The Gulf Protesters: Changing Harvard?

A half-decade after 35 black students took over Mass Hall in protest of Harvard's $20 million investment in Gulf Oil Corporation stock, University administrators and the takeover participants themselves present vastly different analyses of the decline in activism among Harvard students, and the changes--if any--in Harvard's role as an institution investing over $1 billion in funds.

Most people--including Stanley Surrey, Smith Professor of Law and first chairman of the University's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR)--agree that the Mass Hall takeover hastened the move by President Bok to set up the ACSR. Since 1973, the advisory committee, composed of equal numbers of students, faculty and alumni, has counselled the Corporation on socially responsible Harvard shareholding, coming up with recommendations on how Harvard should vote on each shareholder-sponsored resolution it receives as stockholders in hundreds of companies.

President Bok himself disagreed this week with Surrey's analysis of events, claiming that the establishment of a shareholder advisory committee had been among his plans from the start of his term as president in the fall of 1971. At the same time, in light of the Mass Hall takeover, Bok regrets not having established ACSR promptly--before the development of the Gulf Oil protests. "To have had those procedures implemented promptly before the problem arose would have been a good thing," Bok says. "Of course, hindsight is always easy. In the fall, there was no problem, and it didn't appear that moving on that ACSR deliberately would matter. In retrospect, it did, and to that extent I suppose I have some regrets."

Bok would not say whether the establishment of the advisory group before the incident would have forestalled the protest, but "it would have been interesting to find out."

Although the protesters explain it in different terms, almost all of them express a pessimistic, almost fatalistic feeling that the University can never truly become an institution which ethically invests its funds. Many see the problem not simply as a function of the individuals who form the Corporation, however.

Clement Cann '74 believes the takeover highlighted a continuing contradiction at the heart of the University as an institution. As a capitalist institution trying to maximize the yield of its investments, Harvard is necessarily forced into a position "in opposition to human potential and growth," Cann says.

"You have to be subjective to amass a billion dollar portfolio," Cann says. "It's an insoluble contradiction. As long as the University is involved in investment which is subjective by its very nature, trying to maintain intellectual freedom and objectivity within its own walls is impossible.

"The University can come up with any number of programs for people they target as oppressed. This cannot make up for the fact that Harvard investment restricts human development," he adds. A nationalized Harvard University would perhaps be a positive step, although an unrealistic one to consider at this time, he suggests.

Although many said they had never followed the progress of the Corporation's committee on shareholding decisions, protesters who had kept tabs on ACSR suggest the body is simply an effort at appeasement. One student reminded this reporter that several Houses had even boycotted the elections of a student representative to ACSR in the first years of the committee's existence. "The rationale for the University's policies have absolutely no connection with what a little committee feels is ethical," Mary Basset '74 said.

The former campus dissidents' attitudes are not completely at odds with the views of some ACSR members, both past and present. Some members suggest that a bias exists in ACSR membership because of the strong predominance of individuals with business, corporate law, and economics backgrounds, among the group's alumni and faculty members. As Sabine Rodriguez '75, a second-year student at the Law School and a member of ACSR during its first three years says the University appears to believe that an alumnus who works in the arts in Boston is not as capable of judging the social value of shareholder resolution as a corporate lawyer. As a result, some suggest that the Corporation's overwhelming acceptance of ACSR recommendations on voting stock may be more the result of a complete identity of views between the two decision-making bodies, rather than any real advisory power the ACSR group possesses.

Although most of the protesters say they have been out of touch with the University since their graduation, all agreed that student activism at Harvard has declined dramatically since the early 70s. "People just aren't thinking in the same critical way. The level of questioning has seriously declined," Basset says, adding with a nervous laugh, "I'm glad I'm not there now."

Scott Minerbrook '74 believes that today's students question things less because "the University is not offering exactly the same academic curriculum." Attributing much of his own personal motivation for participating in the Mass Hall occupation to courses he had taken as an Afro major, Minerbrook says the University no longer allows students to "experience the same kinds of intellectual crises."

Many of the students cite reasons for the decline in activism other than the standard sociological "tight job market--pre-professional preoccupation--gotta get good grades" synthesis. Some of them reject the absence of an overwhelming issue like Vietnam. The issues are still there, only the interest is not, they suggest.

A recurrent theme voiced by the protesters is that the University has made a conscious effort since the late '60s to admit a more inward-looking group of applicants, screening out social activists who might cause the University trouble. Cann, Basset and others believe this admissions policy has been most intensely implemented concerning black applicants. Cann suggests that the University has stopped admitting many blacks of working-class background, focussing instead on admitting blacks from professional families who will be less likely to take social-activist positions.

At least one student who took part in the takeover now works for the University. The current coordinator of a federally-funded Harvard program that attempts to aid minority group and disadvantaged students in following health careers at Harvard was a graduate student in Biology at the time of his participation in the Mass Hall occupation.

The role in the takeover played by this individual (who declined to be indentified by name and will be called "John Doe") was in one way unique: Doe was the only student of the thirty-five to enter Mass Hall after the start of the occupation. A tutor at the time, he recalls receiving a 7 a.m. phone call in his Claverly room from George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, informing him that black students had just taken over Mass Hall, and asking him if he knew any details of the protest action. The graduate student, who belonged to H-R Afro, told Wald he'd go down to Mass Hall to check out the report and call him back. When the tutor reached Mass Hall, a small group of protesters were already huddled outside and some of the occupying students yelled for him to join them inside. He somehow avoided the observation of the police stationed in the area until he was halfway through a Mass Hall window. Immediately after he entered the building, police moved in and barricaded the hall against further entry.

This takeover participant agrees that since the early seventies, the University has started to admit relatively more black applicants from professional, upper class families. Doe is a native of Georgia who grew up in an epoch when he says segregation was still a legal institution and lynchings an occasional horror; he believes that Harvard students--black and white--no longer realize that black students come from a "different type of political reality," regardless of their economic and financial backgrounds. Doe laments the changing attitudes of black students at the University. He recalls going to a reception for black freshmen this September where he closed his eyes and, he says, "I could have sworn I was with a bunch of upper class white students." Doe says he has little faith in the University's ability to develop a socially responsible position as an investor. "How can the University clean up its act if America can't clean up its act?" he asks.

Five years after his role in the takeover of the University's administrative center, Doe says he feels "schizophrenic" in his attitude toward his Harvard past. "I have my moments when I think this whole thing is an appeasement and that the only thing that I'm doing is helping a group of minority students develop bourgeois values to perpetuate an evil. And on the other hand, I think I see people that I know, in fact, would never have had a chance to have any type of professional aspirations unless we helped them," Doe says.

Harvard-Radcliffe admissions officers disagreed this week with the assertion of the takeover participants that the University has in recent years adopted policies to screen out applicants, either white or minority group members, who show a potential for radical student activism. Their reasons for disagreeing vary, however. Dwight Miller, an admissions officer since 1967, said this week that individual admissions officers may have altered their attitudes toward what types of students to admit during the late '60s and early '70s, but that such changes were "internally" motivated--personal reactions to events the admissions officers witnessed in their admissions and other activities at the University. The University administration never issued any directives to the admissions offices requesting a screening of applicants for possible activism, Miller said.

L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions, also denied that the University ever issued any directives and added that he believes such an admissions screening policy would be detrimental to the University, that the "value of having aware and committed students at the College far outweighs" the occasional costs. Jewett added that, on the basis of past studies by the admissions office, it would be impossible to screen out potential protesters, even if the University wanted to do so.

After the 1969 University Hall takeover, admissions officials went back and studied the admissions records of the leaders of the student strike, Jewett says. According to Jewett, they found at the time that trying to correlate admissions applications with involvements in the strike was "a futile effort." Jewett adds he does not believe there has been a significant change in the composition of family backgrounds of black students admitted to the College.

Senior admissions officer David Evans, who was assistant director of admissions during the 1972 Mass Hall incident, says a study he did at that time of the economic backgrounds of the occupying students showed that most were not among the poorer black students at Harvard. He says that 25 of the 31 undergraduates involved were receiving financial aid, while about 70 per cent of all blacks at the College were also on aid at the time. The median family income of the financial aid students who occupied Mass Hall was $17,000, as opposed to $11,000 for all black students then on financial aid.

Evans says that, contrary to the suggestions of many at the time of the takeover, "this was not a case of students who were unable to handle the social pressures at Harvard because they came from low socio-economic backgrounds. These were students from the middle-and upper-middle classes, as radicals usually are."

Five years later, the Mass Hall occupiers who protested Harvard ownership of Gulf Oil stock feel pessimistic about the prospects for more socially responsible University investing. They doubt that a more activist Harvard student group will arise in the near future. But it is clear that they do not believe that widespread student commitment to social concerns at Harvard is dead and gone. As Scott Minerbrook suggests, "Students at Harvard try to go to sleep periodically. But there are cycles every two or three student generations. Right now, Harvard is trying to present itself as a benign institution. But the student activity will start again."