.
The Faculty, in response to SDS threats to disrupt the Committee of Fifteen, unanimously passed a motion saying that it would "deplore" and "condemn" any attempts at disruption. The Faculty also approved the Wolff Committee's reports on the future of the Grad School of Arts and Science, with its proposals for cutting GSAS enrollment and giving more financial aid to GSAS students.
May 7: The Chief of Naval Personnel in Washington sent a telegram to the 21 students in the Harvard class of '73 who had signed up for the Naval ROTC program. The Navy said that it would not run a ROTC program here next year, and it urged the 21 students to enroll in some other college where Naval ROTC was still being given.
Figures from the Admissions Office showed that the April crisis had not cut the number of students deciding to come to Harvard. About 85 per cent of the students accepted for the class of '73 said they planned to enroll. The acceptance figure for the class of '72 had been about the same. But Radcliffe reported an 8-10 per cent decline in the number of girls accepting places for the Radcliffe class of '73. 'Cliffe administrators blamed the drop on competition from newly-coeducational Yale.
The Soc Rel faculty met and approved a list of courses for next year, but postponed indefinitely a vote on Soc Rel 148 and 149.
May 8: President Pusey testified before a Congressional committee considering tougher Federal legislation against college rioters. Pusey urged the committee to let the colleges handle their troubles by themselves.
Nine Harvard students ordered to appear before the Committee of Fifteen's disciplinary hearing boards said they would not go. The students had been named in complaints filed by Harvard deans.
The Admissions Office followed up the Navy telegram to Naval ROTC students in the class of '73 with a letter of its own. The Harvard letter said that even though the Navy might not conduct ROTC here next year, the University was still eager to have the students attend and would give financial help to any of them that needed it.
May 11: Seymour Martin Lipset, the second Harvard official to testify before a Congressional committee investigating student protests, said that colleges needed administrators with "political savvy" to handle potential disruptions. Lipset criticized administrators for failing to learn the lesson offered by Columbia and Berkeley--that bringing in police alienates students and faculty.
The Law School committee that had been investigating grade reform finally released a tentative report. It recommended that the school reduce the importance of first-year exams and that it offer first-year students the option of being graded pass-fail.
May 12: President Pusey appointed a five-member. Faculty committee chaired by Paul A. Freund to investigate "possible misconduct" by Faculty members and teaching fellows during the April crisis. Pusey said the committee would not impose any punishment, but would only "collect information and establish the facts" about Faculty behavior.
The Committee of Fifteen said it would release its punishment recommendations by Commencement at the latest.
A judge in Cambridge District Court refused to issue warrants against two students allegedly involved in the disruption of an HSA lined delivery. The judge said that there was insufficient evidence against one of the students, and that a preliminary complaint against the other had been withdrawn by the HSA.
May 13: SDS voted once more to disrupt the next session of hearings by the Committee of Fifteen. Resolutions proposing various kinds of Commencement protests were discussed but none came to a vote.
The Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies met for the first since early April, with six students joining the seven Faculty members on the committee. The students--three from Afro and three from potential concentrators in Afro-American Studies--had been added to the committee by the Faculty's April 22 vote. The committee also had two new Faculty members to replace the two who had resigned after the Faculty's vote.
The Soc Rel faculty decided to hold a secret mail ballot to determine the fate of Soc Rel 148 and 149. Roger Brown, the department chairman, said the mail ballot plan was the best way to accurately test department sentiment on the radical courses.
Cambridge police sent Harvard a bill for $5007 for "overtime police expenses on April 10," and the Boston force sent its own $1226 bill. Harvard administrators said they had not heard whether the State Police would also ask for payment for use of its 200 men during the raid on University Hall.
May 14: The Committee of Fifteen held disciplinary hearings and heard testimony from several deans, but none of the students summoned to appear came to the hearings. A group of SDS members tried to get into the tenth-floor room in Holyoke Center where the hearings were going on, but locked doors and police guards kept them out. The students then ringed the center with a picked line.
May 15: SDS members marched once more to Holyoke Center in an attempt to disrupt the Committee of Fifteen's disciplinary hearings. They rode elevators to the tenth-floor, but they got no further than the hallway outside the elevator. There they read a statement to a few of the Faculty members on the committee and then left. Later they went to University Hall and argued with acting dean Edward Mason for about half an hour.
The Law Faculty approved the long-awaited grade reform plan. The new plan gave first year students the choice of three different grading systems--pass-fail, high satisfactory-low-fail, of the old system of nine letter grades.
The new committee investigating Faculty misconduct devised a system for processing complaints against Corporation appointees. The Committee said it would send letters to Faculty members accused of misconduct and then let the accused people explain their action to the committee.
May 17: President Pusey and most of Harvard's dean went to Cincinnati for the annual convention of the Associated Harvard Alumni (AHA). At a morning meeting, the AHA Board of Directors passed a resolution commending the administration and urging that student involved in future violent demonstration should be expelled. But the statement also said that Harvard needed "open-minded consideration of creative solutions" to end the current crisis. Pusey spoke to 1000 alumni at a convention banquet and told them that radical students were trying to turn the University into a political battleground.
At one of the convention's afternoon panel discussions, Dean Ford made his first public appearance since his illness. Ford said at the end of the discussion that the altered Afro-American Studies department was "a serious mistake."
Carl D. Offner, a graduate student in Mathematics, was sentenced to a year in a jail for assaulting Dean Watson during the occupation of University Hall. The city prosecutor asked for a six-month sentence, but trial judge M. Edward Viola overruled him and imposed the one-year sentence.
May 19: A committee of Design School students and faculty asked the University to build 500 units of housing--half for Harvard personnel and half for low-income Cambridge families--on a site near the Divinity School. Current University plans called for 160 units of faculty housing on the site.
The Cambridge City Council gave tentative approval to an ordinance that would limit off-campus living by students by prohibiting more than two non-related people to live in one apartment.
May 20: The Radcliffe College
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