SDS and Friends

THERE is a large number of serious, discontented, left-leaning people on this campus who, while they stay out of the statement-making and infighting of daily political affairs, muster their personal commitment in the clutch to go so far as to do something illegal for the cause. Someone in SDS once called them their "shock troops."

These are the people who make or break a Dow demonstration at Harvard. It was their numbers that blockaded Dow recruiter Fred Leavitt last October three days after Federal troops had driven them off the steps of the Pentagon. This seeming strength of their organization then led some SDS leaders, in their more extravagant moments, to threaten closing down the University. But it is this pivotal group--let's call them the liberal activists--which has recently turned away from SDS, and which probably really didn't believe in them anyway.

What is most important is that the liberal activists never really know what SDS is doing or how they decide on policies. They find out what they know through the media--from the Crimson on Harvard events, and from the national press about far-off places like Wisconsin and B.U. The press, of course, hands its readers what it wants, and most of that is sensational. It was sensational news about police brutality in Oakland and Washington that turned the liberal activists against Dow in the fall, and it is the overplayed copy about SDS' demanding no tuition that disenchants them now.

SDS has a fairly small nucleus of members who regularly go to meetings and work on committees. One of their leaders estimated this group numbered from 50 to 60. That may be a high estimate. As with every activity at Harvard, the active members form something of a club. They room together, hold bull sessions together, and eat in Lehman Hall together--not exclusively, but usually. If SDS people don't mix much with the liberal activists and get their message out that way, it is because the two are motivated by almost completely different goals. The SDS activists have made social concerns their lives. But their liberal "shock troops" have not: these students perceive their own estrangement from the government as temporary and without real significance to their private lives.

FROM what their sources of information have told them, the liberal activists see SDS's recent actions as embarrassingly inept. First they thought SDS claims that Harvard's tuition was being used to preserve class structure within the University were paranoid and irrational. Second, the media told them that SDS was sabotaging Eugene McCarthy (the liberal activist candidate) in Wisconsin. Third, they saw the SDS demonstration that cost Boston University $500,000 in "bad" money us a misdirected, simply sensational protest which was neither practical nor sincere. If SDS really cared about slumlords, they asked, why did they wait until then to oppose them?

And finally, the liberal activists saw SDS in confusion after the death of Martin Luther King. A Boston rally held by SDS and other radical groups seemed purposeless and poorly timed. Above all, it was nearly all white. An SDS demand to pull all police out of the ghetto was severely criticized in the Crimson by Dr. Robert Coles, who asserted that the white radicals lacked any understanding of what was happening there. And meanwhile Afro came on strong and took nearly all the newsmaking campus activism away from them.

GIVEN that the liberal activists are this disaffected and that they do form most of SDS's strength, then the radical takeover of administration buildings at B.U. and Columbia couldn't be repeated at Harvard now.

The basic reason why Columbia and B.U. won't happen at Harvard is because students here don't think that the University is important enough. They don't feel that the University has enough impact on people like themselves to make it a channel for social change. Harvard students have been so persuaded of their own intelligence that they are not awed by professors, or by almost any thing about the University. This attitude, I think, is quite different from that of almost every other university.

In other words, if a radical at B.U. thinks that the university is important enough to change, he thinks so because he sees the university as molding the minds of his fellow students. He thus sees it as a social determinant. Harvard students have been taught to think more of themselves, and are not likely to believe that the university could be nearly as important as they are as individuals.

The liberal activists thus hate to be organized by anyone, and especially by people who don't have their confidence, like SDS. That's why they don't get involved in the dirty work of daily radicalism as represented by SDS's current 'Ten Days in April" organizing campaign. And because the dramatic preconditions of October were absent last February, the liberal activists weren't even there when Dow came back.