When Will Intellectuals Become Activists?

BACK WHEN the White House was Harvard's, the first "advisors" were sent to Vietnam.

Intellectuals today righteously denounce President Johnson and America's foreign policy in Southeast Asia.

But some of the more perceptive remember that one of the principal architects of our Vietnam policy was a former dean of the faculty at Harvard, McGeorge Bundy. These men are expressing their feelings in books like The Dissenting Academy, a collection of articles edited by Theodore Roszak.

To Roszak and others, the Vietnam war has uncovered long-standing failings of the academic community.

Roszak, chairman of the History of Western Culture program at California State College, said that "until the recent rash of campus protest related to the Vietnam war, nothing has so characterized the American academic as a condition of entrenched social irrelevance, so highly developed that it would be comic if it were not sufficiently serious in its implications to stand condemned as an act of criminal delinquency."

Intellectuals are challenging their own integrity. Where were they when John Kennedy was President? What did they say then? Has political science given the right answers? Has it raised the right questions? Have academics provided sufficient and relevant comment on today's issues?

Even the stolid American Political Science Association has reacted to C. Wright Mills' charge that political scientists are nothing but "the utensils of history makers."

The Caucus for a New Political Science, an APSA committee chaired by Harvard graduate student Sanford Levinson, will report on this problem to the association's September convention in Washington.

"Dismal Politics"

Levinson contends that political science lacks relevance to contemporary issues. "Just pick up any recent issue of the American Political Science Review. You'll be lucky to find even one article on Vietnam or civil rights. Who wants to read about the cultural patterns of some village in northern India?" Levinson said in a CRIMSON interview.

"Political Science cannot ignore the issues of our time. It is the moral responsibility of political scientists to address themselves to the questions our society needs answered," Levinson said.

Levinson wants his committee to outline what the nature of political science should be.

Some thoughtful consideration of just this problem was provided in Christian Bay's article, "The Cheerful Science of Dismal Politics," in The Dissenting Academy.

Bay, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, wrote that social scientists of today are efficient at their trade, but that their trade does not demand enough of them.

"Responsible social scientists must also demand of themselves something more, which may be called substantive rationality, . . . the requirement that ends should be as rigorously articulated and tested as are, in political science at its current best, the proposed means to those ends," Bay said.

Bay is afraid that political science has taken an exclusively functional approach. "I object not to a functional approach, but to a functional approach that has no normative reference beyond the range of data it seeks to order and make use of," Bay said.

The ultimate aims of politics or social analysis have "become transformed from a focus on man's needs and potentialities to a focus on systems maintenance," Bay said.

The educational system has institutionalized this shift. In fact, social scientists today "are carefully trained not to discover this," Bay added.

Bay concludes with the warning that "unless we learn to cultivate better our powers of substantive as well as formal rationality, and our courage to teach with candor what we know to be true, or just, our present foreign policies will remain without effective challenge."

THIS FERMENT in political science has also affected the process of regeneration, the educational system that turns out new political scientists. Are the minds of young political scientists being trained properly?

"Social Science and Social Consciousness," by Robert Engler, Professor of Social Science at Sarah Lawrence College, appearing in Roszak's book, contends that the graduate student's mind is being strangely perverted.

"Good undergraduates," Engler writes, "are generally intellectually more open-minded and alive than all but the best of graduate students, a commentary not on graduate genes but on graduate systems."

Emulating their betters, graduate students' "attraction to status and income often leads them to display cynical and opportunistic approaches to their studies and ultimately to their careers.

"Competitive zeal and junior gamesmanship and grantsmanship become their equipment for survival and success in the academic marketplace."

The end result, Engler writes, is that "Idealism comes to be deprecated," whether it be "about learning or about the society."

George Greenburg, a third year graduate student in government, vocalizes a number of complaints about the Harvard graduate program.

His greatest concern is with the requirements and grading of general examinations. His criticism is stimulated by a deeper concern. "There's something dreadfully wrong with this profession. If we can have a better government department here, maybe this will help," Greenburg said.

"Political science is supposed to be value-free but you tend to become committed to the system you are studying." Consequently, "American political scientists don't like to rock the boat."

"I don't have that much of a stake in the system now," Greenburg observed, "but I might in ten years." Graduate education is "a real socialization system."

Doubt about the nature of political science is at the heart of academic criticism. But what sort of political science should be adopted?

Bay wants to "replace political systems with concepts of human need and human development as the ultimate value frameworks for our political analysis."

"I am convinced that our profession will never help us to advance from our wasteful, cruel, pluralist pseudo-politics in the direction of justice and humane politics until we" do this, Bay said.

This intellectual ferment clearly reaches far beyond Vietnam. The practical problem of the war has triggered discussions of a more philosophical bent.

It sounds remarkably like political theory, a beast thought to be extinct in the modern world. In Bay's article, we read that "the proper purpose of politics is identical with the proper purpose of medicine: to postpone death and reduce suffering."

The need for a revival of political theory is explicitly recognized by Engler when he said that "The bulk of political science abdicates from responding to the crying need for a new theory of democracy."

The long neglected pursuit of political theory may find a new and vibrant meaning in today's intellectual world.

This is not to say that academicians have taken refuge in philosophy. Quite the opposite; the concern for theory sparked by the Vietnam quandary has also given rise to the activist intellectual.

GRADUATE STUDENTS traditionally have been cautious in their political activities. They will not risk alienating faculty members whose recommendations could mean the difference between success and failure as a political scientist.

This spring, the graduate students in the government department have created and staffed a speakers bureau in order to carry their views on the war to clubs, churches, and other civic groups in the Harvard vicinity.

Primo Vannicelli, a government graduate student, said that since there had been no strong opposition in the faculty students were leaving the refuge of the lecturn for the influence of the pulpit, the podium, and the soap box.

There are now about 25 graduate students working on the project. "The current direction of our foreign policy has made it our responsibility as experts to speak out in a public forum," Vannicelli said.

Activism is one sign of the increasing ferment in political science. Feelings of guilt and responsibility have made this ferment a particularly poignant issue for political scientists.

But the issues of morality in Vietnam have infringed upon the other disciplines too. Physical science is exemplary of an area where moral issues have imposed themselves upon unsuspecting individuals.

Triggering the A-Bomb

Scientists are deeply involved in the war effort. Since World War II, their contributions to military science have not been viewed in a moral sense; but Vietnam has challenged that. Scientists have become increasingly perplexed by the growing gap between personal morality and public service.

In January, George B. Kistiakowsky, Abbot and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry, resigned from a Pentagon project staff working on the planned anti-personnel barrier between North and South Vietnam. Kistiakowsky, designer of the explo- sive trigger of the atom bomb, would not speak of his resignation in any but a philosophical fashion.

"Love of my country is very important to me. At the same time, I try to live by certain moral standards. I have always tried to adhere to these standards as best I can," Kistiakowsky said.

Kistiakowsky retained a number of other governmental posts. The tension between "love of my country" and "certain moral standards" was evident."

James D. Watson, Professor of Biology, said at the time that there was "a decreasing number of people working in Washington because of a feeling of absolute futility in their efforts."

ONE OF THE country's most prestigious scientific bodies, the President's Science Advisory Committee, holds annual dinners for its current and past members. Past members have rarely failed to appear. This spring, however, only six or seven out of a possible 60 or 70 showed up.

Paul M. Doty, Professor of Chemistry, said this reflected "a great decline in the morale of scientific advisors" and blamed it on the war.

Scientists are deeply involved in the war by the very nature of their wrok. They are efficient, dedicated, and brilliant men. But they are not machines. The growing moral implications of their work has caused consternation in their ranks.

For the physical scientists, it is a problem each individual has to face alone. But for political scientists, the problem is more serious. Political science as a discipline is challenged by these moral issues.

Intellectuals fear that they have ignored contemplation of the ends of policy in favor of a scientific consideration of the means.

This reasoning may place part of the responsibility for the war in Vietnam upon the shoulders of political scientists. But in dealing with current issues, just what is the responsibility of intellectuals in general and political scientists in particular?

That is the question upon which the impact of the current debate on the history of political science will fall.

The increasing political activism and introspection is like the ripples of a stone thrown into a stream. But if that stone is big enough to redirect the stream's current, changes beyond the fighting and dying in Vietnam will take place.

Academia has found itself guilty of neglecting serious moral issues at a time when their consideration was of utmost importance.

Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at MIT, expressed the feeling of the academic world when he said, "The question 'What have I done?' is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read, each day, of fresh atrocities in Vietnam--as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.