Officially Provisional: Student Politics

There are two main kinds of student politics at Harvard, one mainly centered around University committees and the other centered mainly around demonstrations. I'll call them "Official" and "Provisional," like the two wings of the Irish Republican Army. Neither of the two is likely to affect you much, unless you want them to.

Of course, there was a time, only a few years ago, when Harvard student politics occupied the attention of people even outside Cambridge. There had been glimmerings of it earlier on. For example, big headlines gave national play to Harvard student politics in 1965, when hundreds of students surrounded Robert McNamara outside of Quincy House and forced him to answer questions about the Vietnam War. The headlines continued, reched a climax during the Strike of 1969, when students angered by the bloody eviction of anti-ROTC protestors from University Hall shut Harvard down, but began to recede.

Harvard's last stand in the limelight was in spring of 1972, when I was a freshman, Richard Nixon was president, and American mines filled Haiphong Harbor. A group of black students wanted Harvard to sell its stock in Gulf Oil, whose payments for offshore drilling rights in Angola helped support Portuguese rule there. The students seized the occasion of the University-wide strike against the minint of North Vietnam, and occupied Massachusetts Hall. For a week the Yard resounded with bongo drums and abounded with picketers, but the occupiers finally left quietly and Harvard asked them to withdraw for a year. Portugual is leaving Angola now, but Harvard still has its stock in Gulf, and hasn't seen a large illegal demonstration since that one.

In other cities with large university populations, students became involved in local campaigns--in Berkeley, Madison and Ann Arbor they elected radical city governments. Cambridge City Councilor Saundra Graham may have had something like that in mind for her Grass Roots Organization, but the GRO's candidates--except for her--did miserably their first time out. Individual Harvard students have gone in to electoral politics quite frequently--McGovern's pre-convention pollsters in 1972 were Harvard seniors--and back in 1968, Harvard students ran an anti-war referendum campaign. But even then it was clear that Cambridge was not Berkeley. Even if the city did discourage students from voting, its rolls would remain convincingly working-class and considerably more hostile to Harvard as an institution than receptive to worker-student alliances.

So that leaves the two kinds of student politics, meeting around the edges--when a Provisional runs for a University committee, when a University committee endorses a demonstration, or in concentrations and classes (Social Studies or Soc Sci 2, "Western Thought and Institutions") that breed a lot of political types.

The Officials, who seem almost universally to be future lawyers, concentrate on Harvard student - faculty - administration -or- alumni-committees. Harvard used to have a student government, the Harvard Undergraduate Council, but it voted itself out of existence several years ago because of lack of interest. The Radcliffe Union of Students is still reasonably viable, but people's universal confusion about what Radcliffe is and where it is going blurs RUS's functions a little as well.

The surviving Official committees--not counting ad hoc appointed groups, like the ones that study the relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe--are the Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, the House committees and the Freshman Council. (There are also supposed to be students on the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, which steps in when demonstrators get out of hand, but the House Committees won't send representatives to it because they say that would legitimize a repressive group.)

The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) has a certain amount of power because it decides how people are assigned to Houses and therefore in theory what the Houses are like, and makes recommendations on such day-to-day issues as changing the academic calendar. The Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, which President Bok established after the Mass Hall demonstration, has no power at all, although the Harvard Corporation often follows its recommendations in voting its stock on controversial shareholder resolutions. The House committees and the Freshman Council organize dances, milk and cookie hours and whatever other social activities the Houses run, and occasionally take stands on other issues.

In general, few people not running for positions on these committees seem to take a passionate interest in how the elections come out, and it's not uncommon for an election to be uncontested. Maybe this is changing: One candidate for the Freshman Council last year went so far as to buy an advertisement in The Crimson to boost his campaign. He was accordingly disqualified, but not even this breech of political ethics gave much sign of denting his constituents' indifference. Presumably they had their eyes on bigger game.

The Provisional wing of student politics is more extracurricular. Most of its practicioners are leftists but the distinction between them and CHUL people isn't any more ideological than it is clear cut or fixed. You could undoubtedly find any number of issues on which the views of the two wings are mainly the same. When CHUL votes on something that's politically controversial--it doesn't happen too often, but largely because of the touchiness of the Harvard-Radcliffe merger, it's not unheard of--CHUL's student members often couch their arguments in ideological terms.

Actually, an overwhelming majority of Harvard students are probably at least slightly left of the American center anyway, especially if you exclude a few pockets of contrary sentiment, notably the final clubs--it was one of these venerable institutions that, after all, shocked Sarah Roosevelt by rejecting her Franklin. Three years ago, the last time anyone polled them, 80 per cent of Harvard students wanted McGovern to be president. Shirley Chisholm ran second with 8 or 9 per cent, and Nixon, Humphrey, Jackson and Wallace split what was left. Even a lot of the Young Republicans were for Pete McClosky.

So I distinguish the Provisionals from the Officials chiefly by their attitudes: CHUL members are more likely to be interested in Harvard politics for its own sake; the Extracurriculars more often because they think that it reflects national trends that they're interested in. In the more politicized time of the ROTC controversy, when people had to make their arguments explicit and defend their premises, the differences came out quite strongly. Most of the Provisionals, then centered around Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), wanted ROTC kicked off campus because they thought an organization like the United States Army didn't have the right to exist. The Official committees of those days, on the other hand, had long and involved debates about whether ROTC courses met Harvard's academic standards and whether Army-appointed instructors undermined the autonomy of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As you might expect, neither side felt too friendly toward the other. If your chief concern was whether Vietnamese peasants died, you were likely to think that debates about academic standards were a waste of time. On the other hand, if your chief concern was a committee debate on academic standards, you were likely to think repeated references to dying Vietnamese peasants irrelevant intrusions of radical doctrine.

A more recent but somewhat similar contradiction--this time within one group of people--helped keep the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellows Union from successfully striking in 1972 and 1973. The union sprang up when the University imposed an unpopular new financial aid plan without talking to graduate students first. But most of the Union's organizers viewed the financial aid plan as a logical more from a university they thought was more concerned with churning out staffers for American capitalism than with students or even research. So they jumped at the chance to unionize, whereas most other graduate students who joined the union did so reluctantly and evidently felt a little uncomfortable with the union leadership.

The union's organizers were still grumbling occasionally last year, and there's no reason to expect that most teaching fellows would oppose higher salaries or a more generous aid plan. It's even possible that many of them shared the union militants' belief that Harvard has overly close ties with corporate America's military-industrial complex. But most union members didn't think of themselves as fighting the military industrial complex. They thought of themselves as fighting the Kraus Plan, and when the University modified it and set up a few committees with some student representatives, the union fizzled out.

But even here, there was no clear-cut division. Most of the members of the new Graduate School committees also belonged to the union. Conversely, imaginative Officials are as eager as Emerson could have wished to hitch their wagons to a star. Last spring, Quincy House was plastered with leaflets explaining CHUL candidates' positions on everything from women's rights to fighting imperialism.

Both the Provisionals and the Officials managed to get less political people involved, but the Provisionals do it more often. Presumably exclusively Harvard issues tend to seem a bit academic. CHUL managed to stir up a minor storm last year when it recommended that the University abolish sex quotas in housing assignments, including the guaranteed one to one male/female ratio the Quad Houses have enjoyed ever since Radcliffe women and Harvard men have officially lived together. When the going got tough, CHUL hastily battened down, so South House will still be sexually balanced this year. Meanwhile, the Provisionals managed several minor storms, in addition to the never ending battle black students wage about the Afro-American Studies Department, the DuBois Institute and, most recently, a proposed Third World Cultural Center. This battle used to have an extra measure of significance because the Afro Department was the one Harvard department where the students' power was a reality. But the Faculty amended its original resolution two years ago, so the fight no longer carries echoes of May, 1968.

The first other Provisional storm of last year was the New American Movement's 150-person-strong protest against a recruiter from the Honeywell Corporation, which makes most of General Thieu's anti-personnel bombs. The picketers marched in the rain chanting things like, "Want a job, step inside, great career in genocide," and they seemed only slightly disappointed that the recruiter had left before they arrived. As Provisionals, they were more interested in national trends anyway. It was the largest Harvard anti-war demonstration since the Mass Hall occupation.

Even more protesters turned out for then-Vice President Ford's visit to Boston to accept the Harvard Republicans "Man of the Year" award. And a coalition of groups managed crowds of 150 students for several weeks in a row in support of printers striking against the University--which didn't stop the University from declining arbitration, holding out until after Commencement, and breaking the back of the strike.

If you want to follow Harvard politics in any kind of detail, you should probably know the names of at least the larger groups. Here are some of them.

The Radcliffe-Harvard New American Movement (NAM), with perhaps 50 more-or-less active members, is probably the largest political group at Harvard, although the Young Republicans briefly claimed the title after a quarter of last year's freshmen expressed interest in them and they managed a separate introductory meeting.

NAM is a socialist group organized at an Iowa convention in 1971, and it's not mainly a student group--Harvard is one of three or four student chapters. It's pretty specialized, both nationally and at Harvard, but at Harvard last year it had committees working with the United Farm Workers, on the Honeywell and Ford demonstrations, with the printers, and with Afro for the Third World Center, among other things. Members also have consciousness-raising sessions for women, men and homosexuals, Marxist study groups and workshops on graphic posters and literate leaflets. At Harvard, they're probably the closest thing there is to the old SDS before it got torn apart by factionalism and anger.

The Harvard Republican Club is probably the second largest political group at Harvard. Its main coups last year were cabling Nixon to resign earlier than most other Republicans and inviting Ford. The year before Spiro Agnew informed its delegation that he would resign if anything every shook his absolute faith in the administration's integrity, and the club was also naturally the core of the small Harvard Nixon campaign in 1972. But as a group Harvard Republicans are generally not too politically active--the cable to Nixon was pretty exceptional. Similarly, the Young Democrats, which once billed itself as the moderate alternative to SDS and later disappeared altogether, is chiefly interested nowadays in placing members as aides to legislators.

The other three groups with some sort of College-wide political following are the Democratic Socialists, what's left of SDS, and The Crimson. The Democratic Socialists sprang up a year ago, along with Michael Harrington's national Democratic Socialist organizing committee. Last year the group worked some with the United Farm Workers and for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' boycott of Farah pants. They joined the printers' coalition, and a few of their members worked on the Honeywell demonstration.

SDS is now a tightly knit group of six or a dozen sympathizers with the Party for Workers' Power, which split last year from the Progressive Labor Party. The Party for Workers Power called itself Maoist at the time that it came to dominate SDS but later denounced Mao for selling out the working class. It sometimes joined other people's demonstrations. Then it concentrated on fighting racism, primarily by denouncing professors it disapproved of. Its members used to be the most indefatigable people on campus, but it seemed to me that last year they were starting to get tired.

There are also smaller groups (the Lowell House and other women's groups for example), groups that appear and disappear fairly frequently (the New Right Coalition and other libertarian groups, for example) and ad hoc pressure groups that spring up around particular issues. Last year there were groups interested in raising money for the victims of the North African drought, picketing military recruiters, changing the academic calendar, and raising money for Israel during the October War.

Specifics of what's likely to happen this year are naturally hard to predict. One possible storm center might be the Godkin lectures on foreign policy in the fall--former Pentagon director Elliot Richardson '41 is the lecturer, and he ran into some heckling at Class Day last year. Another likely possibility is another union battle--some of Harvard's secretaries have been talking about organizing, and there are a lot more of them than there were printers. In general, my guess is that Provisionals are more in touch with other students than they've been for some time, partly because the passions of '69 and some of their more grandiose ambitions have finally cooled. My roommate, a lovable Midwestern biologist, went to the Honeywell demonstration last year--it could be a straw in the wind. I wouldn't count on a building occupation, but then, you never can tell.