They Won't Remember Hartman

When one of the big shots in the History Department eventually writes the "official history" of Harvard after its 1936 tercentary, where Samuel Eliot Morison '08 left off, odds are he won't mention Chester W. Hartman '57, a former assistant professor of City Planning at the Graduate School of Design.

By conventional standards there's little reason to. Hartman never received tenure at the GSD, teaching for only four years. Although he worked at the GSD's more prestigious conterpart at the University of California at Berkeley after leaving Harvard in 1970, he abandoned the traditional academic world in 1974.

But Hartman's destiny of obscurity is sealed most of all by the embarrassing nature of his claim to fame; six years after charging that he was not rehired for personal and political reasons, Hartman is still waiting for a formal response from the GSD faculty.

Initially the GSD faculty and Hartman spent two years debating the proper review mechanism for his grievance, with the faculty eventually creating a five-man investigatory panel of non-GSD professors over Hartman's objections.

That ad hoc panel spent over three years looking into the highly complex case and finally, last September, issued an often ambiguous 300-page report that declined to say Hartman's academic freedom had been violated but did label his grievances "legitimate."

Faced with an intricate set of facts and the sprawling report, the GSD faculty--most of whom arrived at the school after 1970--referred the case to its Academic Policy Committee. It then spent six months to produce a still-confidential report, revealed this week by The Crimson, that largely exonerates the GSD and Department of City and Regional Planning and suggests that the faculty cannot consider taking action against GSD officials who did not cooperate with the initial investigation.

This second, 32-page report goes before the faculty on May 26; in the meantime principals in the case--including Hartman--may formally comment in writing on the document. The ex-faculty member, who now lives in San Francisco, said last fall that if the GSD's action does not satisfy him, he will take his case to President Bok and possibly to the American Association of University Professors and the courts.