The Silent Spring

A BANNER HEADLINE in The Crimson early in the Spring of 1970 set the tone for April and May that year. It read, "The Left Kicks Off Its Spring Offensive," and regardless of its journalistic propriety, it was not far off the mark. At that juncture, there was no doubt that with the passing of winter, activism would return to college campuses.

Indeed, one half-baked explanation of radical activity worked off the premise that warm weather made students frisky after long winters cooped up inside dormitories. That theory fell apart at Harvard at least when supporters of the Pan African Liberation Committee (PALC) picketed Massachusetts Hall for six dismally rainy April days last year.

What was really interesting about last Spring, though, was not the weather in relation to Harvard undergraduates. The curious fact was that there was any student activism at all. The previous 18 months had been noticeably quiet; it was hard to imagine what group, or which issue, could enlist sufficient support to mount a large protest. The controversy over the Counter Teach-In in 1971 had only just reached the boiling point; Richard Herrnstein's theory of I.Q. hardly seemed worth risking expulsion by the CRR, except to a few members of Progressive Labor and SDS.

PALC then emerged from the quiet, and Harvard bungled into its first encounter with shareholder responsibility. But while the Gulf proxy debate was largely unanticipated by the student population, it heated up rapidly. The first mill-in at University Hall was just about a year ago; the occupation of Mass Hall followed six weeks later.

This Spring may be different. There appear to be few underpinnings for largescale protest; nothing of the scale even of the Herrnstein controversy aroused the interest of the Left, or its remnants, last Fall.

Perhaps the national attention focused on the elections explains student indifference to local issues. Still, the Graduate Student Union, which came very close to striking over teaching fellows' salaries last Spring, has dwindled in number and strength. Sam Popkin went to jail over disclosure of sources in the Pentagon Papers case this Fall, and the news was received with distressed yawns. The CRR is old hat, and boring. More recently, the New American Movement has been pushing leaflets about "political" hirings and firings in three Harvard Departments; most leaflets have found their way unread to the trash basket. And the coaching ability of the varsity basketball coach seems unlikely to demand widespread attention.

This leaves the war and Afro-American Studies. Ironically, these were the issues which tore apart the University at the height of student activism in 1969. But the war is over, right? The outrage over bombing and mining and killing upon which activists could always count for support--as PALC did at Mass Hall last Spring--is ended for now. In the war's aftermath, some odd patterns emerge.

Last week, for example, a newspaper account noted the revitalization of Harvard's only fraternity ("It isn't 1955," a resurgent membership assures us. "No one is going to jump into an icy Charles without clothes on anymore"). The next day, a story reported that Hilary Putnam, the Faculty Old Faithful of the radical left, has severed his association with P.L. and will seek no further affiliation with radical groups. In retrospect, Putnam says, it was a mistake for P.L. and SDS to couple racism and academic freedom in the Herrnstein controversy.

Meanwhile, newspapers are dissecting the Left and the antiwar movement, posturing about its fate now that Vietnam is passe.

Locally, most of the posturing this Fall has concerned Afro-American Studies and the Faculty's Afro Review Committee. The topic is not passe; by any measure, Afro-American Studies is a pressing issue. The complexities of the Afro debate have consumed most of the Afro debate have consumed most of the energies of black activists at Harvard this year, and it is safe to say that with the demise of the organized antiwar movement, black activists are the only group remaining which can create immediate student impact.

This was true enough last Spring. It is more true now. PALC and Afro set the terms of student protest last year, and the antiwar movement--spurred by some coincidental Nixonian outrages--joined in. Since then, PALC's leaders have scattered and Harvard Afro has turned its attention to internal matters.

Because the debate over Afro American Studies has been internal, and academic in nature, it has not led to visible or large-scale support for particular positions. For the same reasons--and because so few people in the community fully understand the debate--Afro will probably remain an intense, but internal, matter.

The proxy controversy has taken on new dimensions as well. Mass Hall has diverted pressure to a Corporation subcommittee and a Faculty-student-alumni group called the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsiblity. The ACSR has met twice already, and it is currently pondering a list of 20 proxy resolutions--compiled by the Investor Responsibility Research Center--which will come up this Spring. Harvard owns stock in 13 of the companies involved.

Yet, stock holdings are not as attractive a target as a year ago. Gulf is not included in the 1973 proxies since last year's resolution failed to receive sufficient support to be repeated this year. Also, PALC regarded the Gulf proxy as a one-shot proposition and probably would not begin a proxy campaign against another company on the Harvard list such as Exxon. The lack of talk about Gulf since PALC's response to Steve Farber's Angola Report in October backs up this conclusion.

A year ago, student leaders were predicting a quiet Spring; some went so far as to say activism was an impossibility given the mood of students. Events proved them wrong. And while a similar reversal could occur this Spring, the diffusion of the war as an issue and the low-key approach to current Harvard controversies foretells the Spring which Faculty and administrators have been anticipating for so long: no strike, no teach-in or counter teach-in, no building occupation, perhaps even no need for the tiresome CRR.