The University and Repression

"We have removed from our community by orderly process students who engaged in violence. . . I am both optimistic and resolute."

FIRST a safe prediction: during the first few months of the coming school year, college administrators will move to consolidate their alliance with "dovish" liberal politicians in an attempt to lead anti-war students into "safe," "respectable" electoral channels.

Such a partnership has obvious benefits for the politician, in supplying him with manpower for ringing doorbells or collecting signatures on petitions. For the college administrations, the official or unofficial sanction of electoral efforts through the donation of office space, materials, or free time to the students may serve to divert attention away from the war-related activities that go on every day within the confines of the university. Such a strategy succeeds if it can significantly dilute student actions and protests against ROTC and military research.

This strategy has so far proved only partially successful. For despite the hastily-assumed anti-war stance of many colleges and universities last spring, there were massive attacks, throughout the student strike, against war and government-related projects on campuses throughout the country. To the more intelligent college administrators, it was evident that the greatest difficulty in enlisting students in a "Second Children's Crusade" (as Time Magazine calls it) was that students had learned well the lessons of the first, the McCarthy campaign. The carrot of establishment politics proved only partially successful in diverting student anger-what was needed was the stick of repression.

Repression can be viewed, as I view it here, as part of a general political strategy. Many universities punitive actions and repressive measures have gone beyond those of mere self-defense, and have been used to create a general atmosphere of repression, repression against certain ideas and movements. The actions of Harvard University last spring and most recently Harvard's filing of criminal trespass charges against four members of SDS are a case in point. While large numbers of students did participate in demonstrations against the university last spring, at no point could the Harvard administration have feared that these demonstrations would of themselves wreck the University.

Yet Harvard has now filed charges, carrying sentences of up to two months, against four people who they have little reason to believe will be around Harvard in the coming year. Divorced from the political setting, it might well seem that the suspensions and civil actions that Harvard has carried through are just obsessively spiteful. But that, of course, is not the whole story.

OVER THE past few years, the radical movement at places like Harvard has been developing and acting upon an analysis of the University which sees the University's essential function as serving the interests of a certain class of people in our society. The first building block of this analysis is the fact that most members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers are businessmen and their lawyers. Radical students have continued to draw ties between the operations of the University in research, education, and training, and the broader mechanisms of society-which are also run by, and in the interests of, these men of wealth and power.

The thrust of the radical critique is to expose the University as a class institution, and to crack the facade of neutrality and disinterestedness which the heads of the University must maintain.

It is these ideas, I think, as much as the physical actions of the students who espouse them, that the University would like to suppress. The real threat to the men who run Harvard, the David Rockefellers and Hugh Calkinses who sit on the Corporation and Board of Overseers, is that if such a movement continued to grow it would undoubtedly reach beyond the walls of the University, and join hands with other disaffected segments of society. The program of groups like SDS denies that the end of the war in Vietnam, or for that matter any significant social change, will be brought about through working with (or relving on) people like those who run Harvard, or the McCarthys, McGoverns, or Goodells who finally support the same interests.

IF, THEN, THE key does not lie in working through the established people or the established channels, that key to change is to be found in fighting alliances with the large numbers of black and white working people who are exploited every day by men like David Rockefeller. And it is these people who are already fighting back: witness thereactions of black people in the ghettos to unemployment, or the startling increase in wildcat strikes over the past few years. The role of students must be to ally with these working people in fighting against the system which causes wars like Vietnam abroad and exploitation at home.

This is not to say that the Deans of Harvard College wake up every morning with fears of working class revolution on their minds. But these differences of ideology and interest become quite evident and very real in the context of a struggle, such as the Strike of last spring. In such a situation when the men who run the University are trying their hardest to feign an anti-war posture and pretend that they have a harmony of interests with the students, any group which continually points to the war-related activities of the University, and advocates fighting alliances with a class of people already hostile to the men who run Harvard, is quite clearly a threat. A major preoccupation of the University hence must become the weeding out of such "undesirable elements" before too much damage is done.

Much of this analysis is supported by the events at Harvard during the strike. It was no coincidence that the University first dropped its liberal posture and adopted the hard line when the question of working people, specifically the rights of people who work at Harvard, was raised.

No sooner had the troops entered Cambodia than Dean Ernest May, heretofore mum on the question of the war, was appearing all over the place flashing the "V" sign and urging students to follow him down to Washington and lobby for peace. Many students felt, and still feel, that lobbying in Congress is the best way to end the war. But many other students questioned the sincerity of the University's anti-war zeal, and pointed to contradictions in its stance. Harvard ROTC, for example, continued to turn out officers for the fighting overseas. Then there was the presence of the Center for International Affairs and the Cambridge Project, through which social science research was channelled for use by the government in Vietnam and other Third World countries. What kind of institution was it that both condemned and contributed to the war and American imperialism?

Harvard showed its hand in the kind of strike it wanted in its dealing with those members of the University community, besides students and faculty, who wanted to work against the war. Whereas the University, in its largess, had granted students all the time they wanted to campaign against the war, they devised labyrinthine, and at times intimidating procedures for University workers to get time off. The feeling that the University was trying to create, though never stated explicitly, was that people like those who worked at Harvard (or anywhere else) were not really important in ending the war; though the men and women who worked in the kitchens were quite obviously members of the society, it was more important that students and faculty be assured their three meals a day so that they could carry on their work in the higher echelons of political activity.

THE UNIVERSITY banked on the fact that students would follow the lead of the men who run Harvard and ignore the working people around them, not just as people who were a key force in changing society, but as people with any brains at all. It is on this rather simple issue, relatively unrelated to the war in Vietnam, that the University's class bias is most apparent. Unfortunately for the University, many students did not buy the line they were offering, and for two days students engaged in a militant picket line in support of those workers who wanted a strike. For participating in these picket lines, many students were disciplined, some suspended, and four are now being charged with criminal trespass.

Such a movement makes further repression necessary. For, as in the case of Harvard, the men with power will drop their liberal facade when they fear for their own best interest. Dean Dunlop is no doubt "resolute" in his willingness to deal harshly with further "violence." But if the movement can continue to advance, even under sharp attack, he has little reason to be optimistic.

(The author is one of four expelled students who have been charged by the University with criminal trespass. Warrants have been issued for their arrest. Police have as yet taken no action.)