Seeger and the University

Harvard has travelled a shabby path these last days. The original action of the administration in refusing the Student Council permission to sponsor a concert by Pete Seeger raised questions of the utmost importance. And the administration's decision yesterday to permit the concert, as long as Seeger is treated as an artist and not a political figure, makes it absolutely clear that their policy strikes at the vital heart of Harvard's commitment to free inquiry.

Before the central principle involved can be discussed, however, two irrelevant issues should be disposed of. First, that the Student Council was to sponsor the concert, rather than another student organization. Some argue that the Council represents the student body and thus is in a special position which requires limiting its freedom of action. The premise of this contention--that the Council is a representative body--is false, and if it were true the conclusion would still be false. The Council no more represents undergraduates than does the CRIMSON, the Harvard Dramatic Club, or the Dean of Students. If it did--and one can scarcely conceive any body that could--then the weak justification for the administration's actions would be still flimsier: a truly representative body would have the strongest right of any student organization to hear whomever it pleases. And that a Council-sponsored concert would be taken elsewhere to imply University approval of Seeger should influence no one: Harvard's responsibility is to itself, not to public opinion.

The second irrelevancy is a specious legal argument. Dean Watson said Monday that "lawyers advise the University against getting involved in cases still pending in court." If the lawyers spoke as lawyers, they are wrong: there would be nothing illegal in Harvard's permitting Seeger to discuss his case while it is under appeal. Mark DcWolfe Howe, professor of Law, has called this argument "absurd." If the lawyers spoke as advisers on a non-legal matter, they are foolish, and the implications of their advice are frightening. Is Harvard to bar a convicted, but unsentenced, man from speaking here about his case? (Willard Uphaus, who spoke in the fall of 1959, meets those specifications.) Or does the trouble come not from the case's pending nature itself, but from the possibility that Seeger will finally lose? If Seeger's appeal fails, will he remain taboo after his sentence is served? (Alger Hiss spoke at Princeton under those conditions.) The only circumstances under which court action could be relevant to a matter such as this would be if the individual concerned were in jail, and thus unable to appear.

Irrelevancies aside, the question can be stated quite simply: what does Harvard stand for? And the answer is equally simple: Harvard is committed only to truth and the proposition that truth is best served by free men freely seeking it. That is why professors have tenure. That is why Harvard's wealth is important--not because it promotes luxury, but because it permits independence. And that is why the administration's original action and its subsequent statement of policy are a disgrace.

Harvard's name, the argument runs, must not be associated with disreputable and controverted causes. But an essential quality of Harvard's name is that its association with a cause does not imply commitment to that cause. And rather than becoming dirtied by its associations, Harvard's name gains splendor by the freedom with which it accepts any association in the fulfillment of its only commitment.

The administration rightly imposes regulations to make clear that individuals do not speak for Harvard; it has wrongly attempted to prevent an individual from king at all, for fear that the University will be thought to be "taking sides" in his case.

If this week's decisions were taken on legal advice, the administration should find itself lawyers who understand that the President and Fellows of Harvard College are no ordinary corporation, concerned with day-to-day fluctuations in its corporate image, but rather trustees for a great ideal. And if the decisions are the considered action of the President, then Harvard deserves a fuller explanation from its servant of why he has departed from the tradition of freedom for which he spoke so well during the McCarthy era.

If this week's decisions were taken on legal advice, the administration should find itself lawyers who understand that the President and Fellows of Harvard College are no ordinary corporation, concerned with day-to-day fluctuations in its corporate image, but rather trustees for a great ideal. And if the decisions are the considered action of the President, then Harvard deserves a fuller explanation from its servant of why he has departed from the tradition of freedom for which he spoke so well during the McCarthy era.