Silhouette Nader at Harvard

IN THE FOUR YEARS since his Unsafe at Any Speed drove Corvair off the market and set General Motors detectives on his tail. Ralph Nader has gone a long way towards establishing himself as the Renaissance Man of American crusaders. After cutting his muckraking teeth on the automobile industry. Nader has moved on to hit a staggering range of targets.

Consider this summer as an example. After a weak start with an expose of overly-loud music at rock'n'-roll halls-a topic that never caught the serious public interest he hoped for-Nader coverd a series of weightier topies. In July, he told George McGovern's Special Senate Committee on Nutrition about the built-in dangers of modern American food, he was later invited to serve on a White House panel on the subject. Shortly afterward there was an exhaustive report on the threat of "brown lung" for workers in textile mills-a report that surprised many public interest workers who thought themselves progressive to keep up with the "black lung" fight against coal mine owners.

Late in the summer. Nader held a news conference to air his charges of government secrecy, and he testified before another Congressional committee that was digesting various plans for a Consumer's Agency in the federal government. All the while, Nader kept the pressure on a number of his old enemies: the titans of Detroit who-Nader said-were still dragging their feet on auto safety: the Agriculture Department's meat inspectors, who didn't seem to be trying hard enough to keep the rotten carcasses out of the stores: the United Mine Workers leadership, which cared more about keeping up good relations with the mine owners than in fighting for tougher mine safety laws. To cover anyone who might feel left out. Nader directed more than 100 students ("Nader's Raiders" in the Washington parlance) who spent the summer investigating several government agencies and one famous Washington law firm.

Along the way on his various projects. Nader has cultivated a sizable lore to surround his public image. One Washington burcaucrat told me very solemnly this summer that Nader never sleeps, rarely eats, and only takes time off from his work to visit his mother in Connecticut. Another man pointed out the spot on F Street in downtown Washington where Nader supposedly disappeared one sunny day, only to emerge two hours later on a speaker's podium in California.

Nader's working habits are admittedly unorthodox, but most of the bizarre components of the Ralph Nader Lone Crusader myth are obviously the offspring of bureaucratic imaginations gone beserk. One element that is genuine, however, is Nader's reputation for putting on a good show. His victims have learned that Nader has an astounding knack of attracting publicity and using the press. He consistently loads his public statements to contain the right mixture of documentation and verbal flamboyance (in the McGovern testimony, for instance, hot dogs with a high fat content became "fatfurters-American's deadliest missiles"). In his increasingly frequent speeches and television appearances. Nader regularly emits the kind of easily graspable, shocking facts that are calculated to galvanize the lazy listeners into action.

WHEN NADER came to Harvard one week ago, he didn't come to put on one of his shock shows. He did throw in a few pungent illustrations-"specialists say they wouldn't be surprised at all if 12,000 people are electrocuted every year because of unsafe hospital wiring"-but the thrust of the speech was different. What Nader has realized is that his effective life span as a reformer is limited. Someday he will get tired or wear out, suffer public embarrassment or simply not be able to get into the newspapers any longer.

If that happened now-as Nader must know very well-most of his projects would probably flounder. Although he has recently set up a fledgling institute in Washington to carry on his kind of work, the effort is still uncertain enough that most of its life depends on Ralph Nader's personal force. The shift from one individual crusader to wider, institutionalized reform isn't easy, but Nader knows that there's only so much one famous crusader can do. And so his Washington institute-with the lumbering title "Center for the Study of Responsive Law"-and his summer student projects are part of his attempt to make the shift. So was his speech here.

The specific proposals Nader suggested were not really startling. To spread the kind of public-interest work he has done on a few industries. Nader urged the students to start in on immediately available targets, like local governments and corporations. To keep the work going, he said that groups of professional students should promise to give some portion of their future earnings to support their classmates doing public interest projects.

What was more fascinating in Nader's appearance was the elaborate appeal he developed to entice students into "reform" efforts. For the theory that has given Nader the most troubling attack in the last year has not been the General Motors charge that he is out to destroy capitalist America. Rather, it has been the needling plaint of college students that Nader is too concerned with patching up the minor flaws of corporate, capitalist, bureaucratic America. Why not get out there and change the whole system?

Since most of the Raiders who worked for him this summer had already been through a self-screening process, Nader did not face the objection too often from them. But there were some questions, and when Life magazine sent writer Jack Newfield-current lion of the New Left journalists-to do a story on the summer project, the questions became more overt. Why do you think this is all worthwhile?. Newfield asked time and again. Don't you people think you're wasting your effort?

ALWAYS ONE to cater to his au?ience, Nader knew that he had to answer that question at Harvard. For much of the first part of his speech, he worked over the same premises that have led to hard nosed militant action on many campuses. His analysis of the failure of the universities is far more elegant and detailed than one charging Complicity With the War Machine or Oppressing Poor Tenants. In a more general attack, Nader showed how the university's professional schools were ignoring their social tasks. Medical schools don't teach prevention: law schools train corporate lawyers; economists never learn to question the costs of a corporate economy.

While self-consciously staying away from questions like Defense Department contracts or government-academic incest, Nader turned up other sorespots where the unversities have abdicated any sense of social justice. Universities are supposed to be the best information gatherers: why don't we know anything about the large corporations? The university-trained mind is supposed to zero in on important questions: why do the academics always wait for the government or the corporations to point out social problems? The universities obviously develop new roles for men to fill in the social web: why has M. I. T. placed so many of its graduates in the electronics industry, and so few in work of more general benefit?

Nearing the climax of his indictment, Nader said that the universities' negligence was "an extremely serious failure when stacked up against the amount of intellectual acumen and resources available." As a consequence of this abdication, corporate America has been able to mount an institutionalized assault on everything of value in American society: the free choice marketplace is a hoax: the Great Lakes verge on irreversible pollution; the social system is "productive but imbalanced."

After that kind of build-up, the most frequently heard description of "the Student's Role" would contain exhortations for militant action to end the universities' prostitution. Nader seemed to be on his way there when he said that the students of the last two years have taught everyone a clear lesson: university administrations are more responsive to physical stimulus than ethical pleas. "Isn't it a disgrace that it took the physical displacement of a few men called deans to get larger numbers of students and faculty finally to face important issues?"

IF THE universities are degenerate and physical stimulus is good, how can Nader recommend a summer in Washington over an evening in University Hall? In a tough logical fix, Nader wriggled out by again expanding his view. The point of all the prodding and stimulus is to be effective, he said. And as long as the students fight on the university's terms, they are using a strikingly ineffective strategy. "Reagan has done with the students at Berkely just what Hitler tried to do with the Jews. He's made them the scapegoats for all the troubles in the state; he's turned all the people outside the university against them." By staying within Reagan's arena-or Hayakawa's or Kirk's or Pusey's-the students are spitting out their effort on the wrong targets: "as long as they stay inside the university arena, Reagan can be sure they won't spend any time asking what he's done about mental health or the desecration of the state."

His appeal was not to take the heat off universities, especially in the areas where change inside the university will make a real difference. Nader himself has been one of the main agitators in the national law school reform movement. The point was that students who want to beat the system have to stop playing by the system's rules. Student bodies might get ROTC off the campus, and that might make a chink in ROTC, which might cut into the war effort. But maybe things would be quicker and more effective if the bodies worked on the Defense Department of General Dynamics instead of sticking to the artificial limits of the university. Laird and Nixon and Nader all know that the system can stand the students as long as they stay on campus; Nader is the only one of the three that wants to tell the students.