Phillips Brooks House Changes Its Politics

Doug Schmidt paused for a moment, leaned further back in his armchair, and lifted a coke bottle to his lips. When he put down the bottle, he said, "I guess what I'm saying is that this little germ got planted three or four years ago, and has spread hierarchically."

Douglas M. Schmidt '76 is the new president of Phillips Brooks House, as of March 1, and this "germ" is going to be the central concern of his presidency.

The 30-member "cabinet" of PBH has decided to shift the House's emphasis away from social service toward a commitment to social change. The members have adopted a more wary attitude to pure social service programs. They are ambivalent about oiling squeaky school systems with tutoring programs, about maintaining reading programs they believe can and should be shut down. PBH ended its tutoring program in the Brighton school system in 1972 because volunteers "saw themselves being used by the superintendent of the school as an excuse not to provide facilities," says retiring PBH president Stephen D. Cooke '75. In 1973, PBH stopped organizing dramatic productions at the Longfellow School in Cambridge, because the volunteers didn't see any long-term beneficial results from the program. A big brother/sister program at Columbia Point succumbed for similar reasons in 1972, and aspects of several other PBH programs have been dropped in recent years because the House did not see any real improvements coming from them.

Schmidt says this year is going to be "a deciding one." He says the members of PBH are going to have to take a stand on four questions:

* "How much does PBH owe to the Cambridge community?"

* "How much is PBH a part of Harvard?"

* "How much is PBH adding to the problems it is trying to solve?" and,

* "What does it mean to volunteer?"

For the past several years, the members of PBH's cabinet have been meeting every two or three weeks in a wood-paneled room on the second floor of PBH's ivy-covered building in the Yard; the smaller group of executives convenes twice every week; and the entire staff has been going on two weekend retreats each year. The new cabinet already met for ten hours last week.

Since early last spring, these leaders have gradually and collectively decided the PBH needs some up-to-date answers to those four questions--questions which PBH leaders have not formally reassessed since the era of late-sixties activism.

PBH has begun to create committees and renovate existing ones to try to direct its energies from social service to social action. Joseph E. Sandler '75, retiring chairman of Prisons, one of the twelve committees now standing, says Prisons was one of the first committees to "change over." He says the committee to "change over". He says the committee really began to change direction in the summer of 1973, when he himself was working for a Massachusetts organization, the Ad Hoc Committee for Prison Reform. During that summer, John Boone, commissioner of correction, who was working for the elimination of correctional institutions, was fired after holding office for a year. Phillips Brooks House decided to join the loose coalition of people and organization in the state pressing for radical change in the penal system, particularly the completion of Boone's goals.

"Most of the movement acknowledges that teaching behind bars doesn't work. It's an artificial environment. It's destructive and dehumanizing. Yet most of the committee is still teaching in the institutions, this represents a conflict," says Sandler.

The Prisons Committee's conflict is typical of the problems of the whole House. Massachusetts penal reform groups have brought the committee more abruptly face-to-face with the inconsistencies of its programs: last summer a prison official cited the work of PBH volunteers as evidence of Bridgewater's positive correctional facilities. In a suit brought by the Prisoners' Rights Project.

Prisons has since moved into the area of political and family service for prisoners, by placing volunteers at the Families and Friends of Prisoners Center in Dorchester, and does research and mailing work pushing for legislation to standardize parole eligibility. Yet with the simultaneous continuation of teaching programs, Sandler says he believes that the Prisons committee has compromised itself.

The Community Medical Program, on the other hand, is a committee whose changes give PBH executives more cause for optimism. During the last two years, the committee has moved away from placing volunteers in clinics, and has attempted to make available medicine, health care, and nutrition to more people who need them. Last year the committee started a hot lunch program for elderly people, and it is instituting a year-off program for students who want to work in rural medicine. Volunteers now create programs where they see a need for them.

But PBH members insist they are not abandoning social service. Most committee heads emphasize that their object is not to phase out social service--the founding purpose of PBH--but rather to become aware of the effects of that service, to prevent future nightmares like the Bridgewater trial citation. They believe continued social services does not rule out social action.

"There are some committees with defined volunteer positions," says Schmidt. "There's always going to be a need for tutors, for one-to-one programs. What varies is how much emphasis we're putting on them. We're deeply committed to social service."

PBH members attribute their new focus to a variety of influences: changing attitudes among the students and in America as a whole, a development of new ideas as a reaction to executives' frustrations, and three specific events that retiring president Cooke says helped "clear away the barriers."

One of those events was the Bridgewater Prison suit. The order two were the decision that tutoring in the Brighton school system was counterproductive in the long run, and the institution of three Phillips Brooks House courses open to all undergraduates.

The courses, all new this year, are Social Sciences 171, a course that combines educational theory with actual teaching in the Cambridge school system, a Quincy House seminar on Cambridge, and an Ed School course on tutoring methodology that includes teaching reading in Boston prisons. PBH began to consider creating courses two years ago, when the House first hired an educational consultant. The idea of courses grew out of "general concern about educating volunteers," says Cooke.

The doubts created by the Brighton and Bridgewater problems and the new possibilities for educating volunteers opened up by the courses have led to volunteers' increased feelings of responsibility for their role in the Boston and Cambridge communities. Most of the executives trace their abrupt change in attitude to last spring, when they say the executive, through meetings and discussions, came to feel that PBH policy needed overhauling. Schmidt and Cooke say that all 30 cabinet members now agree on the shift to social action: it is only on the nuts and bolts of implementation that they have to continually confer and compromise.

PBH is pleased with some of its first steps, in particular with two new committees. The House set up the East Boston People's Rights Committee last year, designed to help welfare recipients get their checks from an un-cooperative bureaucracy. The particular charm of this committee is that once it has helped educate and organize a community pressure group, it will withdraw from East Boston and the resident organization will be self-sufficient.

PBH feels its change in attitudes are parallel to a national trend. Executives now speak of a retreat from Great Society optimism. They came to Harvard from schools and towns influenced by the sixties, and since they have been here they have become repulsed by the old paternalistic patching up of community problems.

Alan Brickman '76, the incoming executive vice president and retiring chairman of the education committee, says he "used to believe that reform begins in the classroom. Not any more."

But PBH members do not feel that Harvard has helped them rethink their commitment to the community; as in the case of Prisons, they have been pressured by outside groups and people, and by frustrations they encountered while doing social service work. Doug Schmidt says his Harvard experience actually hindered his social commitment. While at high school in Evansville, Ind., Schmidt says he was dedicated to protests and community work. Schmidt and a handful of friends organized the first free lunch program in his home town.

"At Harvard," Schmidt says, "my energies were subverted. At the end of last year I realized I had compromised myself." He says he lost sight of interests and "sold out to some of the status trips that go along with Harvard. I don't feel that I'm an exceptional case. We're getting our heads together."

Schmidt says he is not an exception because he has spoken to so many students at Harvard and Radcliffe who are dissatisfied, restless, or bored, but who do not have any "outlets." He believes Harvard could be better structured to help students find those outlets. Although he says PBH is not the answer for everyone, he hopes to help make students' involvement in the community a meaningful option. Community work is "not the way Harvard is slanted." Schmidt says, but perhaps through worthwhile programs and increased publicity, PBH can help change Harvard's slant.

PBH has a strange administrative tie with the University. A 12-member faculty committee, headed as of two weeks ago by the Rev. Peter Gomes, approves the spending of the House's endowment, which makes up approximately one half of the total annual budget. "PBH is a small Harvard department," explained Woody N. Peterson, '70, the graduate secretary of the House. "The committee is responsible only for the building." Peterson explained that PBH as a student group using the building is totally separate from the department even though they share the same name.

Half of each year's budget does not come from the endowment but from contributions and gifts. Students are free to spend that half of the budget however they desire. Peterson said next year's projected budget is $52,000, plus any additional money raised by individual committees this summer.

The budget breaks down into mainly salaries (administrative assistant, bookkeeper, secretary, graduate secretary, educational advisor, hired consultants) and automobile, telephone, and equipment expenses, basically everything except the utilities and upkeep of the building, which are paid for by the Harvard administration.

So it seems that PBH is not tied in a static position to Harvard, but can do what it wants. So if Harvard is not "slanted" toward community work, it must be possible for PBH to fill that gap.

This slant is why publicity has become a concern at PBH. There is now a member of the executive committee in charge of publicity, and this fall the House sent out its first pre-registration mailing to freshmen. Executives cite a higher turn-out at the traditional open houses at the start of the past two semesters. The almost 400 PBH volunteers received the first volunteer newsletter this December, telling them about developments in some of the other committees, about new programs, and about impending executive elections.

However, the number of actual volunteers on the PBH records has remained approximately the same as last year. The figure has hovered at just below four hundred for the past five years, after a 1967-68 peak of just under 1000 volunteers. But executives point out the faddish nature of much of late 1960's volunteering. "The numbers don't necessarily reflect a greater commitment," says Steve Cooke.

PBH leaders see the problem of recruiting as attracting the kind of people in the first place who are willing to give the extra time and energy that everyone in the House agrees is needed for social change. It's easier to sign up to tutor once or twice a week than to interview, lobby, and organize.

Sandler says his Prisons committee has problems attracting volunteers interested in the political aspects of prison reform. "We need to figure out how to get commitments out of students," Sandler says. He says students' understanding of the role of volunteers needs to be changed. "They think what they'd like to do is develop a relationship with an individual. Political change is a different story. It's somewhat more abstract, but has a hell of a lot of impact...I'm not sure the most political people come to Phillips Brooks House."

So PBH wants to fight the attitudes at Harvard and Radcliffe that stop students from doing anything that doesn't produce any immediate results. The new president feels that the University's structure fosters that student attitude, but he and his cabinet want to recruit and educate volunteers in the hopes of making some change in a system they have unconsciously helped to perpetuate.