The Committee Needs a Reasonable Mind'

John P. Fernandez '69 had plenty of personal commitments to keep him occupied in 1969. He was a married man, working 40 hours a week. He didn't know too many students--he transferred to Harvard his junior year and lived off campus.

One day Thomas Crooks, then master of Dudley House, walked up to him, Fernandez recalls, and said, "John, the Committee of Fifteen needs someone with a reasonable mind." Fernandez thought it over and decided to run in his House elections for a seat on the Committee.

The SDS had adopted a creative counter-strategy--it ran its own delegates in House elections, and if they won, they promptly resigned. When Dudley House held its election, it came down to a runoff between Fernandez and an SDS member. Fernandez won, and headed for the final hurdle to becoming a member--the green marble lottery.

Because the committee only admitted three student representatives, yet each House had held an election, the final choice was decided by lot. "I remember," Fernandez says, "there were only three green marbles and you had to choose one of them in order to win. I was feeling kind of unlucky that day and I asked the president of Dudley House to choose for me." He walked away with a green marble and Fernandez had his seat on the committee.

Fernandez does not consider himself a traitor to his fellow students, but he does recognize that many undergraduates did. "There were comments made as I walked out of the hearings. They called me pig, said that I was selling out to the establishment." Others questioned what he, of all people--"a minority with a very poor background"--was doing in the CRR meeting room on the penthouse floor of Holyoke Center, "sitting around with all these white gentlemen."

But he stuck with the committee to the end, remaining in Cambridge all summer after his graduation to finish up the casework. "Why did I want to be on the committee? Well, I guess I sympathized with what the students were doing and I figured I was a strong person and wouldn't be intimidated." Fernandez believes he helped to modify some of the disciplinary action: "A lot more than three students would have been dismissed if it weren't for the students who sat on the committee."

Because he spoke out for these students, Fernandez contends, he played a saving role on a committee where few of the Faculty members--as far as Fernandez could tell--seemed particularly concerned with the welfare of the undergraduates. "The conservative [Faculty] on the committee were looking out for their own good," Fernandez recalls. "Their own good" included aspirations like gaining tenure or a name as candidate for the University presidency, he adds.

Fernandez often disapproved not only of the Faculty members' motives, but of their decisions. The committee, for example, would conclude that someone had committed "an assault," if "they had a picture showing that the student touched a dean's arm, which I didn't quite agree with."

But, hopelessly outnumbered in this belief, Fernandez could only sit and watch as Archibald Cox '34, Loeb University Professor and the University prosecutor for the committee, would show pictures and the professors would "decide whether or not the person was touching a dean."

But Fernandez still argues that it was better to sit on the committee than to boycott: "If you don't involve yourself in the process, the Faculty can say, look, we gave you a chance." The committee's practices might become fairer if students were equally represented on the disciplinary body, but Fernandez warns that students should not expect this to happen: "You won't ever get it. People in a position of power aren't going to give it up."

The Faculty committee members also recruited Fernandez for some security guard work. "I'm five-foot ten, but look a lot taller with the Afro, and I look like I lift weights," he says. So the committee placed Fernandez outside the doors of Holyoke Center, barring the way when SDS attempted to storm the building.

But the committee members did not include Fernandez in all of their activities. When the Committee of Fifteen met with concerned older alumni, Fernandez was not invited.

Today, Fernandez again finds himself in the middle. A division operations manager in A.T.&T.'s Pittsburgh branch, he works full-time for the sprawling company--then goes home to write books attacking the system. He has published two so far--"Black Managers in White Corporations" and "Racism and Sexism in Corporate America." "I do it to keep my sanity," Fernandez explains.