Let Him Eat Pizza

DEREK BOK and his most important administrators were supposed to have supped with 600 of Harvard's most celebrated and generous alumni and faculty Thursday night at an enormous dinner commemorating the University's 350th anniversary.

Bok and company ended up munching on delivery-truck pizza after protesters forced the cancellation of the gala.

If activists celebrated Bok's proletarian late-night snack as a wonderful ironic twist on what they might term his let-them-eat-cake attitude toward their activities, the University president and his cohorts were certainly not as happy.

Sixty-eight labor, student and alumni activists overwhelmed the three security guards around Memorial Hall just 15 minutes before guests were to arrive from the pre-dinner cocktail party. Even after enough police had arrived to remove the protesters, they were delayed by Harvard's "chain of command," which prevents them from acting in such situations without authorization from a series of specific University officials. Before a decision could be reached, scores of prestigious alumni had appeared and confronted the activists--some physically and many others verbally.

The two groups soon became entangled, and the police would have had to slog through the growing group of formally clad alumni to remove the members of the blockade.

AT THE SCENE Bok was personally humiliated. His enormous university, at the height of its grandest celebration, was being held captive by 68 scruffy partisans. The former Harvard Law School dean--who once defused a protest there with bags full of coffee and donuts--was reduced to a state of helplessness in front of the most important alumni and faculty of the University.

Harvard's failure to adequately protect Memorial Hall from protesters in advance was embarrassing as well. Despite the massive security forces assembled here for the 350th, the police, under the direction of Harvard University Police Chief Paul Johnson failed in its most fundamental task: preventing the University from being humiliated during its big bash.

And once the police did arrive, they did not clear the guests away from Memorial Hall in anticipation of an order from Bok to make the arrests necessary to clear a pathway through the protesters.

That order never came for two reasons. First was the behavior of the party-goers. Enraged at this affront to themselves and the celebration of Harvard's 350th, a significant number of the prestigious guests lost their cool and tried to take control of the situation themselves. Many verbally harassed the blockaders and others tried to make their way bodily into the building.

If Bok was to have a chance to remove the protesters in an orderly fashion, the alumni would have had to back off and let the police handle it. As it was, and as may be inevitable in a situation with so many corporate chief executives, the distinguished alumni behaved like a herd of rampaging bulls.

Not only did their activity severely restrict Bok's options, but it was a sad commentary on the 350th. The only contact that these best and brightest would have with the present student body was a childish shouting match in which the two groups matched their self-righteousness.

While many alumni at the event seemed to indicate that they would have been happier if Bok had decided to order the police to make arrests despite the chaos, he said the protest was "too fluid a situation to control." With alumni yelling and scuffling with the protesters in the dark, a confrontation could have resulted in injuries to some of the assembled VIPs.

THE RECENT Massachusetts Hall policy of passive resistance to divestment activists also may have influenced the decision not to arrest the protesters, who said afterwards that they fully expected to be taken in by police.

When shanties were erected between Massachusetts and University Halls in the spring, Bok drew the line only at further expansion of the encampment and allowed the structures to remain through Commencement as "a legitimate form of free expression."

Other Harvard administration actions have also avoided confrontation and prevented escalation in the ongoing battle between the activists and the University. The strategy has been a good one, however, because the activists enjoy only the vaguest intellectual sympathy from the student body. Each time protesters take new steps to disrupt University life, they push themselves farther away from a politically apathetic student body.

Last night, in front of a group of powerful people who were not used to having their party schedules interrupted by groups of political protesters, a different strategy was needed. Confrontation was achieved de facto by the militants, and Bok's failure to order their arrest in no way limited the damage that they did to the University's reputation.

And white 350th organizers and Harvard officials may well try to downplay the events of Thursday night as a slight aberration in an otherwise gratifying celebration, something besides a big dinner was spoiled Thursday night.

The make-believe mood of the past few days' events was ruined, too. A university reveling in the glories of its storied past was forced to confront the fierce internal political debate over its activities in the present.