Fair Harvard Strikes Back

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, professor of Government and Social Relations, is luckier than most people who work for a living. He evidently likes his job and is convinced of its worth. In his essay on the history of political controversy at Harvard, Lipset writes about his profession and his place of employment like a parishioner who believes he worships the best of all gods at the best of all churches. His job, lest there be any confusion about it, is "creative scholarship," the cultivation and formulation of knowledge. His employer is, of course, Harvard University, whose historical dedication to free and unfettered scholarship, according to Lipset, has known little if any bounds.

At the beginning of his study of Harvard politics, Lipset warns his readers that the topics he emphasizes "clearly reflect the values, biases, and conceptual outlook of the authors." Cautions of this sort usually go without saying in academic literature, but in Lipset's case the warning should not go uneeded. Lipset is writing as an insider, a partisan on his home turf, and makes little pretense at detachment. He makes no apologies for his professional or institutional attachments, but Lipset's esteem for his calling has made his narrative account of Harvard politics more personal than it pretends to be.

In a direct and understandable way, Lipset's concern for his subject is an outgrowth of the upheavals foisted upon academia by the student revolts of the late 1960s. Early in the essay he writer:

The story of the sixties at Harvard, and at many other institutions as well, could not be understood as an exceptional event. Rather, Harvard, as the oldest and pre-eminent American university, had fount itself intensely involved in almost every wave and type of controversy that has run through American higher education. If the sixties taught any lesson to those participating in American collegiate life, it is that people who do not know their own history cannot know on what road they are. Since politics, conventional and unconventional, conservative and radical, will continue in the university world as long as such institutions remain centers of free and creative thought, and since there will be more student rebellions, and faculty-administration-governing boards struggles, an effort to report on politics at Harvard...seemed warranted.

Lipset, a member of the Faculty's conservative caucus (in the essay he refers to it as the moderate caucus), obviously was distressed by the turn University politics took in the sixties and equally discouraged by Harvard's institutional response to the challenge of student radicalism. The people who controlled Harvard--liberal administrators and faculty--failed, in Lipset's eyes, to appreciate the historical context and the historical implications of the "attack on academic freedom." In his essay, Lipset sets out to draw the appropriate lessons and to inform the University of its higher interests.

LIPSET'S THESIS IS a simple one: political activity is endemic to institutions such as Harvard because of the nature of their intellectual endeavor. Scholarly innovativeness, he writes, engenders certain values which lead in a natural way to political concerns. These values include skepticism about existing knowledge and a universalism that treats all things connected with scholarly pursuit according to impersonal criteria. The academic's skepticism brings him into conflict with the reigning powers in society while his universalism leads the scholar to oppose "those aspects of stratified societies that limit equality of opportunity." Despite the obvious conflicts between scholars and the powers that be in society, free thought in academic settings is tolerated because of the contributions it makes to social advancement. In order to protect themselves from external encroachments on their prerogatives, Lipset argues, scholars must vigilantly protect their "academic freedom."

In order to demonstrate his thesis, Lipset reviews 338 years of Harvard history--mostly through a synthesis of secondary accounts--to show that Harvard indeed has had its share of political controversies and that the principles of academic freedom were often called upon by professional scholars in Cambridge to protect the integrity of independent thought from meddling governing boards and other non-academically oriented groups. Lipset's historical narrative is not altogether satisfactory, but its reliance on captivating details at least provides for enjoyable reading.

Lipset divides political activity into several categories. First, there are internal power-struggles between governing boards, administrators and academics. Second, he recounts numerous philosophically based disputes over educational policy. Early on in Harvard's history these disputes were religiously oriented pitting traditional Congregationalists against the more liberal Unitarians. In later years, the fights centered on whether the University should be primarily concerned with training and indoctrinating young minds or with providing the proper conditions for the production of new knowledge. Third, Lipset describes various student rebellions--over issues ranging from the quality of butter served in the dining comments to the internal social hierarchy imposed on undergraduates. A side from the events of 1969, the apparent high point for student rebellion came in 1834 when a dispute over University discipline led President Josiah Quincy to suspend the entire sophomore class for a year and to call in the local police to restore order to Harvard Yard. Fourth, the essay describes the sporadic and occasionally radical involvement of faculty and students in the political affairs of the nation. In this regard Lipset traces the origins of SDS to early socialist movements on campus at the turn of the twentieth century.

The point of Lipset's lengthy account of Harvard politics is to show that political controversy has always been part and parcel of academic life, and should be understood as such. He suggests that this, was and is the case precisely because of the awesome intellectual freedom that the University encouraged. Lipset does not repudiate this political activity; at best he is somewhat proud of it and at worst he suggests it is a reasonable price to pay for intellectual vitality. But what does all this have to do with the student radicalism of the 1960s?

The connection is this: the unprecedented extremism of recent student radicalism is seen by Lipset as an attack on the very academic freedom that provided the source for the liveliness of intellectual thought and political activity at Harvard. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Harvard had fostered an "academic culture" that promoted scholarship for scholarship's sake, intellectual research relatively free of social constraint, and a solemn respect for creative academic thought. Because of its commitment to this ideal (and to a lesser extent, according to Lipset's analysis, because of its access to influence and financial resources), Harvard came to be though of as something of a sacred place for scholars. This was the Harvard that Lipset and his colleagues came to cherish so deeply, and this was the Harvard that Lipset believed was being undermined by the anti-intellectual subculture" of student radicals. Citing the work of fellow professor Samuel Huntington, Lipset writes:

He [Huntington] suggested that many students were again worshipping at different altars from the intellectually oriented faculty. And he concluded that as in earlier times when a scholarly faculty had faced undergraduates who predominantly reflected the anti-intellectual culture of the socially-elite "clubbies," the faculty must now deal with a student body many of whose members accept the new anti-intellectual orientations of the "counterculture" and the New Left. Thus, as in the past, many students do not respect professors, and professors resent students.

For Lipset, to give in to the "anti-intellectualism" of the new student politics, to compromise or waver in the face of its challenge, is intolerable. Capitulation of any sort--and Lipset suggests that such capitulation did take place after the Bust of University Hall--would strike something of a death blow to the very idea of Harvard.

AN ACCOUNT which suggests that student activism followed well defined patterns over the course of 338 years, Lipset is faced with the problem of explaining why in 1969 undergraduate radicalism was able to mount such a stunning attack on the University itself. He resolves the problem with two devices--one historical and one psychological. In his chapter on "The Protest of the Thirties" he argues that Depression-era radical students failed to mobilize mass support among their peers because "the University did not present them with any issue of repression," the sort of issue around which students at other campuses were able to organize. To support this claim, Lipset cites a contemporary Crimson article that said: "In a college where each member, student and faculty alike, is left free to pursue his given task and no official thought is paid to caste, color or previous condition of servitude, the average Harvard man finds it hard to see just what he can really agitate about."

By the mid 1960s, Lipset argues, radicals had finally learned that "campaigns against intangible enemies like racism and war might have their place, but supporters could be won only by attacking nearby visible enemies on specific issues...a target in Cambridge was priceless." During the year of the Strike. Lipset writers, SDS had decided that in order to top its feats the year before at Columbia it would have to act at Harvard in a way "deliberately designed to provoke authority to be repressive." The forcible occupation of University Hall was the tactic decided upon, and the Pusey administration , Lipset suggests, responded just as the radicals would have wanted it to when Pusey called in outside force to evict the protesters. (The outrage of students and sympathetic faculty to the Bust was predictable, Lipset claims, because a similar reaction followed Josiah Quincy's decision to call in police to restore order after the riots of 1834.)

In explaing why 1969 represented an identifiable break in the pattern of moderate student radicalism at Harvard, Lipset suggests that the class composition of undergraduate radicals had changed. In 1969, sons of conservative bluebloods joined the ranks of the politically disaffected. Lipset says that these radicals became more militant because they felt that they had to leave no doubts about the rejection of their upper-class lives for leftist politics. The explanation is hardly a compelling one since Lipset presents no overwhelming evidence that the bluebloods mad up any more than 50 per cent of the "militants," and it also ignores the fact that many of Harvard's radicals in the early part of the twentieth century were bluebloods who did not resort to militant rebellion against the University while they were students here.

Lipset, though, does not despair. Students activism, his historical account suggests, is cyclical and its form is more important than its substance. As a stoic believer in the capacity of the Harvard faculty to steer a steady course in its commitment to intellectual excellence, he suggests that "it is possible to still hope that the academic culture may regain much of the ground it has lost." As if to buck up his discouraged colleagues he closes his essay with the thought that the "price of freedom and innovation is often disturbing; the rewards are very high." Demonstrating these rewards, he writes: "In February-March 1971, the International Gallup Poll asked leaders in 70 nations: 'What University do you regard as the best in he world--all thing taken in consideration?' The poll reported that Harvard topped the list."

FOR THOSE WHO do not worship at the same altar as Lipset, his faith, and the analysis it spawned, is frustrating at best. His vision of the independent scholar, committed to a self-defined notion of excellence, is a paper-thin one. The ability of the scholar to remain aloof from the rest of society is ultimately dependent on the good will of those who obligingly suffer the scholar's peculiar ways. The rules of American society allow the academic elite its measure of independence because scholars have generally aligned with the political and economic elite. Lipset himself points out that universities serve "the bodies politic" by providing them with "new basic discoveries that help keep their national economic and military collectives in the vanguard." Lipset also argues that the superior academic institutions have taken a hand in the control of society in another way: by creating a corps of elite personnel to serve at the top of society, "the culture producing centers have been gaining in their ability to exercise great influence over the other elites, whether in government, the churches, business establishments, or the mass media."

Scholarly institutions have made aloofness from external control an illusion. The illusion is based on the ability of those institutions to throw their chips in with the non-academic rulers of society. The merger may be a long-lasting one, but it will not be a happy one for the nineteenth-century vision promulgated by Lipset. At one point, the fiddler will change his tune, and the university will find itself in the position of having to dance. That will happen, one way or another. But more important, the university by its own means has destroyed the myth of scholarship for its own sake. It cannot be preserved against those who no doubt will demand that scholars begin to produce knowledge for the benefit to those whom it now ignores.