The Conflict Comes to A Head

It seemed afterwards to have been brewing for months: the DuBois Institute Student Committee had been considering a sit-in or more drastic action since February, and the administration, sensing something in the air, had increased police security in the Yard.

DISC's five-hour sit-in in Massachusetts Hall's reception room a week ago is the result of years of dispute over the DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research--a dispute that may, with the sit-in, have reached its high-water mark.

The long-simmering controversy reached a crucial point in the fall, when President Bok appointed a University-wide advisory board for the institute that did not include Ewart Guinier '33, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department.

Since he came to Harvard. Guinier has fought with almost everyone he has come in contact with outside of his own department, and the decision not to put him on the advisory board was apparently motivated by fears that its meetings would become battles.

Still, he and members of DISC have been upset that the supposed link between the institute and the Afro Department might become dissolved. DISC members felt as well that the institute as planned wrongly excluded undergraduates from its operation.

So all winter and into the spring DISC was protesting, the advisory board was meeting and Bok, who is said to have put the institute near the top of his list of fund-raising priorities, was getting contributions.

Everything collided last Friday. The 16 students who sat in Mass Hall and the 200 others who picketed outside in support of them said their actions were motivated by Bok's refusal to meet with them--but Bok says the group never asked him for a meeting until they were already inside Mass Hall.

DISC members admit they never officially asked for a meeting with Bok, but they say Bok should have approached them after receiving their proposals.

At any rate, Bok agreed this week to meet with up to four or five DISC members, and DISC spokesmen say they are happy to meet with Bok. It's hard to predict what will come out of the meetings; the answer depends on what the priorities of the students' demands are.

Since this fall Bok has shown a commitment to the idea of ties between the institute and the Afro Department, if not between the institute and Guinier. He says he will offer all new tenured members of the Afro Department places on the advisory board.

Bok is also apparently committed to an exclusion of undergraduates from the institute's planning and management, because it will be primarily directed toward advanced research--on that point. Bok and the students directly disagree.

Next week's Bok-DISC meeting will, then, probably be more of a test of the students' priorities than Bok's. If a direct link between the institute and Afro is the students' major concern, they may possibly emerge satisfied from the meeting.

But that is unlikely. If the issue of student participation does not split Bok and DISC, the general bitterness between them probably will.