Experts Divided on Riot Report

Harvard's sociologists are greeting the Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders (the Riot Commission Report) with reactions ranging from marked enthusiasm to fierce criticism.

Ardent supporters of the Report hail it as a crucial landmark. "In a way it's like Uncle Tom's Cabin," said Abram J. Chayes '43, professor of Law, who is largely responsible for the Report's chapter on the mass media. "It poses the issue in a way which can never be ignored again. The importance of this report is that it is directed not toward the President but to the public conscience," Chayes added.

The Report's harshest critics, on the other hand, argue that the Committee should not have been appointed in the first place. "I hope this does not turn out to be a historic event. It can only mark a turn for the worse," Edward C. Banfield, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Urban Government said.

If the Report was indeed a political necessity, said James Q. Wilson, professor of Government and co-author of City Politics, it should have taken a very different approach.

Debating the value of almost every aspect of the Report-its content, the formulation, the conclusions, as well as the impact these may have-Harvard academicians do agree on one point. It will not make it into any sociological anthologies. "The data gathering process was very slow," Gary T. Marx, assistant professor of Sociology, who helped draft the first preliminary report, said.

This is one of the major reasons academicians here do not feel quite comfortable with the Report. They deal with this in different ways. "These are gut issues, I don't know why scholarship should be involved. It wouldn't be worth reading if it had been written by historians," said Maurice D. Kilbridge, professor of Business Administration, who teaches a course on urban problems.

Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History, who has also criticized the report because it lacked "historical perspective," admitted that one can not expect history to be written in the eight months it took the Commission to produce the report.

Many, like Handlin, disagree strongly with the Report on a number of points and feel it skips over important arguments. Still they believe with Handlin that, "the things it recommends should be done even if these are not the right reasons."

The urbanologists are unwilling to criticize the Report and thus unwittingly provide ammunition to those who would ignore the issues it raises.

Harvard scholars have therefore kept their criticisms of the Report very quiet. Daniel Patrick Moynihan ,director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies and author of the controversial Moynihan Report on the Negro family, at first refused to comment on the findings of the Riot Commission Report. Later he called the Report "a landmark in race relations" and commented that there were no Negroes in the Commission's research division. "I'm not sure this analysis would have been done by Negro social scientists," he said. But Moynihan prefers to emphasize the "scandalous" reaction of the President whose most extensive comment on the Report has been to recommend it to a luncheon audience of businessmen. "The administration consists of nothing but a bunch of patio liberals," Moynihan charged, including Vice-President Humphrey who has hinted that the administration was displeased to find no mention of its own legislative achievements in the Report