Studying--Or Fighting--The Feds

"The law assumes academics don't have professional ethics, nor even good sense. The great leviathan wants to step in to keep us from misbehaving."

The man who said that--Alan E. Heimert '49, chairman of the English Department--has a new administrative job now. Probably starting next year. Heimert will chair a Faculty committee on Harvard's relationship to the leviathan he spoke about at an October Faculty meeting--the federal government.

The impetus for the committee grew chiefly out of the Faculty's problems during the fall in dealing with the federal law opening student files, an experience that Heimert and other faculty members found less than pleasant.

For carious reasons the Faculty as a whole wasn't very happy with the law, but it couldn't do much about it. If the Faculty had decided not to comply with the law it would have lost millions of irreplacable dollars in federal student loan subsidies.

So the Faculty's hands were tied by finances--with money riding in the balance, as it does with every federal law that affects Harvard, there was no choice but compliance no matter how unsavory the law.

"My concern would be." Heimert said this week, "that the financial wallop of the federal government makes it impossible to say no to their demands."

The files law spawned a series of bureaucratic committees in the Faculty during the fall, as professors and administrators grappled with an issue that seemed to codify their had feelings toward the government.

The issue went from the already constituted Privacy Committee to a special subcommittee of department chairman--that was where Heimert first came in--to a special files law task force. During all the talks, the idea of non-compliance reportedly came up again and again and seemed as appealing as it was impracticable.

After much lobbying Harvard and other universities managed to effect minor changes in the law, but it must nevertheless have been a frightening experience for Faculty members who think of Harvard as a fiercely independent institution.

So Heimert's committee will probably study Harvard and the government with the idea of avoiding future files laws, probably by forging some sort of mutual understanding between professors here and people on Capital Hill.

It won't be an easy task; congressmen and senators are likely to stand as firmly behind their right to legislate universities as professors stand being their right to freedom from government interference.

And Heimert's committee can't get around the immutable fact of Harvard government life: nearly one-third of Harvard's annual operating budget comes from possibly revocable federal funds of some sort.