Merger? What Merger?

Faculty debates on the merger?" Gerald Holton, Malinckrodt Professor of Physics and Faculty member during the Faculty merger discussions, sounded bewildered, but amused. "They are a small part of my autobiography," he confessed.

Well, at least he remembers them. If Harvard Faculty ever composes its memoirs, more than likely the chapter on the 1969 and '70 merger debates will not make the final edition. Most of Holton's colleagues do not recall a debate ever taking place and the few who do, have only the vaguest notion what anyone said. Even John R. Marquand, assistant dean of the Faculty and often dubbed 'Harvard's unofficial historian,' knows he went to the meetings concerning the merger, but confesses uncomfortably, "I don't remember anything." James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, was also around at the time but explains, "The merger wasn't what I was thinking about back then." He was not +alone.

Despite Faculty fuzziness on the subject, Faculty minutes and newspaper reports in the 1969-'70 academic year show that the merger did reach the floor of University Hall's faculty room.

Possibly the uninspiring discussions on the merger put Marquand and his colleagues to sleep. Only one thing do Faculty members clearly recall about the debates--they were dull. Chase N. Peterson, then Harvard's director of the admissions and financial aid and now vice-president at the University of Utah, says no one was "exceptionally passionate." Back then the Faculty had more passion-inducing issues than the fund drive and the Core Curriculum to consider. When former Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting formally opened the Faculty talks on the merger in April 1969, the student strike erupted two days later. In the following months, as the faculty cowered in Sanders Theater and Merle Fainsod, Pforzheimer University Professor, guarded the portals of Widener Library, the merger was far from anyone's mind.

But eight months after the bust the Faculty still had not bothered to act on the merger and merger proponents were getting sick of waiting around. The Radcliffe Quarterly ran an editorial in December 1969, chastizing professorial lethargy on the merger. "The Faculty on Arts and Sciences has seemed in no hurry to put the merger on its agenda," the editorial criticized.

The Faculty did, however, offer what any good bureaucrat would consider the next best thing to a slot on the agenda--it appointed a committee "to examine the issues." Although the Faculty planned to form the committee by the end of the '68-'69 academic year, it did not name the members until August, and the committee in turn did not meet until September. And no Faculty members recall hearing a committee report. On professor said he thought Giles Constable '50, professor of History, might have reported, but Constable denies ever sitting on such a committee.

With the merger committee apparently out of commission, Ernest R. May, professor of History and Dean of the College, tried once more to prod the Faculty toward resolving the merger issue in the winter of '69-'70. He opened the floor of the Faculty meeting in February to debate on the merger, but few could think of anything substantial to say. So Constable moved to set up a merger committee. Or so the Faculty minutes claim. Constable doesn't remember this either.

Edward L. Keenan '57, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and then member of a committee on the admissions and financial aid aspects of the merger, did not believe in hasty Faculty action either. He advised that all decisions on future relationships between Harvard and Radcliffe "be deferred until all considerations pro and con from both communities have been heard." Bunting also opposed the Faculty making a decisive statement on the merger. "It would be premature for this Faculty to take any action at this time that would limit the options," she warned.

The Faculty finally closed the meeting by passing a resolution supporting the principle of coeducation--not a huge concession, considering the Faculty had been teaching co-ed classes since the 1940's. But they backed off from wholehearted support of the merger, claiming it would be imprudent to take a stand until they fully examined the implications of what they referred to as "the irrevocable merger." The vote also required--by the end of the spring term--that their rerun merger committee study on the findings of the four administrative merger committees. The Faculty never heard from them again.

But Pusey apparently had wearied of Faculty committees and their disappearing acts. A week after the February faculty non-debate/debate, he pushed the June 30, 1969 merger deadline forward, explaining, "This Faculty is not now ready to say they're in favor of such a close relationship."

Because educational instruction became co-ed in 1943, the merger would have no direct effect on professors' lifestyles, which explains their disinterest. Franklin L. Ford, dean of the College until the end of 1969, remembers bemused Faculty members at the time asking, "What does it have to do with us?"

The Faculty found the technical issues--such as financial aid and housing expansion--too confusing to discuss. Wilson recalls faculty members looking befuddled and finally declaring, "Well, that's an interesting idea," but Wilson says most didn't really understand what was involved, and asked to move on to something else.

The Faculty did debate--somewhat--the effects of a one-to-one female ratio, which the administration had predicted as a possible outcome of the merger. Though no Faculty member explicitly opposed the merger--with the exception of what Ford calls a few "curmudgeonly old misogynists"--many professors worried that the push to balance the ratio could force a decrease in the number of male applicants accepted. Reducing the male student body spelled disaster to Pusey who declared at the February Faculty meeting: "Call this male chauvinist if you like. There are many people here who would be unhappy to see the number of men reduced." Peterson had gloomier predictions, if Harvard reduced male admissions, he prophesied "such heightened frustrations and negative feedback as might literally destroy the richness of our applicant pool, our national schools committee apparatus and the interest of the secondary schools they contact."

When Faculty members discovered that the only alternative--and the one the University eventually adopted--was to admit 40 per cent more women, they got nervous again. Increased enrollment might mean greater demands placed on Faculty in the form of more tutorials and larger lectures. Greater teaching commitment--never a chore relished by the Faculty--dampened any enthusiasm for expanded enrollment.

Bunting winces when she recalls Peterson's apocalyptic speech before the Faculty. But his vehemence did not trouble her much at the time. Peterson, she explains, "did not have many followers."

Faculty members very briefly touched on how the merger would affect students. Some argued women might be better off remaining Radcliffe students, if only officially, because it gave them a sense of identity that affiliation with Harvard would destroy. Constable says he and other faculty members "somewhat feared women would not be as well-off." More faculty seemed concerned that men might be better off if women remained Radcliffe students. Pusey pronounced at the February Faculty meeting that Harvard had an "obligation to the nation" to train Harvard men. Peterson says he felt "very protective about the male student body."

And then a few diehards fussed about the dangers to the old boy network. A rapid growth of the female student body might reduce "male bonding," David Riesman and his colleagues predicted. Some of the elderly professors liked to "pretend that the old system still existed, when it had long gone by the boards," Pusey now recalls.

The Faculty's classic tendency to cast suspicion on immoderate change contributed to its reluctance to move quickly on the merger. Co-residency struck some as an alarming and sudden breach with the past. Peterson and his fellow faculty members, he explains, "philosophically resisted these great shifts in tide."

Looking back, Peterson admits his alarmist views "were never justified." Most professors concur, but nevertheless believe if they had it to do over, they would have moved with the same caution. The Faculty members at the time recoiled from the dangers of what Peterson calls a "precipitous merger," contending that Harvard was not "prepared" for the allegedly grandiose reversals in University tides.

But none are able to articulate specifically why Harvard was not ready in 1969 or '70, and what changed in 1971. Maybe some Faculty committee finally approved it. "Hmmm, maybe," say the professors, "but I don't really remember..."NATHAN M. PUSEY '28