Tilting At Towers

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The tower of impartial journalism on Plympton St generally stands straight. But "Political Controversies at Harvard, 1636-1974" by Seymour Martin Lipset in "Education and Politics at Harvard," provoked a full page review by Geoffrey Garin on April 12 titled "Fair Harvard Strikes Back."

Mr. Garin starts with his own interpretation of Professor Lipset's essay. He writes that Harvard's "dedication to free and unfettered scholarship, according to Lipset has known little if any bounds." Such an "illusion" of academic "aloofness from external control" is scorned by Mr. Garin. But since Professor Lipset is defending only the ideal of a university as a center for critical intellect he is explicitly concerned with the effects of social and political disputes on this ideal. So he discusses President Lowell's bigotry; he covers restrictions on pro-Communist faculty and students during the McCarthy period; and he tries to determine why President Pusey failed to "appreciate the strength of the half of a millennium old norm that police should not be called to the precincts of a university."

The festivities of 1969 are of particular interest to Mr. Garin. He is angered by Professor Lipset's perception that a forceful reaction was actually desired by those who occupied University Hall. And the Crimson reviewer again presents his own version of Professor Lipset's logic: "The outrage of students and sympathetic faculty to the Bust was predictable, Lipset claims, because a similar reaction followed Josiah Quincy's decision to call in police to restore order after the riots of 1834." But Professor Lipset offers this comparison only to show that Harvard's resistance in external authority is long standing and traditional. The 1969 response was in fact predicted by a Crimson editor, Joel Kramer, who wrote in 1968 that Harvard administrators should learn from the Columbia confrontation not to use police against students. For at Columbia "Moderate students who had opposed the sit-in-reacted to the police action by joining the radicals in a coalition calling for President Kirk's resignation." On the eve of the Harvard occupation, SDS itself defeated a motion calling for immediate seizure of a building each of the three times it was proposed. But the next day, the Maoist Worker. Student Alliance caucus of SDS moved in. It was only President Pusey's order for outside police to evacuate the building that "radicalized" other students, and made a strike possible. Surveys show that 82 per cent of Harvard students opposed the sit-in but 78 per cent rejected the calling of police, and that the use of outside force not the protesters' issues, convinced moderate students to strike.

A pamphlet approved by the occupiers and produced within University Hall stated their aims: "We are not seeking to 'purify' the University--the men who run this country also run Harvard. We are fighting against two major thrusts of the 'gentlemen' against poor people at home and abroad and against ourselves." Mr. Garin also connects the academic, economic, and political elites. But Professor Lipset reports data from an SDS run course showing that, when average American family income was $8,000 a year, average Harvard income was $17,000, and average $DS income was $23,000. Virtually all the students arrested in University Hall were WSA members, and of these" approximately 50 per cent attended prep school, with the largest representation from the most exclusive ones like St. Paul's," Mr. Garin's calculated reply is that "Lipset presents no overwhelming evidence that bluebloods made up any more than 50 per cent of the 'militants.' "But why such a high proportion from an elite whose interests were supposedly challenged, and who should have been totally absent from SDS? I am not certain either, and look forward to The Crimson's investigative series on this key question. Still, Mr. Garin reports, "The rulers of American society allow the academic elite its measure of independence because scholars have generally aligned with the political and economic elite." But John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 1971: "It was the universities . . . which led the opposition to the Vietnam War, which forced the retirement of President Johnson, which are forcing the pace of our present withdrawal from Vietnam, which are leading the battle against the great corporations on the issue of pollution, and which at the last congressional elections retired a score or more of the more egregious time-servers, military sycophants, and hawks." And Milton Friedman has recognized, with less glee, that "The University is by design and effect the institution in society which creates discontent with existing moral, social and political institutions and proposes new institutions to replace them. . . . The University is inherently a disruptive force." To preserve these inherent qualities, Professor Lipset adopts Max Weber's convictions, and argues elsewhere that, while value-free scholarship can never be fully realized in the social sciences, the ideal must be pursued. While it is fine for individual professors to be political advocates, such commitment must be separate from their scholarship and the spirit of the university as a whole.

But if Mr. Garin and The Crimson reject this "vision of the independent scholar," what about the vision of the independent journalist? I have occasionally heard it said that The Crimson allows editorial sentiments to sneak into news columns. While I personally doubt this, I still must ask whether The Crimson wishes to maintain the ideal of objectivity for journalists which Mr.Garin denies for scholars. It would seem so, since The Crimson runs unsigned editorials under its masthead. But if the current editors of The Crimson do not repudiate the philosophy of their former political editor, a clear statement of the political interests which the newspaper serves is in order. Its readers will then know how the tower tilts. Allen R. Myerson '76