The Cavalier daily. :: Friday, April 18, 1969 :: University of Virginia Library

The Flags in Harvard Yard were
already at half mast when it
happened, a series of mistakes and
misunderstandings compounded
and redoubled, multiplied so
greatly that they threatened to
exterminate much of what has
made Harvard a sort of angelic
utopia.

In this era of student dissent and
rioting, Harvard, not by coincidence,
has led almost a charmed life. With
a faculty as liberal as its students, a
well informed and enlightened
administration, and enough available
funds to do almost anything,
all chances for trouble at Harvard
have been met and acted upon
before they had a chance to

Photo By Charles Ribkaoff

become explosive issues. There is
little at Harvard to complain about;
as one former student told me,
"until this came up, I'd have to say
that anyone with the audacity to
complain about anything here was
crazy."

The current crisis started like
many others had, and seemed well
on its way to being resolved like
many others. The first issue was
ROTC on campus. Liberals and
radicals protested that having such
courses on campus implied tacit
approval of the military complex,
not a popular thing in Cambridge.
The faculty, which has a good deal
of power at Harvard, objected to
ROTC instructors, most of whom
are without comparable degrees or
intelligence, being accorded full
faculty status

Further, both faculty and students
objected to ROTC courses
being given full credit, since most
students allegedly take them either
for the money involved, or because
they are, at Harvard as well as
elsewhere, generally considered to
be roaring guts, without comparable
intellectual content to other
courses.

At first, it didn't even seem like
a major issue. Fewer than 50
undergraduates signed up for the
ROTC at Harvard this year anyway,
and the program seemed about to
fade away on its own. The faculty
passed a resolution calling for the
removal of academic credit from
these course, leaving them with a
sort of club status

The other schools in the Ivy
League have either already done
this, or are in the process of doing
it, and it seemed that that would
happen at Harvard. And that,
conceivably, could have been that.

But it wasn't. Harvard President
Nathan Pusey made what may turn
out to be the major blunder of his
otherwise brilliant carer. At the
apparent urging of Dean Ford, the
number two man in the Harvard
hierarchy, he rejected the resolution,
thereby splitting the faculty
and infuriating the radicals.

Students suggested many reasons
for President Pusey's decision.
One theory is that the Army put
considerable pressure on him to
keep the program, arguing that
abolition of ROTC at Harvard
could mean the end of the program
throughout the nation, and that it
was vital and necessary to the
nation (this statement has been
questioned by many, since it
reportedly takes less than three
months to train a lieutenant,
anyway). Perhaps he really believed
that ROTC should be offered for
credit, and simply misread and
misunderstood the depth of
opinion on the matter.

At any rate, student reaction
was not long in coming. On
Wednesday a group of about 200
SDS and other radicals stormed
University Hall. Although it was the
first time this happened at Harvard,
students outside didn't much seem
to care, and the whole thing might
have did down if left alone.

Inside the building, the scene
was an incredible fantasy. The
students acted something like a
group of kids who had just hit the
Great Cookie Jar In The Sky, and
gotten away with it. There was
little destruction of property.

They issued a group of demands
and proposals, some of which
seemed hastily concocted (after all,
you can't have a very good
revolution with only one demand).
Then Dr. Pusey made his second
mistake of the encounter, when he
issued a statement saying "can
anyone really take these demands
seriously?"

And then came what has come
to be called The Great Mistake.
President Pusey called the cops,
some 500 of them, to clear the
building. The students were trespassing,
and were breaking the Law.
But, sing the bandaged heads and
bloody pictures make it impossible
for me to justify the response.

No one knows why he reacted
this way, with uncharacteristic
venom. One theory is that there
were confidential papers in University
which he didn't want seen or
made known (a captured letter
from Dean Ford, calling the faculty
ROTC resolution "Irresponsible"
was published and distributed yesterday;
it may lead to his resignation).

But it happened, and in a
thundering of night sticks on skulls,
the original issues suddenly became
submerged; the issues became
police on campus, and Dr. Pusey's
right to call them in.

The debate centers around
who's in charge of what and where
the faculty, in an apparent play for
power, issued a statement Friday
condemning both the administration
and SDS. SDS issued statements
condemning everybody, and
soon the campus seemed in danger
of polarizing, with everybody mad
at everybody else.

The real issue, then, seems to
have become involved with the
rights of students and faculty to
choose what they wish to be
taught, and what they want to do.

I don't know what's going to
happen at Harvard; The administration,
locked into a hard line
position, seems intent to make it
even more so (a recent statement
warned that the University would
be closed if there were any more
building takeovers; there has been
no official response to the police
raid). This has made the students
increasingly frustrated, and increasingly
militant. The strike and
symposiums go on, but the carnival
atmosphere seems to be fading, as
what all this may lead to becomes
more apparent.

It's too simple to explain the
Harvard situation in terms of
generalities like "generation gaps"
and other pimply hyperbole. But
what seems to have happened is a
form of age stratification: the
police came, and the students
untied in their opposition to them.
The basic issues, although still
present, are no longer central. While
it may not be the role of the
University to serve as a basis for
society-wide social change, it is the
only structure available to students,
perhaps the most concerned body
of people in our society. Thus, the
uprisings at Harvard, as elsewhere,
can be viewed in a large spectrum
encompassing the antiwar and antipoverty
movements which preceded
them. The basic question,
then, is the role of the University,
and its students, and the administration's
rights of discipline.

The repercussions could be
gargantuan, as many are beginning
to realize. If the hard line works at
all, it will give lesser colleges a
precedent, a sort of carte blanche
to order up an instant bloodbath at
the first sign of student trouble. If
students aren't judged qualified to
decide some of their affairs at
Harvard where might they be
qualified? The answers and precedents
will be worked out here in
the next few days; what happens
will affect all of us.

It's Saturday, now and the strike
is in full force. The libraries are still
deserted, the information booths
crowded. At the University, the
learning process goes on. Older
reporters and teachers talk among
themselves, trying to understand
what these dirty, vulgar, beat up
kids are really after; they really
have no idea. Perhaps you have to
be part of this to really understand
it. The informal colloquia continue,
with frequent house meetings to try
to agree on policy.

The movement here is a constructive
one; there have been no
cries of close or destroy the
University. And although many of
the demands seem irrelevant, the
issues are by no means as important
as the philosophy behind them. At
Harvard today they are deciding
things for all of us.

I look at my fading red
armband, wish I was really one of
them, and know it is time to move
on.