Good-Bye, John: An Adversary Departs

THE FACULTY in early February was treated to the curtain performance of an always engaging show--John Dunlop in action at a Faculty meeting. Most of the Faculty members and observers had expected that Dunlop would have long since left for his new job in Washington, but as they ambled into the University Hall Faculty meeting room, they saw the former dean seated in his usual position at the right of President Bok. As usual, Dunlop was trading quips with passers-by and periodically bursting into fits of laughter, always casting a canny eye about the room to reassure himself that everything in his Faculty was in order.

The start of the meeting never deters Dunlop from continuing his performance. While Bok plays the somber straight man, Dunlop slouches in his chair, scowls disdainfully in the direction of his ever diminishing number of adversaries, only to jerk upright in paroxysms of laughter when his side scores a point. At a meeting last Fall, he and Bok disagreed over a bit of financial minutia, and when evidence corroborating his position came forth from the audience, he lurched forward chuckling, his finger waggling at the somewhat taken aback Bok. Some observers swore they saw him stick out his tongue at the President.

With his departure to Washington, Harvard has lost its most colorful and free-wheeling figure. Dunlop was no saint, but he had a certain appealing straight-forward way of conducting business. In the middle of propounding some outrageously conservative policy or point of view, accompanied by loud table-poundings, he would disarm his listerners by twisting his rubbery features into an impish grin, leaving them wondering whether he was actually as conservative as all that.

Even his much-publicized arrogance had its engaging aspect. He dropped names so often that floors threatened to collapse under their collective weight, but always with a troll-like wink that undermined the gravity of his statements and reduced them almost to an acknowledged self-parody. He bandied about words like power, influence, hiring and firing, always with himself on the business end of the proposittion, yet his flamboyant style seemed to belie the cold calculation of his rhetoric.

YET THE BIGGEST mistake many of Dunlop's adversaries made was not to take him seriously. He refused to play the game by Harvard's rules of quiet civility, using his style as a hard-boiled tough egg, two-fisted beer drinking labor negotiator to keep his opponents off-balance. He took over a splintered Faculty in 1970 and in the next several years knit the deeply-rooted divisions back together, sending independent-minded reformers either into disarray or scurrying for the center. As Otto von Bismarck had once manipulated German liberals into supporting his reunification efforts, so did Harvard's Iron Chancellor unite most of the Faculty, restoring a certain reverence for his office that had been absent for some time. Even most of Dunlop's erstwhile liberal opponents capitulated out of respect for his skillful blending of energy, manipulation and unorthodoxy.

Dunlop's undeniable success in presiding over the Faculty is the more remarkable considering the time he spent moonlighting in Washington as a member of several national economic councils. He would tirelessly keep matters in University Hall under control during the week, and then, almost effortlessly, wing his way to the nation's capital to conduct mysterious business with the leaders of the building trades unions. Even after he left Harvard officially, he could still be seen lurking around University Hall on week-ends, keeping this end of the business in order before returning to his post as director of Richard Nixon's Cost of Living Council.

All this doesn't mean that Dunlop was some paragon of virtue. His conservative stands on questions like University discipline, the Afro-American Studies Department and graduate student rights did much to undermine the halting progress being made at Harvard in the late sixties. He threw his weight behind the repressive Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, building a sequestered fortress for the CRR atop Holyoke Center so it could kick out dissidents in peace. He orchestrated the offensive against the Afro-American Studies Department which culminated in the restructuring of the Department in January: even after leaving for Washington, he explicitly retained a hand in appointing the search committees that are playing a critical role in shaping the Afro Department's future.

Dunlop was less successful in his struggle with the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow Union, but even here, his continual behind-the-scenes manipulation helped in several ways to defuse Union support eventually. His positions on these and other issues were undoubtedly no more reactionary than the views adhered to by most of his colleagues in the Administration or the Faculty, but his talent at translating them into reality made him a more effective roadblock to progress.

Still, there was some reason to regret Dunlop's departure. His style marked him off from the rest of the grey bureaucrats who have come to predominate around here, even though they are at least commited as he was to impending progress. Dunlop at least had a sense of commitment to match his engaging personality: his tactics, although expedient in an immediate sense, at least channeled events toward goals he valued sincerely and highly. Most of us accurately viewed him as an adversary, but he was at least the kind we could simultaneously chuckle at and respect even as we repudiated most of what he stood for.