On Strike Tower of Babel

...The Titanic sails at dawn. Everybody's shouting "Which side are you on?" And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers. Dylan

TUESDAY afternoon's Faculty meeting came as a slap in the face to the large number of Harvard students who had hoped for a unified University reaction against the President's policy of genocide in Indochina. By merely voicing an unofficial condemnation of Administration policy, the Faculty in effect opted out of taking any positive action that might help bring about an end to the killing at home and in Southeast Asia.

The meeting's rationale, of course, was that the Faculty should not enter into "polities" as a corporate body and that their loyalty should be first and foremost to academic pursuits. No doubt they felt this is a noble stand, but- in the reality of the present crisis- it is a shabby affront to those who feel that bringing to an end this country's wholesale destruction of human life takes precedence over all other business. Fighting the acts of violence being committed in the name of the Free World is hardly "politics" in the usual sense.

Someone once asked the artist Giacometti if, were his studio on fire, he would first save his famous sculpture of a dog or a dog he kept as a pet. Giacometti said he would save the dog. Apparently, the majority of the Harvard Faculty would, in the same situation prefer to save the sculpture. For what the Faculty's failure to go out on strike with the students essentially means is that they would rather save University routine than join students in a full-time struggle against the systematic murder of Asians, black militants, and college students by our government.

A strike is in progress here and it will not stop. Obviously the strike's importance is more than symbolic: everyone knows that President Nixon does not give a damn whether Harvard stays open or not. Rather, the point of the strike is to allow students and employees to use all their time and energy to fight American policy in any way they see fit. By implicidy endorsing a "business as usual" policy at Harvard, the Faculty forces students to divide their time between academic and patriotic responsibilities.

As the strike continues, despite the Faculty's failure to join it, students are forced to fight the University while they fight Washington. Students must wage a battle with Harvard to gain the time they need to wage a battle against American genocide.

One wonders what must happen before the Faculty is willing to act. One of our liberal Masters told a student at a Shannon Hall demonstration Monday, "Look, I was as pissed off as you about Cambodia. But why can't we work together?"

Good question. If the Faculty wants to do something about the war, why don't they get rid of ROTC? It's being phased out, they say- phased-out murder. The Faculty says it wants to stop the killing taught in Shannon Hall. What perverted conception of academic freedom compels them to take two years to do it? To condemn the burning of a building as violence is a good example of the worst variety of shortsightedness. If burning Shannon Hall slows the American war machine a tiny bit, the flames will do a lot for Cambridge's skyline.

There are good political arguments against militant action now. Public revulsion against American aggression in Southeast Asia is stronger now than ever, and we should work for a mass base. If the Faculty eventually wants to join this work, they are welcome- but they should not interfere with others who choose to fight right now. Those Faculty members who consider anti-Nazism as the central renet of their philosophies should look around them- at Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the black ghettos, and Kent State. If after that glance at the world those "academic freedom" mongers of the Faculty still think the students are the Nazis, and that the students deserve more opposition than Nixon, then they would indeed be beyond hope. We would have nothing to learn from them.

THE FACULTY at present is clearly more interested in preserving order at Harvard than in making sure there is a nation left for Harvard men to run. And they are doubly blind if they believe that sticking their heads in the sand will prevent bullets from flying here. The Faculty can stand in the doorway of Shannon Hall forever- the only thing that will stop student militance in this racist, imperialist country is the end of racism and imperialism.

But the Faculty's head is very deeply stuck in the sand. At its meeting Tuesday, the illegal American invasion of Cambodia and the resultant nation-wide strike was not deemed appropriate for the Faculty to consider in formal session. In a convocation afterwards, the Faculty let us know they are unofficially opposed to the Cambodian invasion- but so what? Whoever doubted that they would be? The question on most students' minds as the Faculty met was what action they would take to back up their sentiments. The answer came: a resounding "nothing." Only eleven Faculty members voted in favor of the mass meeting's demands.

The Faculty, of course, is not the only Harvard sect that delights in elitism. Many students agree that somehow Harvard must be above all this commotion. We are not above it: Harvard men are supplying tax money to fund the war just as graduates from Northeastern, or Purdue, or Berkeley. Harvard, too, is funneling men and research into the machine that slaughters hundreds of thousands of Asians. Harvard is not above anything- it is deep in the muck that is America.

Many Harvard students- us included- have tried to avoid confronting the Faculty as an enemy. Our enemy is Richard Nixon, and the faceless, brutal bureaucracy he heads. We have been increasingly appalled as the Faculty, out of some misplaced fear of political involvement, seems more and more concerned with thwarting students fighting the government than with joining in the fight. The Faculty's action- or rather lack of it- on Tuesday is the most discouraging sign yet. The proud Harvard Faculty seems determined that when the nation splits in two and machineguns chatter in the Yard a scholarly meeting across the overpass will enjoy perfect order and calm. If the Harvard Faculty someday descends from its pedestal to fight the gunning down of militant students who have run out of other means of protest, Agnew may indeed accuse them of playing polities. But maybe, by then, they will have to face his guns like the rest of us.