Counter-Revolution at Harvard

The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by the police. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself. --Robert Pirsig,   Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

ONE OF THE MOST delightful impressions Harvard's pre-freshmen get from their admissions booklets is that they are about to join Pirsig's "real" university--that they are about to start to enrich the collective heritage of reason. It seems that, when they arrive in September, they will be able to take part in the free search for whatever truth may be found at Harvard.

However, a pattern of policies enacted over the past two years demonstrates that the powers that be in this university are tightening their control over every aspect of the student experience at Harvard. This attack directly challenges the ability of students to engage in free academic, or even personal development. Student energies are focused on responding to particular erosions of their rights, but miss the broader counter-revolution that has emerged--the administration's attempt to overturn the gains won by students in the last decade.

This counter-revolution, this quest to turn the clock back to the days before 1969 and preferably before 1960, is not some great conspiracy, orchestrated in University Hall. Rather, an unstated philosophy--clamp down on the students--has spread surreptitiously throughout the ranks of those who run this university, and what appear to be isolated attempts to regain control of this or that aspect of student life are in fact part of a larger pattern involving the whole University.

THE MOST DRASTIC attacks are, of course, on student freedom to choose an academic program. The Core Curriculum, rushed through with eleven minutes of debate on the proposal itself, and passed in spite of strong and broad-based student opposition, is the most overwhelming example. One of the greatest gains made by students in recent years was the explosion in the number of courses; the diversity of choice put the structure of the student's program very much in the student's hands. The attack on that diversity began well before the core was proposed with such tactics as denying Gen Ed credit to students who took a course with an explicit loose-grading policy--Nat Sci 36a.

Individual departments are also following the general faculty's lead and are restricting the freedom of their concentrators. For example, Social Studies now strictly enforces its thesis requirement. History and Literature has tightened the basic requirements for concentrators, setting up rigid introductory course requirements where none had existed before. The Core is just the most floodlit, the culmination of the Faculty's attempts to eliminate much of the students' control of his education at Harvard and to restore it to omniscient Faculty members and administrators.

Not satisfied with regaining lost prerogatives in academics, the Faculty/administration is attempting to gain greater control over student life. Little things, like the periodic housing transfer freezes, are constant irritants.

A much more flagrant example is the Faculty's battle with student-run theater. Up until last year Loeb Drama Center shows were selected by the student Harvard Dramatic Club (HDC) board, which emphasized student-run shows. Last year the Faculty demanded and received equal representation with students on the initial show selection board and final veto power over that board's decisions. The result has been that this year and next, four professionals and only three students a year direct mainstage shows. One HDC board member predicts that in five years there will be no more student theater at the Loeb.

NONE OF THIS is really new. Yet, it is important to see the general pattern in what have been treated as individual, separate issues. The administration's fear that gave rise to this policy--that students may demand ever-increasing control of their lives at Harvard--was most clearly expressed in the response to the recent South Africa demonstrations. The sight of thousands of students making demands (not requests) brought back memories of '69. The Faculty and administration see, quite rightly, an attempt to erode their power to set University policy. Such student demands demonstrate that students have concerns very different from other groups within the University. To counter this, the administration claims that no special avenues of input or control are necessary in investment and other decisions, because the administration is acting to further interests of all those at Harvard. This is the same straw man that the administration throws up to justify the actions that defend or expand administration control of student life.

With any such action, the administration invokes the myth of "the Harvard community." This is the myth that all people connected with the University, bound as they are by a common commitment to Pirsig's "real University," share a common interest which is best served by the actions of a benevolent vanguard group within the community--the Faculty/administration. Hence in the core debate the faculty proponents tried to blunt student opposition by continual references to the "community of educated men," for which the criteria of membership, of course, could best be defined only by the Faculty. In the Loeb coup, the Faculty reminded the students of the common goal to provide good theater, ignoring the need to develop good student theater.

In fact, the "Harvard community" is a farce, a facade used to justify interference in legitimate student concerns. Students have interests that directly compete with those of the Faculty/administration. Most importantly, the students and Faculty clash whenever student choice runs into faculty expedience or even mere faculty preference, as it did with the Core. To defend what control students have left over their Harvard experience, and to expand the student role at Harvard, students must first begin acting as a unified group within the University, and realize that all students share some common class concerns which must be defended.

The first step in this defense is visible, vocal and broad-based support for the new student government. When the assembly speaks, it must speak with the enthusiastic support of students. Also, the assembly must be pushed to demand for itself as large a role as possible within the University, mobilizing students within departments and on committees to defend their local interests. If the students let the assembly become a government majors' debating society, it is both their own fault and loss.

BUT MORE IMPORTANT than any specific institutional structure or tactic, is that students must develop a common consciousness. This consciousness is not just a pretty toy to toss around at midnight gripe sessions. Rather, it must be the inspiration and focus for all direct action at the University. Such common identification is necessary so that whenever students, in the assembly or in the streets, gather to protest any individual policy, or demand some specific redress, they will realize that the problem is much larger. The action they seek must ultimately not only right some immediate wrong, but also strengthen students' rights and freedoms within the University. Without something to unify it, all student action will have only fleeting, momentary impact. The community myth--which denies that any student interest or identification does exist--must be destroyed.

Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Ca.) once grouped students, with others, in "the Nigger vote," part of "all the people left out of the political process." Until we see ourselves that way, and until we develop our own movement to break the bonds of such a role, student freedom at Harvard will remain subject to the kind of arbitrary attack that is now occurring throughout the University. For now, any pre-freshmen looking forward to a sojourn in "the continuing body of reason itself," should forget it.