This Week

HARVARD'S GOVERNING boards and Faculty should not interpret the current lull in the student strike here as an indication that the demands behind the strike have been satisfactorily met. In each area of contention, the issue remain unresolved, and the next week will show whether the Corporation and Faculty plan to deal openly and properly with these issues.

The passage of the Bruner resolution on ROTC clearly indicated that the Faculty would like the Corporation to find a polite way of severing this University's connection with ROTC. The Faculty members who overwhelmingly supported this resolution cannot have been unaware that the Federal statutes governing ROTC make it impossible for the units to remain here under the terms of the resolution. It now remains for the Corporation to recognize the Faculty's clear intent, and agree to let ROTC leave.

On the demands for a restructuring of the decision making process, the Corporation has responded by forming an unwieldy and utterly unrepresentative 68-man panel which little more than parodies the original restructuring demands. The issue is not merely one of "communication", as the Corporation's statement of last Friday suggested, but one of power. No one believes any longer that, given adequate channels of communication, the Corporation is likely to make consistently just and proper decisions. So long as absolute control of this University's political and social policies continues to rest with the Corporation and the Overseers, no real changes in Harvard's governance will have been made.

The Corporation's response to the expansion demands is no more satisfactory than its "concession" on restructuring. The Corporation's Friday statement promised to built a mere 179 units of housing for non-Harvard occupants, and even this promise gave no indication of when these units would be erected, or of what rents would be charged for them. In argeeing to replace only the housing actually destroyed by Harvard, the Corporation is making the wholly untenable assumption that such demolition of units has been the only impact of Harvard on the Cambridge housing market. The Wilson report, which was adopted by the Faculty last week makes clear that Harvard's impact has been far greater than that, and the Corporation should stop pretending that the erection of 179 new units, and a vague promise of further action in the indefinite future, will correct the effects of Harvard's traditional dependence on Cambridge's existing housing stock to meet its rapidly growing needs.

The demand of the Association of African and Afro-American students for a voice in the creation of a black studies program here has also not yet been met. This is, of course, an area where the final decision rests with the Faculty of Arts and sciences, and there is every indication that the Afro position will be adopted by the Faculty tomorrow. By doing so, the Faculty will not only be argeeing to a proposal which is fundamentally sound and just, but will also be demonstrating that its concern with pressing issues does not ebb and flow with the degree of overt pressure which students are exerting.

This, in a sense, is true of all the decisions that must be made in the next week. The Faculty's passage of a stronger resolution on ROTC did not indicate, as some have suggested, that it was merely giving way before radical pressure. But a failure to act this week, in the absence of the same degree of overt pressure that was being exerted last week, would suggest to many that the Faculty's action on ROTC was merely a consequence of student disruption.