Keeping Secrets

My attention has just been called to your issue of January 12, 1984, with an article by Dr. Sissela Bok, "Securing Information." Of the Reagan administration's efforts to amend the Freedom of Information Act and to restrict access to information in other ways, Dr. Bok says:

If we consider other societies that labor under official control over what is written, over research, over travel and public service, we find that the control affects not only what is dangerous to national security but, much more often, what would present a challenge to government leaders themselves: all that might prove embarassing, all that stands in need of challenge, all that exposes failure and abuses...

Dr Bok feels that "there is no greater danger for free democratic systems than the pressure to imitate the security measures of modern police states."

Readers of Dr. Bok's article would never know that Harvard University pursues the policy of secrecy that she deplores in others. I agree with her that "the press has done surprisingly little" to discuss the issue of secrecy. I write this article in the belief that The Crimson, also agreeing with Dr Bok, will take this opportunity to inform its readers about secrecy at Harvard.

In December 1977, through the courtesy of Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky. I received a copy of the letter President Bok sent to those who had requested permission to do research in the Corporation records (i.e. the records of the University) dealing with events during the McCarthy period President Bok repeated whatHarvardGeneral Counsel Daniel Steiner '54 had already announced. The rule closing Corporation documents to the public for fifty years would not be set aside, no one was suffering a serious injustice or current damage because of confusion over past events and, besides, preservation that only the passage of time can bring.

I did nothing about the letter until I was reminded of a passage in it by the coincidence of two events in April 1980. On April 11, I read a paper at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on my research, made possible through the Freedom of Information Act, on the relations between the FBI and universities and labor unions during the McCarthy period. Among the documents I had received were reports from the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Boston FBI office to Washington headquarters dealing with the "most cooperative and understanding association between the Bureau and Harvard University" and with the "arrangements [that] have been perfected whereby information of interest will be made available to the Bureau on a confidential basis" (SAC Boston to The Director. FBI, June 19, July 31, 1950). I read in the newspapers the very next day that President Bok had written in an open letter to the Harvard faculty concerning the controversy over an appointment to Professor Arnold Harberger, [to the Harvard Institute for International Development] that "allowing political judgements to influence faculty appointments is a threat to the fundamental principles of academic freedom," and had drawn "a parallel between the protests lodged against Harberger and the climate created in the early 1950s by Joseph McCarthy..."

The FBI documents I had received seemed possibly to clarify an obscure passage in President Bok's earlier letter to those who sought access to the Harvard documents. It is quite possible, he wrote then, that the Harvard files contain records relating to the political activities of various people, based on information submitted by individuals or noted down by administrative officials after conversations Just why Harvard officials should have noted such political information was not discussed by President Bok, but the FBI documents provided one possible explanation--an "arrangement" existed with the FBI President Bok's warning in his open letter about the danger of "political considerations" in the making of appointments and his explicit reference to the damage McCarthy had done seemed to justify the hope that perhaps a change in policy was possible. On April 24, 1980. I wrote to President Bok congratulating him on the stand he had taken. I expressed the hope that this position, together with the forcefulness of arguments that had recently been made against lying and concealment, would lead him to reconsider the 50-year rule.

President Bok's reply complimented me on my ingenuity in suggesting that concealment of the truth, in the form of denying access to historical documents, is sufficiently close to lying as to raise serious moral questions. He maintained, however, that the conduct of university business required respect for the commitment to confidentiality made at earlier times. As for the present, confidentiality was required if people were not to be afraid to disclose sensitive facts. He concluded by suggesting that if, someday, his wife were to write a book on the ethics of secrecy as a companion to her book on lying, he and I would be able to discuss the matter with greater sophistication.

In my reply to President Bok I pointed out that the distinction he made between lying and failing to disclose did not fully dispose of the matter. Witnesses in a court of law are put under oath not only not to lie, but to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth President Bok's position. I felt, made it clear that he would disapprove of a Harvard official's lying about the university's relations with the FBI during the McCarthy period, but he would not disapprove of the refusal of a Harvard official to reveal what he knew about those relations or make available the documents that would permit others to construct the record of history. As to the argument that the university must respect earlier committments to confidentiality. I asked if in fact that university had made such commitments and to whom--to its own employees (all of them or some of them), to government officials? As to his argument that the principle of confidentiality must be maintained lest people refuse to reveal sensitive facts and opinions. I pointed out that the FBI was not interested in "facts and opinions in general, nor facts and opinions about Good and Evil in Western Literature, Change and Continuity in History, Citizenship and Its Obligations in Classical Antiquity," but facts and opinions about the political beliefs of particular people, "exactly the kinds of beliefs and opinions which you warned against taking into account in the making of academic appointments." President Bok's position would make it impossible to examine the Harvard documents in an effort to determine the degree to which its officials shared the FBI's concern with sensitive facts and opinions and cooperated in enquiring into them.

I argued, too, that my request for access to certain documents would not involve a breach of confidentiality. I was interested only in those documents dealing with Harvard's relations with the FBI, and those could be made available in a form which allowed inferences to be drawn as to policy without revealing the names of informants, either those that Harvard used internally or those who reported for Harvard to the FBI. What President Bok presented as an argument based on confidentiality was in reality. I said, a claim to immunity based on executive privilege. Those who had formulated a particular policy were to be protected from the consequences of their decisions by making it impossible to inquire into what they had done and why. "There is an ethical argument to be made in support of the principle of confidentiality, and I have not asked you to breach confidentiality. But there is no ethical argument to be made in support of the principle of executive privilege, only a political argument."

I concluded by reminding President Bok that he had not commented on the two FBI documents concerning Harvard that I had sent him, and by pointing out that his arguments were rejected at the time the Freedom of Information Act had been debated--and that neither the government nor the sky had fallen.

President Bok did not reply, and I wrote to him on July 29, 1980, asking permission to quote from our correspondence in connection with some articles I was writing.

To that letter President Bok did reply. He was at a great disadvantage in carrying on a debate with me because of the enormous demands of operating the university, including the capital fund campaign. Since he did not have time to engage in such a debate, which the importance of the issue would warrant, he did not believe he could authorize publication of the correspondence, which did not do full justice to his views.

I wrote at once that I had not asked for a debate nor for permission to publish the correspondence, but only for permission to quote from it in some articles I was writing. I wondered if his objection to reproduction of his letters included objection to quotations from them.

On September 9, 1980, President Bok wrote that this was a matter that he would either want to discuss in detail or say nothing about in print at all. He chose the latter course as the only feasible one. I could not quote from his letters.

That ended my correspondence with President Bok, though not with Dr. Bok. After the publication of her books on Lying and Secrecy and following the appearance of her article on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on the dangers of secrecy. I wrote to solicit her support--given her strongly felt views about these matters--in changing Harvard's secrecy policy. Neither in her books nor in her many articles has Dr. Bok ever mentioned that policy. I appreciate the reasons for her reticence, but since they do not apply to me and since I feel that the fight for freedom of information, like charity, begins at home. I thought it would be helpful to call the matter to her attention. If, now, Dr. Bok continues to keep silent about Harvard's secrecy policy, as, judging from her article in The Crimson, she does, it is not because she does not know of it but because she chooses not to speak of it.

On March 16, 1983 just after her Op-Ed page article was printed. I wrote Dr. Bok that even the FBI provided at least limited access to its documents under the Freedom of Information Act, but that Harvard barred all access to Corporation documents for a period of fifty years. As a result, scholars interested in the relations between government and universities during the McCarthy period were severely handicapped. I enclosed copy of a recent article I had written on Harvard and the FBI, quoting several FBI documents indicating the existence, as one of them put it, of "a most cooperative and understanding association between the Bureau and Harvard University." Efforts to discover the nature of that "association"--how it worked, with whom it was established, who was affected by it-- were frustrated by the FBI's censorship of the documents it released and Harvard's refusal to release any documents at all for fifty years, a policy more restrictive than the Official Secrets Acts of many governments. I wrote Dr. Bok that those who petitioned Harvard for a relaxation of its policy were told by the administration that the passage of fifty years, by improving the perspective from which we view the events of the McCarthy period, will aid in maturing our judgment.

I pointed out to Dr. Bok that I had corresponded with President Bok about Harvard's policy, and that he had refused me permission to quote from his letters. And I concluded:

The veil of secrecy is drawn so tight that not only is it impossible to reconstruct the events of the past, but even to reveal the existence of a debate about the meaning of those events....One does not expect...university presidents to adapt Orwell's memory hole" to the governance of universities.

When I had not heard from Dr. Bok after nearly two months. I wrote her again:

Your books on lying and secrecy have looked into some dark corners and therefore have been called "consequentia." I think you would disclose still more ambiguities if your third book were to deal with silence. Merely to show the implications of some primitive distinctions would be helpful; for example, to distinguish between the silence that gives consent and the silence that is the product of the fear to dissent--or the silence that comes when one cannot find words with which to express the emotion of release from some oppressive affliction and the silence that makes one an accomplice to such oppression.

Sometime later, in May, 1983, Dr. Bok telephoned me to say that she had not written because of the press of work at the end of the academic year. She was interested in the letters and articles I had sent, she said, and I would soon hear from her at length, but I have not.

Sigmund Diamond is Giddings Professor of Sociology and Professor of History, Columbia University.

My concern is less with Dr. Bok's moral postures this with President Bok's administrative position. I do not expect a resuscitation of my correspondence with them, but my correspondence with Harvard continues fitfully, and I can report to The Crimson that President Bok's policy on official secrecy continues. In response to my request for access to archival materials at the Law School, Assistant Dean Stephen M. Bernard informed me that no waiver of the 50-year rule would be granted. The reasons? One,"--the task of going through these materials to extract the ones relevant to your request was daunting and would involve my spending an amount of time on this project that I simply do not have." Second,"...you would probably be dissatisfied with the results of a process that involved my filtering out--on the basis of factors relating to the purposes of the 50-year rule, such as issues of individual privacy -- documents you might judge, if you had access to them, to be relevant to your inquiries." Stone-walling at Watergate relied on the doctrine of executive privilege; at Massachusetts Hall it rests mainly on administrative convenience.

In my time at Harvard, the Confidential Guide to courses was useful in providing countervailing information to official blurbs. Perhaps the unofficial recital of events I have provided will help present and future Harvard students in making educational choices by providing a context for the Core Curriculum course. "Moral Choice and Personal Responsibility," officially described as dealing with: "The role of moral deliberation and choice in such personal conflicts as those having to do with loyalty, promises, secrecy, and truthfulness, and in weighing modes of conduct and life plans." I hope it will be helpful to them, as I hope it will be helpful to those scholars who will not be deflected from the search for Veritas because they are seduced by currently fashionable cant that covers up unpalatable particular truths by parading its preference for lofty, but unexceptionable, general truths