Not Just Sour Grapes

WE ALL LEARNED in elementary school about common denominators--before you subtract apples from oranges you must turn everything into bananas. It seemed last week, momentarily, that that's what Michael W. Brown-Beasley had forgotten to do: here was an ex-Fiscal Services employee arguing a case of reverse racial discrimination by comparing Harvard's handling of his dismissal for insubordination (apples) to its treatment of a one-time Buildings and Grounds superintendent arrested for threatening a Radcliffe student he allegedly had pimped for (oranges).

But Michael W. Brown-Beasley is no dummy, and he does, so to speak, have a banana converter--the Harvard University Salaried Personnel Manual. So while his discrimination complaint, filed with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), may seem like callous or misguided exploitation of public interest in the recent "Harvard prostitution scandal," it is in fact a serious attempt to attack what Brown-Beasley sees as procedural errors in his firing. The complaint is also hardly a random shot in the dark: since being dismissed as assistant to the director of Fiscal Services on August 4, Brown-Beasley has been fighting inside the University to reverse his dismissal. And his complaint to the OCR appears to be the first in a series of moves Brown-Beasley may make outside University channels to strengthen his arguments for reinstatement.

A REVIEW OF the circumstances of Brown-Beasley's and the superintendent's departures suggest a solid prima facie case against Harvard, although not necessarily on racial discrimination grounds. Take first the case of the B&G employee, Julian K. Fredie: arrested on July 27 for threatening a Radcliffe student, Fredie is suspended with pay. Two weeks later, shortly after his conviction on the criminal charge, Fredie resigns from his job at Harvard.

At about the same time Brown-Beasley is receiving markedly different treatment. After quarreling, against his boss's orders, with another employee whom he felt was endangering an expensive Holyoke Center computer, Brown-Beasley is fired. Hiss boss, R. Jerrold Gibson '51, director of the Office of Fiscal Services, has taken none of the "progressive" disciplinary steps mandated by the salaried personnel manual: informal oral warnings recorded by the employer, warning letters and suspension.

This is where Brown-Beasley's banana converter comes in. Since the August 4th firing Harvard's defense has leaned partially on a disturbingly vague clause in the personnel manual that reads, "Discharge without prior warnings or suspension may be justified for very serious offenses, for example, serious dishonesty, including theft of University property." (Harvard's arguments also rest on the University's contention that Brown-Beasley, who admits he is eccentric and hard to get along with, has a record of difficulties in jobs he has held at Harvard since 1969. But Brown-Beasley's University personnel file contains no evidence to back this charge.) Before details of the Fredie case emerged early last month, Brown-Beasley challenged use of the clause, attacking it as fuzzy (it does not say if the employee must be found guilty of the "very serious offenses") and as inappropriate for his case since he was not accused of a criminal act such as stealing University property. Harvard retorted that the clause could also cover insubordination, especially by a "management" employee like Brown-Beasley.

But, as Brown-Beasley has argued, Harvard's broad interpretation of the clause grew even more dubious when the press revealed earlier this fall that Fredie--who had certainly been charged with a far more serious act than Brown-Beasley-had been suspended with pay after his arrest and had never been fired. Brown-Beasley correctly points out that Harvard's action was appropriate, since employees should be considered innocent until proven guilty. But Brown-Beasley also rightly insists that he, as an employee charged merely with insubordination, certainly also deserved the protection of due process. Harvard's response--that the charges against the two were "of a totally different nature"--is hardly convincing.

It would be difficult to prove, however, that Harvard handled the two cases differently because Brown-Beasley is white and Fredie is black. A more likely scenario is that Brown-Beasley could be fired with little fuss, his oddities and outspokenness having weakened his standing within the administration. The Fredie case, on the other hand, was potentially explosive: there were charges that Harvard higher-ups were involved in the alleged prostitution operation and students had definitely been linked to the case. Indeed the delay in the publicizing of the conviction suggests the care with which Harvard and the court authorities handled the case. The validity of the race argument in this comparison seems to be highly questionable, although Harvard arguably would have been more sensitive if Brown-Beasley were black.

Yet this hardly destroys Brown-Beasley's basic dispute. The facts of his case suggest quite strongly not only that Harvard erred in his dismissal but also that the personnel manual provides insufficient protection for salaried employees. It seems arbitrary, for example, for Harvard to cite the "very serious offenses" clause when other disciplinary rules in the manual state:

Except in unusual circumstances, an employee should not be disciplined or discharged without an opportunity to present his or her side of the story...An employee should not be disciplined or discharged in haste or anger. If a serious incident occurs which may warrant discharge, the employee should be suspended pending investigation.

It is alarming--as Brown-Beasley himself has noted--that these procedures--which provide Harvard such amazing latitude--are essentially part of the University's affirmative action plan. What besides the cumbersome appeal procedure is to prevent a racist or sexist supervisor, for example, from using the escape clause to justify abrogation of "progressive" discipline?

THE RACIAL discrimination complaint is hardly the only turf on which Brown-Beasley is waging his fight. Indeed his full-time battle to overturn his dismissal--marked by at times daily distribution of accusatory, informational or questioning letters to members of the administration--has generated additional disputes that have helped stalemate his appeal proceeding. One of the less substantive disagreements, the mini-war of nerves over Harvard's non-recognition of Brown-Beasley's student nominee to the appeal panel, suggests not only the degree of legalism in Brown-Beasley's appeal efforts but also his overwhelming suspicion of Harvard.

The dispute centers on whether Harvard has "failed" to officially recognize Glenn E. "Buddy" Diamond '78, Brown-Beasley's student nominee to the three-member appeal panel. Harvard argues that it has notified Brown-Beasley of its recognition directly and Diamond indirectly--by sending him a photocopy of its letter to Brown-Beasley. University officials also state that they have no right not to recognize Diamond and therefore no real obligation to recognize him officially. However, both Brown-Beasley and Diamond suspect that Harvard wants to block the sitting of an undergraduate on the appeal panel, and partially for this reason, Diamond is standing by his initial declaration to a Harvard official that he does not do business "by Xerox."

As a result, Diamond and Fiscal Services Director Gibson's representative, Thomas O'Brien, have not yet met to name the third or "neutral" member of the appeal board, raising the possibility that O'Brien--and eventually Harvard--will argue that Brown-Beasley's case has gone "stale." It seems at this point, with Harvard's public statement that it cannot block Diamond's membership on the panel, that Brown-Beasley and his representative should move on to more substantive disputes.

This would not necessarily move the appeal hearing ahead. Brown-Beasley has declared that Diamond will also not act until two Harvard officials--Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, and Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to the president--respond to several inquiries Brown-Beasley has made about affirmative action policy and aspects of the appeal procedure, and until Brown-Beasley has initiated possible litigation on those responses. Both Steiner and Leonard have refused to reply, asserting that they may eventually be involved in judging the appeal panel's recommendations, which are assessed finally by the University's president or general counsel. Steiner has also expressed faith in the ability of the current greivance procedures to handle any issue Brown-Beasley should raise.

In this case some of Brown-Beasley's arguments are weak, but several raise serious questions that Steiner's arguments do not answer. On the one hand Leonard is probably right not to rule now on Brown-Beasley's query, a request for an investigation of his racial discrimination complaint, which would best first be handled by the appeal panel. Yet it is hard to understand why Steiner--who for one need not, as Brown-Beasley notes, ultimately rule on the case--will not respond to certain fundamental procedural questions Brown-Beasley has raised. These questions include: 1) questions about the possible bias permitted in the list of candidates for the "neutral" third hearing panel seat, a list compiled by President Bok; and 2) questions about the procedures for the hearing: will it be public and include provisions for the calling and cross- examination of witnesses and for Brown-Beasley to face his accusers.

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By now the Bok administration is no stranger to labor battles: over the last year alone it has squared off against individual workers (such as Sherman Holcombe), unions (the dining hall workers), and labor organizers (District 65). But intra-management challenges like Brown-Beasley's are something new to Harvard and apparently something about which the University has much to learn.

Though not surprising, it would be sad if Harvard continued to mistake Brown-Beasley's peculiar manner--his profuse letter-writing, his occasional self-righteousness and his inordinate suspicion--as reasons to treat his charges lightly. On procedural grounds Brown-Beasley has a strong case against Harvard, and beyond this there remain the serious substantive allegations he has made about the operation of the Office of Fiscal Services and, more generally, the application of computers at Harvard. Apples, oranges and bananas aside, there's more to the Brown-Beasley controversy than fruit cocktai