No Politics?

The case of Mr. Arnold Harberger and of his proposed dual appointment as professor of Economics and Director of HIID continues to confuse even after Mr. Harberger's refusal of Harvard's offer. The issues at stake are indeed central to academic freedom at the University, but our President has not dealt with them adequately in his recent open letter.

We are told that Mr. Harberger disapproves of the Chilean dictatorship (see Crimson, April 7). Were he its faithful and active supporter, this should be irrelevant to a professional appointment. If Mr. Harberger had stabbed his political enemies in Chicago and torn out their hearts with his hands, he should still not be barred by us from becoming a professor at Harvard. Who knows, in the course of this experience he might have had a visionary insight into the silliness of general equilibrium analysis for the sake of which a grateful, irresponsible, and dazzled posterity might forgive him his crimes. As people and as citizens we do not allow the ends to justify the means. We rightly try not to participate in posterity's characteristic moral indifference and in its crazed and crude worship of creative power. But as members of a university our task is to find enemies as well as friends, to push back the moral vetos on intellectual coexistence, and to subtract from the obstacles that society offers to a life of thought rather than to add obstacles, of our own making.

Becoming Director of HIID is another story. This is one of the few activities in which the University, as a corporate institution, is directly involved in politics. But the University is not organized so as to allow the political issues in question to be discussed and decided by some process of University-wide debate and decision. The name of the University, not the names of individual teachers or students, is used to further political activities with which some of us passionately disagree. It is used in faraway countries and in ways that students and teachers have not chosen and cannot see.

The President views HIID as a technical eneterprise providing apolitical skills to serve "indigenous" objectives. If "inhumane" or "reprehensible" projects are proposed, then the good fellows of the Institute and the responsible deans will see to it that they are not accepted. What is not "irresponsible" or "immoral" will be all right. Politics get lost in the shuffle between unpolitical morality and illusory technique.

In fact, however, even apparently uncontroversial programs imply political decisions. The same health or agrarian or educational objectives, no matter how narrow and immediate they may seem, can almost invariable be achieved by alternative routes, each with different consequences for the distribution of power and advantage and for the opportunities of popular militancy. It is pointless to treat this service activity as apolitical on the ground that it follows indigenous values. The officials with whom HIID deals in countries like Haiti and Indonesia are not in a position to speak for the desires of their people. Even if they were, the decision to support the majoritarian choice would be no less political. It is not much of a consolation to think that HIID's practical effects may be close to nil; it still stands its local ideological allies in good stead.

The view of development consulting work expressed in the President's open letter would be mistaken in much of the world for a transparent pretext or a tasteless joke; some of the loudest laughs would come from Mr. Harberger's Latin American collaborators. Yet there are still many people in the United States (though perhaps not as many as in the 1950's) who, like Mr. Bok himself, honestly believe in this view. Among them--if one is to judge by HIID's descriptive literature--are the Institute's own staff.

So the crux of the problem is disagreement about the political character of a certain kind of activity that Harvard carries on officially. At least, the President of the University should not present this as a simple fight between two people who do and do not respect academic freedom.

If Mr. Bok is wrong about what HIID does, Harvard should shut the Institute down together with those other few activities of the University that represent an outright institutional intervention in politics. What could be the appropriate process for appointing HIID's director and staff? The best that can be expected is that if right- or left-wing people are chosen, their political adversaries will raise hell and try to rouse the vast, annoyed center from its torpor. This is actually what happened in the Harberger case. But it has its disadvantages: the confusion about academic freedom that it produces, the unavoidability of enthroning lackluster figures who offend nobody, and, above all, the failure to deal with the root problem of politics secluded against opportunities for conflict or accountability. This situation is not just imprudent, it is unjust. It deprives those who oppose HIID's field programs of any effective form of representation, agitation, or resistance, while lending these programs the name of the University to which we all belong.

Now suppose Mr. Bok is right in viewing HIID's work as technique tempered by scruple rather than as politics unjustified by democracy. In this case, the residual standard for appointment to HIID is still a bad idea, though the argument against it becomes more tentative. A large amount of study of the Third World goes on at Harvard. HIID has nothing to do with more than a minute part of this research. For the sake of this minimal scholarly advantage, we get continued uncertainty about the issues of academic freedom that are central to the University. Out of confusion or anger, many people will oppose HIID appointments and field programs without insisting on the difference between academic and political activity even if at heart most of them do seem to care about the difference. Others will be misinterpreted as if they were careless of academic freedom. Though the academic classes usually prefer distinguish to inventing, this problem seems to overtax their capacity for distinction. We should not expose ourselves to repeated occasions for disagreement, bluster, and bitterness over something that is fundamental to us in exchange for something that contributes almost nothing to our basic endeavor as a university. It's a matter of common sense. So, once again, Harvard should get rid of HIID and get out of world politics.

The Harberger case can serve us an an occasion to begin debate on the larger aspects of academic freedom and protest movements at Harvard.

It is not enough to avoid straightforward political persecution in professional appointments. This is the ground level of academic freedom, but it is only that. It is hardly a great achievement so long as the country's established institutions are not felt to be in jeopardy. The second level of academic freedom is the avoidance of the dictatorship of orthodoxies that make no real effort to separate their commitment to certain intellectual traditions from their evaluations of candidates. The two levels are directly linked to all branches of social thought: a politically adversarial stance is often accompanied by dissent from the ruling theoretical practices in a discipline.

The real test of academic freedom, beyond the elimination of unabashed political gangsterism, is whether some of the people appointed in every field do work that most of their colleagues believe to be fundamentally misguided and dangerous, but which, by an act of self-doubt or self-transcendence, these same skeptical colleagues are bale to see as the possible vehicle of a powerful truth. Professors often fail to rise to this standard of judgement out of prejudice, mean-mindedness, and the narcosis induced by membership in a mutual admiration society. But they also fail out of a kind of hypocrisy and despair. They want to suppress the painful awareness of the element of arbitrariness in their lifelong devotion to some particular mode of thought. They are unable to imagine their own discipline, in the here and now, as the arena of a violent formative contest. Judged by the higher standard, academic freedom does not flourish at Harvard. Our failure to establish it corrupts our common life.

There is also something to be said about the emphasis and direction of protest movements at the University, as demonstrated in the Harberger controversy. Some of Mr. Harberger's critics threw the distinction between a political and professorial appointment to the dogs. For them, it's all politics. This is to confuse problems of a different order. On the part of the academic radicals or heretics in America, it's sort of dumb. What will become of us leftists when the majorities are entitled to judge us on the basis of our political activities and when, at best, well defined and well policed political sects are assigned a quota in the academy? And what will happen to use outcasts and dreamers (not the same category as leftists) when the bungling and half-hearted hazing to which we are subject is replaced by a licensed and shameless oppression?

Other critics of Mr. Harberger made a point of villifying him. They seem to believe that to fight ardently against your political enemies, you've got to hate them. What a lack of imagination.

Then, there is the troubling focus on exclusively negative aims: divesting in South Africa, erasing the Engelhard name from the library, of keeping out Mr. Harberger. All this certainly help dramatize the nature of the United States' dealings with the Third World. But some people seem more anxious to satisfy their autumnal and luxurious desire for innocence than to advance a position within their own country. Their campaigns begin and end in handwashing; Pontius Pilate is their political theorist. Those of us foreigners who admire the American people for their characteristic qualities of good faith, generosity, and rule-breaking inventiveness must hope that this is not the end of the story. Far-reaching dissent must be combined with the development of a constructive strategy and vision. How else can the United States--or any other country--remain or become an experiment of value to humanity? Roberto Mangabeira Unger   Professor of Law