ETHNIC MILITANCY

To the Editors of The Crimson:

For a decade now I have attempted to offer a voice of moderation in matters of ethnic and political militancy within the Harvard community. I have found this role extremely uncomfortable. I share the goals of some militants. Above all, I have the deepest sympathy with the desire of groups such as women, blacks, Jews, radicals (right and left), homosexuals, etc. to remove ascriptive constraints upon full particpation and representation in the life of this great university. Yet I have found it impossible to support militant and confrontationalist styles for realizing these goals.

The danger of poltical and ethnic militancy to a great university is that they distort the quality of those delicate relationships and sensibilities that sustain a great university. Indeed, those who adopt militancy as a style of behavior within a university do so precisely because they, for whatever reasons, no longer comprehend the behavioral requisites of a great university. Thus for them a new raison d'etre becomes imperative: the logic of militant confrontation runs its civility-destroying course.

In a Yom Kippur sermon at Memorial Church on September 14, Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of Harvard Hillel, announced his leadership of a militant Jewish thrust within the Harvard community. This is a regretful event, potentially even more destructive of that delicate framework of civility which sustains Harvard's greatness than the past militancy of blacks, leftists, and women. Like the latter's spokesmen, Rabbi Gold's claims for redressing Jewish grievances would have Harvard surrender its painstakingly acquired universalism to the cathartic requisites of a new particularism. He considers Harvard's past injuries to Jews grounds for inflicting upon Harvard today a new round of particularistic assertion.

In fact, for Rabbi Gold the injuries of the past define the present. This leads him to the same kind of totalistic claims for redress that emanated earlier from black, leftist, and women militants. Even though Harvard today is in reality farther removed from its Christian origins than at any previous period, Rabbi Gold's militant perception of the situation causes him to view Memorial Church as standing, in his words, "in the heart of this university..." A maddening juxtaposition of the past-and-present always leads to extremist conclusions. Thus for Rabbi Gold Harvard can redress past injuries to Jews only through parity of status for Judaism--a parity that extends, alas, even to the secular sphere of the Harvard calendar, for it is not enough for Harvard to provide an alternative registration day for religious Jewish students.

What all this amounts to is a thoroughgoing confusion about the limits of ethnic particularism in a democratic society. There is no better guide to understanding this difficult issue than David Riesman, who, over a generation ago, recognized that a style of give-and-take is a crucial feature of America's success at fashioning pluralistic solutions to the conflicting claims of its numerous ethnic subcultures. Over time this process has allowed successive generations of Americans to design a dialectically unique cultural-political synthesis which is general or universal enough to sustain a successful nation-state yet parochial enough to nourish a kaleidoscopic subsystem of ethnic particularisms--some originating and gaining substance solely within the American nation (e.g., Mormons).

What is especially unique about this American solution, as David Riesman has taught us, is that power (political-economy) and culture (ethnicity), however intertwined in localities, have sustained at the national level a functional distance one to the other. No doubt at any given period this situation is imperfectly realized. But at least the value of a functional differentiation of power and culture is broadcast and key spokesmen of national strata (lawyers, educators, capitalists, scientists, intellectuals, etc.) are found supporting it.

Harvard, of course, has been for a century one of those national institutions burdened with that perplexing obligation, that multifaceted task of fashioning a functional distance between its cultural (WASP) origins, on the one hand, and its national power, on the other. All things given, as an institution's national power increases its demand for cultural specificity decreases. No doubt this dynamic of Americanization or American institutional democratization--if I can call it such--is never perfect at any given point in time: it is always an approximation of a longrun norm or ideal, exhibiting much cultural lag.

But any given cultural lag is not the decisive feature of the total situation, though in the eyes of the new ethnic militants who insist on a maddening juxtaposition of the past-and-present it appears so. Anyway some cultural lag is functional to the longrun process of Americanization and should not be condemned. I have no doubt that Memorial Church--which Rabbi Gold mistakenly perceives as standing "in the heart of this university"--is one such cultural lag. After all, no small part of the national support (financial and otherwise) which sustains Harvard University is connected to this symbol of Harvard's Christian origins. This can and should be tolerated without jeopardizing the longrun dynamic of the institutional democratization of Harvard. Martin Kilson   Professor of Government