Melodrama and Tragedy: 1974

WATERGATE fills the media. Each new day brings its sufficient evil--buggings, attempted bribery of judges, suppression of evidence, executive defiance of the Constitution, presidential lies. Not even Henry Kissinger's threats to resign can quiet the awakened American press and American people. Watergate has aroused a necessary critical spirit in this country, and that is well and good. But in the last year there have been events that touched us more intensely, events that touched us more intensely, events that live in our memories because of the heroism of their actors or the tragedy in which they ended--heroism and tragedy which the Watergate scandals, for all their absorbing melodrama, have never approached.

Remember Vietnam

WE remember the last year for the death of a great man, Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende was not the only person who died when Chile's upper classes decided that democracy couldn't extend to working people. But because Allende devoted his life to the oppressed, because he tried to see that the undernourished children of the slums of Santiago would have milk to drink, he stands for all the Chilean junta's victims. For more than three years, Chile held out a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. It seemed to prove that people could take power over the places where they worked--over their own lives, in the last analysis--without violence, without infringing on traditional liberties, without an abrupt break with the past. Now that beacon is gone.

Elsewhere in the world, beacons flickered, shot off sparks, were extinguished and flared out again. In Thailand, students struggling for democracy toppled a military dictatorship. Korean students rose in an effort to shake theirs. In Greece, the indomitable courage of students and workers undeterred by repression and torture brought down one dictator, though a more efficient one took his place. The ten-year independence struggle of Portugal's African colonies sparked revolutionary change within Europe's oldest dictatorship--change that isn't over yet, change whose unexpected depth and growth is testimony to the survival of people's love for freedom even under the most secure constraints.

Americans should take comfort and inspiration from the struggles of their sisters and brothers throughout the world. But most of all, the people of one area taught us what heroism means. For decades the people of Indochina have fought on--against Japan, against France, against the United States--for the right to live quietly in their own land. The American military had billions of dollars, thousands of tons of bombs, the most up-to-date electronic weaponry. The National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had less sophisticated weaponry and less practiced troops, but they also had a reciprocated faith in the people of their country. And they fought the United States to a standstill.

Americans should take solace in the victory of the Vietnamese people, for it grew out of values that Americans share--belief in ordinary people's intelligence, charity, and ability to make important decisions by themselves. We take no pride at all in our government's refusal to accept that victory. As long as the United States continues to prop up and pay for reactionary governments without popular support, the Indochina war will continue, and Vietnamese and Cambodians will continue to die unnecessarily. General Thieu will continue to hold and to torture tens of thousands of political prisoners. The peoples of Indochina will be unable to rebuild their war-ravaged countries, unable to enjoy the all but destroyed lands they refused to surrender to foreign invaders or their native henchmen. And as long as the United States continues to help impose totalitarian governments on people elsewhere in the world, sloganeering liberals interested only in Watergate--Nixon's much more limited, watered-down march toward totalitarianism at home--will sound like hypocrites and frauds.

Impeach Nixon

LIKE President Johnson before him, President Nixon merits impeachment for a crime so high other misdemeanors pale beside it: Waging war, for years on end, against a nation whose only crime was to struggle for freedom. It's almost comical that Nixon should also merit--and conceivably undergo--impeachment for obstructing justice in the Watergate case.

Congress should impeach President Nixon. The United States will survive even if it doesn't, and the day-to-day business of government will go on, somehow. But the democratic spirit that once made this country the hope of the world will be dealt another in the series of blows that have reduced it to its present state of crisis.

Impeachment is a serious step. In a state ruled not by a king but by an elected representative of its people, impeachment shouldn't be unthinkable, but a viable threat to any president who steps too far out of line. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty needed the nourishment of a revolution every 20 years. Jefferson was a radical and a revolutionary, to be sure, but even the most moderate believer in the democratic safeguards of the Constitution shouldn't find an impeachment once a century at all excessive.

Impeachment would raise possibilities for self-scrutiny and change in the American government in a way that nothing else has in recent years. Replacing Richard Nixon with Gerald Ford wouldn't normally represent an important change--though it might rid the presidency of the petty corruption and vindictiveness that today make it an object for laughter as well as sorrow. But an impeachment trial, with the full presumably cathartic public discussion it would inevitably entail, could help spark a rebirth of democracy and a militance about popular participation in making decisions that hasn't been seen in this country since the New Deal. Nixon is right. It is time to stop wallowing in issues of personal guilt or innocence. It's time to defend ourselves against assaults against democracy and to ensure that the fruits of that democracy are shared equally by all. By one of history's ironies, Watergate, the culmination of those assaults, offers us an opportunity to begin to move on to other issues--building a world of peace, ending racial and sexual discrimination, and redistributing wealth and power. Even the first steps--for example, fighting the inflation Nixon's economists have tried to stop by freezing wages while helping corporate profits soar--will be infinitely easier if the Watergate cancer is treated as it should be with excision.

Support the Strike

LIKE the Nixon administration, Harvard likes to ask those who can afford it least to bear inflation's burdens. This year, 36 members of the Graphics Arts International Union, with wages ranging from $110 a week for some typesetters to $240 a week for certain classes of pressmen, are striking for 10-to 14-per-cent wage increases.

The typesetters' wages are about 25 per cent below Boston rates for workers of their skill level. Most of these workers are not unionized. The printers' wages are about 20 per cent below those paid to other GAIU printers in the area. Harvard maintains that it can't afford more than a 5.5 per cent increase without forcing the University Printing Office's costs above those of commercial shops.

If Harvard can't pay competitive wages and break even at the same time, maybe it isn't running its printing office right. And it's hard to see why Harvard's workers--faced with annual cost-of-living increases considerably greater than 5.5 per cent--should pay for what John B. Butler, director of personnel, describes as the University's effort to "slow inflation."

One-to-One

WITH the consummation of the "non-merger" and the appointment of the Strauch Committee to study Radcliffe's future, Harvard has recognized that equality between the sexes demands more than the present 2.5 to 1 male-female ratio. Change is in the air, and next year the Stauch Committee will examine a number of plans to bring more women into the College. But only one policy--one-to-one admissions--can begin to end sexual discrimination in the University.

Plausible arguments against setting any kind of quotas in admissions are ready to hand--although the administrators who've maintained tiny female quotas for years are hardly the right people to make them. But the chief rival to equal admissions--a "sex-blind" policy--would allow these same administrators to perpetuate discrimination covertly behind a facade of equality. Harvard traditionally places weight in admissions on sex-related traits, such as high school athletic achievement or the holding of particular school offices. Harvard could admit equal proportions of the men and women who apply, while maintaining the present imbalance of its recruiting and financial aid departments. Because of these and other possibilities for evasion, students could never be sure--particularly given Harvard's history--that a "sex-blind" admissions policy had rid admissions of sex discrimination.

Moreover, because of the high caliber of Harvard's applicant pool, setting a male-female quota in admissions would be no more arbitrary than the University's present admissions policy. Harvard doesn't take the "most qualified" applicants it gets--there's no way it could even try. Rather, Harvard picks from a pool of more or less equally qualified applicants a class it expects to be interesting and diverse. Admitting more women would strengthen both efforts, and imply no lowering of academic standards. At the same time, adopting a one-to-one policy would place Harvard in the forefront of a movement to redress the cumulative effects of centuries of discrimination. "Sex-blind" admissions, working with the status quo, does not address itself to the need to improve the socio-economic standing of women in America.

Harvard needs a policy explicitly committed to admitting equal numbers of men and women, with equal recruiting efforts and equal financial aid. But this change in policy must not bring with it an increase in class size. The Houses are already overcrowded, student contact with professors and advisors is already infrequent, the University has already become a sprawling corporate-style bureaucracy. A further increase in enrollment would seriously harm the educational atmosphere at Harvard.

Some object to this position, arguing that increasing the admission of women to Harvard is acceptable only so long as the number of men here keeps increasing too. This viewpoint is often based on arguments that alumni contributions will fall off if it isn't adopted. But these arguments come most frequently from alumni who attribute their own sexism to all their classmates--and in the last few classes, Radcliffe graduates' pledges have topped those of their Harvard counterparts. Worse yet, this viewpoint reflects an idea that educated men are more valuable than educated women. If alumni who reject this idea made contributions to Harvard contingent on its implementation of one-to-one admissions, they could help to eradicate the sexism which pervades the University, in admissions as well as hiring.

Affirmative Action

THE University's affirmative action plan finally received government approval last fall, but that is no cause for pride of self-congratulations. The fact that it took the University three years and four separate attempts to meet the federal government's minimal standards for fair hiring of minorities and women is, on the other hand, considerable cause for shame.

The reason it took so long for Harvard to win approval for its plan, it would seem, is that the plan's authors were determined to promise no more in terms of hiring women and minorities than the law required of them. When they underestimated what the law required, the plan was rejected. Now the University has met the government's undemanding guidelines, but it is still far from reaching the standards any real commitment to affirmative action would dictate.

It is apparent from the projected hiring statistics cited in the plan that Harvard as an institution regrets having to deal with the issue of giving fair consideration to minority and female candidates for Faculty positions. Only one out of 54 tenured Faculty members this year is a woman. By 1976, after affirmative action has been applied, the ratio will only improve so that one out of 50 is a woman. The problem is almost as bad with junior faculty. Under Harvard's present action plan, the percentage of women among non-tenured will only increase to 12 by 1976, as compared to the current 10 per cent.

Walter Leonard, President Bok's affirmative action coordinator, defends Harvard plan by saying that its effects will be felt only in the more distant future. Even this is dubious. Take for example the case of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which supplies Harvard with the bulk of its academic staff. Of the 550 students who were admitted to GSAS last fall, only eight were black. Under conditions such as these, it is little wonder that Harvard can make the claim it must go slow on affirmative action because it can not find enough qualified minority candidates for Faculty posts.

It is not altogether clear who is to blame for Harvard's poor showing in the equal opportunity employment field. Leonard claims, with some substantiation, that there is significant resistance in the individual departments to affirmative action. If that is indeed the case, then it is incumbent on Bok to exercise some moral leadership and turn the tide around. This is, as much as anything else, a question of morality and of a commitment to social equality. In an institution where liberal principles are preached so freely, there has been a dismal failure of its leaders to face up to their moral obligations on this central social issue.

The DuBois Controversy

BESIDES handling the University's affirmative action program, Walter Leonard also chaired a presidential advisory committee this year that issued a report on the much-delayed W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. The Leonard committee report recommends a DuBois Institute completely devoted to research and separate from any teaching department--this despite the fact that Harvard chartered the institute at the same time it approved the formation of the Afro-American Studies Department and the Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies wrote the first prospectus for the institute.

President Bok kept the Leonard committee's report secret for several weeks and has declined to meet with members of the United Committee of Third World Organizations and Faculty members who object to the report. Bok's reticence is inexcusable; the objections to the report are well-founded. The Afro Department is understaffed and desperately needs the research-gathering help an official tie with the institute could provide, in order to increase the quality of its teaching and to attract high-quality black scholars.

The Third World committee has also called on Bok to have the institute sponsor workshops and summer research programs in order to maintain ties to the Harvard black community, another good suggestion. The University has the chance to establish an institute that could instruct and enrich the academic lives of black students at Harvard, and it shouldn't create instead a remote, pure-research institute that will help only the scholars who work in it.