Steve Kaplan Ken Glazier

KEN GLAZIER lives in a cramped single room on the fifth floor of Kirkland House. When I first went puffing up the narrow stairway to see him, I found a plastic dime-store sign on his door that read in mock-heroic, mock-executive terms "Kenneth M. Glazier." Above the sign, a little jingle about Great men from a Chinese fortune cookie was pasted. When I entered the room to arrange an interview, he tried to pawn off his old furniture on me. And when the first interview had been set up, he cancelled it in order to take a bartending job that afternoon and leave this university out of hock. Ken Glazier, former chairman of the Student-Faculty Advisory Committee, had never learned the fine points on the Harvard student-politico game.

Now Steve Kaplan, last year's president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, lives in a spacious quad on the second floor of the Leverett Towers. The elevator stops at his front door. While he too tried to unload furniture, the idea slid nicely into the course of conversation. Steve Kaplan has been a Harvard politician for four years.

As the two major student government leaders, both developed their own style for meeting Harvard's political crises this year. Both Kaplan and Glazier approached the changing political scene with a sense of practicality (i.e. business sense--witness the furniture) and few of the notions that in the past have doomed student government at Harvard to endless debates over whether girls should stay in the rooms legally or illegally after midnight.

In details, their styles flare away to separate poles, Glazier calls Kaplan, "Kaplan." Kaplan calls Glazier "Ken." Together they forged a coordinated student government attack on University problems for the first time in a decade.

This year was a political year, a year of confrontation, and the traditional Harvard politician fighting for parietals and girls in the dining room faded in the encounter.

Following the Dow incident last year, which seems farther and farther away as history telescopes before the strike, the Student-Faculty as both an advisory board and a political forum. Stanley Hoffmann originated the idea of SFAC as a place for the "rational and reasonable" discussion of the issues that he pleaded for this year after the bust.

On Hoffmann's recommendation, Glazier ran for SFAC from Kirkland House. This was the first time he had sought any student government position at Harvard. "I don't believe in student government in the traditional terms, and I would never run for HUC or HPC," Glazier said last week crumped down on the floor of his barren room. "SFAC seemed to be something different. That's why I ran."

Though the SFAC mandate was open through the Spring and into the beginning of this Fall, Glazier admits that he never considered it as anything more than Hoffmann's rational and reasonable forum. "People like to look at SFAC as a cure-all but it wasn't. The problems of this University are too deep. What the committee can do and did do is establish an extensive forum where issues can come out ad nauseum."

"The problem that SFAC encountered," he continued, "was transmitting the discussions that went on there to the University as a whole. The people in SFAC knew this and I don't know the answer for it."

SFAC did not need a clean-cut spokesman as much as it demanded a chairman who was acceptable to all sides. In the long debates, where Oscar Handlin lined up against Alex Keyssar, the Committee generated its own publicity. Glazier was a moderator more than a leader.

THE Undergraduate Council began last year without the emotional surge of the Dow incident. Everyone expected another year of parietal bickering, but Kaplan and the new HUC--which included active radicals for the first time--turned from the eternal struggle in the middle of the Spring. In May, the Committee on Houses passed its parietal extensions anyway.

After parietals, the HUC faced the choice of escalating its fight with the COH to bringing girls into the dining halls every night or revamping the HUC image, making student government relevant to the shifting student concern for political issues.

"We didn't know what we could do realistically," Kaplan said. "Students didn't perceive of the HUC as being a student government. The parietals obsession had made us mono-focused. The elections were indirect through the House Committees. And people at Harvard inherently don't like to feel that others represent them--they feel that they are capable of representing themselves. Besides, there was no reason for anyone to do anything with us."

Even greater than the problem of establishing legitimacy with the students was finding a place in the Harvard power structure. Unlike the new SFAC, which is a Faculty subcommittee, the HUC has never had the power to place its resolutions on the agenda in Faculty meetings.

Approval of any HUC resolutions and even consideration by the Faculty or administration depended first on getting an appointment with Dean Watson, Glimp, or Ford and second on convincing them that the HUC proposal was in line with what they wanted done. In short, the HUC, with a few exceptions, had been resigned to the task of working out the details of administration plans.

As president of the HUC, Kaplan had moved into one of the most obscure public positions at Harvard. At the beginning of the year, Dean Glimp told one of the HUC members, "I ht ink you boys ought to make a new student center your big project this year."

The first time Kaplan met President dent Pusey last fall, Pusey began the 15-minute interview saying, 'So you're the new student council president." Kaplan had led HUC for eight months at the time.

In the Spring of 1968, the HUC had requested student seating on the Committee of Houses and the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP), the Faculty sub-committee which shapes educational policy. HUC's conservative proposals for a minority position on these committees were flatly rejected, but an indication of the shift in its status this year can be seen in the fact that these are now the conservative position in the debate of the Fainsod Committee on Faculty restructuring.

The total rejection of the seating proposal in the Spring brought more publicity to the Undergraduate Council, and more important, gave members of the HUC a much better indication of where they stood on the Harvard ladder--at the bottom.

When the academic year 1968-69 began in September, both Kaplan and the radical members of HUC who often drew his Kennedy liberalism to the left realized that the Council lacked legitimacy to do anything; working on that assumption, they decided to do everything.

At the second meeting of the year on October 1, the ROTC issue came before the Council three weeks before SFAC took up the issue and five weeks before SDS started its abolish ROTC campaigning.

"I really think we initiated the ROTC discussion." Kaplan said. "We said that we feel is an area that should be discussed in the University and we discussed it."

The extended debates in the HUC over the wording of ROTC resolution brought HUC its first continuously heavy publicity outside of the parietals area in the CRIMSON. Using a fact sheet developed by HUC, the Student Faculty Advisory Committee also worked out its resolution which finally passed at the Faculty meeting in February.

By the middle of November, ROTC had become Harvard's political issue of the year--though some administrators and Faculty members did not discover the fact until early April. The SDS campaign to abolish ROTC, the YPSL petition, the HUC and SFAC resolutions, the HRPC audit which asked for the end of academic credit, and the CEP modification of the SFAC resolution spread over a political spectrum by which most students measured themselves.

Paralleling the definition of a political spectrum, however, was a more subtle definition of student government. The position calling for reducing ROTC to the status of an extracurricular committee picked up the label "SFAC-HUC-HRPC resolution"--an alphabetical hodge-podge that indicated student solidarity gainst the present status of ROTC at Harvard.

In the technical problems of differentiating between the CEP and the joint SFAC-HUC-HRPC positions, Kaplan and Glazier got together to write the first of three joint student government statements the week of the Paine Hall Faculty meeting to debate ROTC.

After the CEP rewrote the SFAC resolution trying to make it more acceptable to conservative Faculty members, "I realized it wasn't any good and Kaplan simultaneously said that he didn't like it," Glazier said. They wrote the first statement together and called Ken Kaufman (chairman of HRPC, the third major student government organization) to get him to sign it." Glazier said.

At a press conference called before the Paine Hall meeting by Dean Ford, Kaplan and Glazier walked in and read off their statement before a surprised Ford who had talked with Glazier only once before for 15 minutes while signing papers in his office.

Before the Paine Hall sit-in and the subsequent probation for 125 students, Kaplan and Glazier had known one another only through a loose friendship in the Crimson Key. Through Paine Hall and the winter, the increased political activity drew the two politically together. Although they had never cooperated as chairmen of the HUC and SFAC, their areas of concern began to overlap and more.

Glazier, straight - guy - but- not - a - spokesman, has only a vague notion of who the administrators are that he is dealing with. In talking about one of the SFAC resolutions early in the Fall he said "I sent the thing over to Bennick-Smith--or someone over there--I don't even know Bennick-Smith, and they issued some statement clearing it up." Even so, Glazier was the most visible spokesman.

KKAPLAN, on the other hand, had been forced to go to the administration for everything the HUC did. He held weekly conferences with Glimp during the year and semi-weekly talks with Ford. Most became general discussions of student gripes, but the channels of communication were open to him. HUC had made Kaplan a natural student-administration coordinator. SFAC turned Glazier into an organizational head. Glazier and Kaplan not only think alike, but even talked the same. "During the strike, Kaplan and I didn't have anything to do with each other organizationally," Glazier said, "but we understood each other and thought about the issues in the same way. You'd better check with Kaplan about that." Two days before, Kaplan said, "I don't know what I did for three days during the strike. I talked with Faculty and students and the Corporation Sunday afternoon. I never really talked with Ken during the strike, but there was an understanding through it. We had the same areas of concern and argued in the same way, but you'd better check with Ken on that."

After February, Kaplan and Glazier both left their leadership of the HUC and SFAC, but saw each other while working unofficially with the Fainsod Committee on restructuring.

In March, when it was obvious that the SDS Spring campaign would peak after Easter vacation, Kaplan began to attend SDS meetings to see what was going on. Glazier, his year on SFAC over, returned to a non-political life. "You name it, and I didn't do it," he said.

"I had no particular interest in getting involved in anything," Glazier said in explaining his late appearance outside University Hall after the sit-in April 9. Kaplan, John Hanify, this year's president of the HUC, and Frank Raines, present chairman of SFAC had been there since noon.

While the moderate students spent all of Wednesday night looking for a middle ground between impatient radicals and outraged administrators, the need for a moderate political force during the crisis became readily apparent. The HUC and the SFAC were totally inadequate. Perhaps because Raines and Hanify had not adjusted to the roles that Glazier and Kaplan vacated or perhaps because of the lack of any substantive power in Harvard student government--a lack which Glazier and Kaplan had managed to overcome through the minor crisis at Paine Hall.

"The leadership of Mem Church fell to me because I could jell more people around me than anyone else," Glazier said. As former chairman of the influential student committee, "I was the least common denominator," he added.

During the strike, Glazier became the only visible moderate leader; working through the weekend however, he tired of the pressures of holding together a group which was well-intentioned but totally unorganized and without any mandate for forging policy. While Kaplan continued through the entire wekend and authored the final proposal that ended the strike on April. 18, Glazier announced the dissolution of the Mem Church Group at the first mass meeting on Monday, April 14. Within three hours, he was on his way to the Cape with a friend from the Mem Church group to get away for two days.

With the Strike over and the issue of University restructuring now in the hands of both the Committee, Kaplan and Glazier have been consulted regularly on the role of student government in any new University government proposal.

Glazier has seemingly faded into and faded out of the Harvard political scene this year--rising to local and even national fame through his leadership of the moderates in the Strike. From his cramped single on the top of Kirkland House and back into it, he has only been a Harvard politician for one year. Still he believes that the movement in restructuring will be toward more student-faculty committees like SFAC.

Kaplan, on the other hand, has been in student government for four years and has difficulty getting out of himself to see where the changes have taken place. He too thinks that a student voice in University decision-making will come through joint committees rather than an expanded role for something like the HUC. "I really don't know what the effect of my year on HUC has had," he said. "The one thing that can be said is that we raised the sights of HUC and student government." Next year, the Faculty must make the final decision on what direction those sights are aimed.

In details, their styles flare away to separate poles. Glazier calls Kaplan, "Kaplan." Kaplan calls Glazier, "Ken."