Books The Right to Say 'We'

Praeger; 214 pp.; $2.25.

BY NOW, of course, we have witnessed a fair number of attempts to "explain" the Harvard strike, relate it to ensuing events, speculate on its relevance to the "youth movement," and bundle up the whole affair in a neat little package. We have suffered through the compressed political and sociological tract that demands a remarkable suspension of basic intellectual instincts; muddled through the straight-forward factual account whose tedious details could only interest those who were deeply involved in them; and marveled at the bizarre near-hysteria of the participant who later bared his soul in print.

Richard Zorza's contribution to this ever-widening genre of strike literature hits upon a precarious balance between these equally undesirable poles. As an active member of the moderate Memorial Church group. Zorza must certainly have gained insights and observations that could contribute to a sounder understanding of why the strike failed to gather momentum and fell apart the way it did. Most of that insight, however, is forever buried beneath his swollen, badly cliched rhetoric:

Harvard was a giant congiomerate whose only goal was size-not human relevance. The separate parts of Harvard, the college and the graduate schools, were just different companies in that vast conglomerate. The president had degenerated into an arbiter of funding requests . . . Suddenly, the reality that the only thing that mattered was people was revealed to me. Turning in on my inner being, I found what many of my generation were finding.

One might be more sympathetic toward Zorza's simplified analysis of Harvard as a detached, anti-humanistic society if his own conception of those who have the right to say "we" were not so limited. In fact, Zorza envisions a reform movement that is every bit as shut off and ivory towerish as the University he disparages. At one point, he rejoices to find that:

We were all becoming a community. One girl remembered: "I felt totally hostile to everyone not a student. I was glaring at all the cars and the people in them. It seemed that it was us versus them; they had caused it, or at least they had not stopped it."

What follows is not thrilling: late-night planning sessions of the moderate leadership in Weld Common Room, intricately mapped-out strategies to chart a course between the Administration and SDS in order to keep the moderates' strike going; miscellaneous sorties with the liberal faculty; the immense technical difficulties of staging the mass meetings; and so on.

Zorza's obsession with details would be somewhat less overbearing if he had recorded those details corectly. As he has them, the dates for the SDS meeting which decided on the occupation, the occupation itself, and the bust are all one day late; he dedicates the book to Cambridge city manager James L. Sullivan but gets his name wrong; and the names of many major figures are misspelled.

To be fair, many of Zorza's observations are well-taken and nicely expressed. He remembers that, as an entering freshman at Harvard, "One felt good to be part of an institution with those pretensions." In view of SDS accusations that the moderate leadership sought to sell out the strike, and Steven Kelman's contention that the moderates were mindless running dogs for SDS instigators, it is refreshing to hear a response from the moderate faction that rises to the level of coherent political analysis. And Zorza offers a vital yet rarely grasped insight into the thinking of the conservative academic:

There were small, almost pathetic, groups, who could not accept the concerns of SDS, or at least its means of expressing them. The University maybe meant more to them than to others, or they saw it in a different light. They held their little meetings over dinner in the houses. Their world was falling apart. They were getting so much from the university that they needed and wanted. And now a group whose concerns they could not understand or accept came along with a style that they found incomprehensible and destructive. Their environment and their security were threatened by people who never seemed to listen, only to talk, and shout. Suddenly, the whole world had gone mad.

It is these instances of occasional competence that tend to lift Zorza's book slightly above the general level of the strike literature that we have seen so far. But considering that level, and the overal worth of this book, that isn't saving much.