Planning 11-3b

WHEN SIEGFRIED Bruening, visiting lecturer on Transportation, announced Friday that he was cancelling Planning 11-3b "An End to Urban Violence," he conceded that his course prospectus was unclear. It was worse than that. In vague introductory paragraphs, Bruening promised to consider such questions as "Does society at large have the right and/or obligation to attempt to control or eliminate riots?" But more closely defined, the seminar looked like a macabre think tank exercise in the techniques of riot repression.

Bruening said in his prospectus that the course would try to define "the critical mass for collective violence." It would assume that "the control of riots requires adequate counter-forces, an organization for them, and a strategy or strategies for their use." The city planners in the group could investigate "the relations between built-up areas and open space to determine their effects on the formation and control of riots" or design "fire-fighting techniques and equipment that are relatively immune to mob violence." Bruening claimed that the course would be a case-study test of the systems approach to solving urban problems, but his prospectus ominously promised that the course would present its findings "to a limited, invited audience," before turning them into a report.

Its implicit partiality for social engineering made Planning 11-3b objectionably narrow in conception as well as frighteningly numb to its racist overtones, and it is fortunate that Bruening acknowledged the mistakes and cancelled the seminar. Had he chosen not to yield to his critics though, the course should have been given--not cancelled by force as the Afro demonstrators promised Friday it would be. One bad course would do far less damage than the precedent that a course's point of view opens it to suppression by those in the community who find that point of view objectionable.

If Planning 11-3b could be cancelled by force, are all courses that flirt with mechanisms for social control unacceptable? Professors Banfield and Wilson don't analyze riots the same way most Afro members do. Could parts of their urban policy courses then be censored too? The only present check on the content of Harvard courses--review by the relevant Faculty or department--is rarely used, and though a few bad courses may result, there are not so many as to justify changing Harvard's general policy of letting individual Faculty members teach what they want.

College wide or University-wide mechanisms for reviewing the propriety of courses could as easily choose to muffle the radical point-of-view as that of the social engineers. Professors Handlin and Bailyn proposed such a review board to the Faculty during the ROTC debate, and its first target would probably have been Soc. Rel. 149 sections on rent control, not Professor Huntington's course on developing countries.

The Afro demonstrators argued Friday that Harvard was betraying the spirit of the Rosovsky report by allowing the riot-control seminar to be given. But the view-point of a single course, unlike investment policy, is not something for which the University as a whole should be held responsible. The University does have an obligation, as the Rosovsky committee said, "to create an environment in which racial justice prevails at all levels," but it is not clear that this effort must be at the expense of its responsibility to protect a plurality of intellectual approaches within its community.