The Secret Sharer

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE public pressure forced him to change his mind, President Bok told a press conference he could not release for general consumption his advisory committee's report on the W.E.B. DuBois Institute. The reason for this, Bok said, was that committee members served as his personal advisors and he was afraid that future advisors would hesitate to speak frankly if they knew their recommendations might be open to public scrutiny.

Aside from certain similarities to President Nixon's position on releasing White House tapes and documents, Bok's stand on confidentiality is frightening because it indicates where Bok's sympathies lie when the demands of his bureaucracy conflict with even the elemental requirements of democracy. The problem is compounded because Bok's tendency to conduct policy-making in secret seems to be the rule rather than the exception for most administrators at Harvard.

Consider the Bok-appointed executive committee that's currently managing the affairs of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department. The committee is chaired by Robert J. Kiely, associate dean of the Faculty and a professor of English; only four of its eight members have any formal connection with VES. Persistent rumors have it that the executive committee is on the verge of making significant changes in the VES program. Because of the committee's self-imposed isolation from the department's teaching staff and concentrators, only the eight members of the executive committee know for sure whether the rumors are true and what the future holds for VES.

The possibility that the department may be in the midst of dramatic change has thrown VES into veritable chaos. The intensity of the rumors floating around the department took a hefty upward turn last week after the executive committee--in something of a surprise move--chose not to rehire three VES teachers, two of whom have played a leading role in the department ever since its creation. The firings only increased the sense of futility of teachers and students who wanted to know what the hell was going on in their own department. Almost everyone in VES--save the four members of the executive committee--reported their reaction to the whole affair as what one person called "intense demoralization."

And what was the reaction of the executive committee to all this?

Robert G. Gardner '48, acting chairman of VES, gave his assurances that the firings had no "deep significance" for departmental policy, but added that only committee chairman Kiely had the authority to discuss specific policy matters under the committee's consideration.

John M. Rosenfield, professor of Fine Arts and another committee member, said that the committee did not set out to make any enormous revisions in VES policy, but he too deferred to Kiely on specific questions. "Bob Kiely is our leader," Rosenfield said, "you should try talking to Mr. Kiely about this."

When Kiely was contacted by The Crimson, his only comment on VES was: "I have no comment to make on the Vis Stud Department at the present time."

SO MUCH FOR THE free flow of information. Two VES students who were particularly upset about the firings and the rumors surrounding them will meet with the executive committee next week; perhaps then the committee will lift the veil of ignorance--as John Rawls would call it--and begin to tell people what they have on their minds.

Even if the VES executive committee does answer the two students' questions to everyone's satisfaction, the problem will not be solved. In almost all aspects of policy making in the Harvard bureaucracy, secrecy is too finely ingrained, too deeply integrated into the way things get done here, to be dispensed with that easily. Policy-makers are too used to the ease and efficiency of a decision-making process in which only the very few members of some central committee have access to the facts and are privy to power. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of faculty appointments.

When the Afro-American Studies Department was created five years ago, students were explicitly guaranteed the right to participate in the hiring and firing of departmental faculty. From the very beginning critics of student participation in the hiring of faculty complained that the department couldn't work because no self-respecting professor would be willing to undergo the scrutiny of students (something like Bok's argument about releasing the Leonard committee report.) As soon as the Faculty got the chance--when the tide of student radicalism had begun to recede--it dismantled the machinery for student participation. While it is true that the Afro Department was not able to hire a tenured professor while students sat on the search committees, the new student-less search committee, at work for over a year now, has also failed to find new Afro faculty. The only significant difference between the two procedures, it would appear, is that now the whole thing is done with relatively little consultation with student opinion. When The Crimson finally learned the name of one of the scholars sought by the current search committee, nominally chaired by Kiely, one administrator told the offending reporter, "You did a very bad thing," explaining that public disclosure of the negotiations allegedly caused them to fall through.

IF THE DISCLOSURE of the name did in fact cause the Afro appointment to fall through, it is easy to see why the bureaucrat would think that revealing publicly the discussions of the search committee "was a very bad thing." Similarly, if Bok's advisors are afraid to speak frankly because they suspect their advice will be open to public perusal, it is understandable why the bureaucrat would not want committee reports to become public information.

But the point is that the liberal president of a liberal university--like the president of a nation--should not be so quick to assume the purely efficiency-minded bureaucrat's point of view. In fact, if the university president believes in the liberal and democratic ideals which his faculty teaches and which he so freely espouses in defense of academic freedom and his other favorite causes, he should want to avoid the bureaucratic viewpoint like the plague.

Perhaps Robert J. Kiely put it best when he wrote in The Crimson a year and a half ago: "A professor of English who becomes a dean is bound to become either a hypocrite or a subversive." The same is true for professors of Law or anything else who pass over to the other side of university administration. What we need now is more deans who freely allow themselves to become subversives.