The Sit-In: II

The Faculty meets today to consider one of the most explosive issues to face the University in years. Faculty members must decide what to do with 300 students who last Wednesday staged a sit-in at Mallinckrodt Hall to protest the war in Vietnam. Under the circumstances, there can be no punishment.

No measures that have been suggested so far can be anything but arbitrary, unjust, and offensive. Punishing a handful of randomly selected scapegoats will stir, not deter, rancorous anti-University protests. It will weaken, not encourage, respect for the rules. Most important, it would simply be unreasonable, and there is no compelling reason for the University to rush headlong now into harsh action.

The demonstration was something new to Harvard: a form of civil disobedience directed not at the rules or at the University but at a symbol of an immoral and unwanted war. Vociferous protest raises very difficult questions of basic rights--the right of dissent, rights of free movement and speech. A balance between them is sometimes difficult to strike, and drawing the line is never something to be done lightly.

However hard it is to define the boundaries, they must exist, and a major concern of the Faculty today will be to decide a policy on future demonstrations. That objective will in no way be served by attempting to compensate for the tolerance of officials who wisely allowed Wednesday's sit-in to run its course.

Those officials did not outline to the demonstrators the University's policy on civil disobedience. It has none. They could not give to the demonstrators a clear measure of how serious the Administration regarded their action. The officials themselves simply did not know. They took down some names, and they divided the names into groups that claim no relation to actual participation in the sit-in. To act at this point on the basis of such ad hoc, ill-defined procedures would be worse than useless. Justice may always be in some measure arbitrary, but there is at least the presumption that those who execute it have tried to make it less so.

Demonstrations against the war will no doubt continue. Students who oppose it have a right and a duty to express their opposition. Civil disobedience is not the only way, and it is not the best way--demonstrations are an expression of impotence, not power, and it will take a building of political strength to end the war. But civil disobedience is one way for students to call attention to the incursions of the war on their campus: and the intensity, inevitability, and morality of their protest should be respected.

The Faculty should outline a firm policy of dealing with civil disobedience. Students who engage in such protest agree to accept the consequence of their act; the University should spell out clearly what the consequence will be. Demonstrations on campus that infringe on the basic rights of others should be tolerated as long as tolerance is possible. When, in the considered judgment of University officials, action must be taken, demonstrators should be requested to move or face an automatic punishment. That punishment should be probation.

Heed should be taken that such extraordinary action must come only with due warning, and that officials must give careful consideration before issuing that warning. If the University is to remain a viable community, any expression of opinion, any demonstration by students, must be met with cautious, deliberate thought.

But those who transgress basic rights may have to be met--at some point--with firm action. Civil disobedience with no penalty is meaningless, and the University has an obligation to all of its members to deter thoughtless behavior.

It is wise for the University to provide a reasoned reaction of its own to civil disobedience. Its alternative is to forget its own rules, and to rely in the last instance on the Cambridge police. The University tends, as it should, to be far more tolerant of shrill dissent than society at large. Those who wish to defy laws and risk arrest to make their protest heard will not be deprived of the opportunity, either off campus or on. The University will still remain a haven for the freer expression of ideas.

That should be the basic objective of the Faculty. It will not be served by ignoring students, the intensity of their opposition to the war, or the war itself. Nor will it be served by arbitrary action now to deter demonstrations.