Time of Troubles

Following is a chronology of the key events in the surge of student activism at the Law School this year:

Summer 1982--Minority law students announce plans to boycott a civil rights class to be taught in January 1983 by two prominent civil rights attorneys.

The Harvard Black Law Student Association (BLSA) decides to protest the class, charging that a tenure-track minority professor, not temporary visitors regardless of their national stature, should be brought to the Law School to teach the class BLSA President Muhammad I. Kenyatta writes to Julius L. Chambers, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who is to teach the class.

Citing Kenyatta's letter, Dean of the Law School James A. Vorenberg '49 criticizes the boycotters, calling their protest a reverse-racist personal attack on the white teacher of the class. Jack Greenberg, Director General of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Columnists around the country echo this analysis.

September 1982--The six member organizations of the Third World Coalition vote to boycott the Chambers Greenberg class Support in the Coalition, however, is not unanimous. The boycott tactic, says Joseph A Garcia, president of La Alianza the Chicano students organization, "will hurt minority students. It's like cutting off our nose to spite our face."

October 1982--A poll by the Harvard Law Record reveals that 71 percent of the student body is opposed to the boycott Ninety percent, however, say they favor "a special effort" on the part of the faculty to hire more minority and female professors, raising the number above the two

November 1982--A referendum conducted by the Law School Council, the official student government, finds that 662 students support affirmative action at the Law School, with only 180 students against. The faculty passes a resolution endorsing affirmative action in principle, but rejects an alternative proposal to hire the most qualified minority and female candidates.

January 1983--Support for the boycott increases. The coalition gains endorsement from the Committee on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues, the Women's Law Association, and the Law School Council for the boycott. Approximately 60 students, almost half of them whites, picket the first class of the Chambers-Greenberg class.

February 2, 1983--More than 90 students attend the first lecture of the coalition-sponsored alternative civil rights class, which brings minority law professors to Harvard to give weekly lectures. At the biweekly faculty meeting the same day, Cecil McNab, co-chairman of the coalition, and several other coalition members make a short presentation, in which they criticize the lack of student power at the Law School.

March 8, 1983--Stemming from the faculty meeting appearance, a jointly organized student-faculty forum with the faculty draws more than 350 students. The two most widely discussed issues at the forum are affirmative action and curriculum reforms. The meeting is tense and antagonistic, as students and professors meet face to face outside the classroom for the first time in recent memory.

April 13, 1983--For the second year in a row, a petition of first-year students is presented to the faculty-student Committee on Legal Education endorsing the "no hassle pass" which would allow students to pass when called on in class. For the second year in a row, it fails to get committee approval. Despite a presentation by two students on behalf of the 240 singers of the petition, the no-hassle pass is defeated 3-7.

April 25, 1983--Forty Law students, mostly non-whites, stage a small demonstration outside the dean's office asking that Charles Lawrence, professor of law at the University of San Francisco, be hired at Harvard. The appointments committee meeting at the dean office decides that Lawrence and another Black man are the most qualified minority candidates and then inexplicably decides that they are not qualified to teach at Harvard, according to student leaders.

May 5, 1983--The day after the faculty passed a resolution allowing professors to grade class room participation in many clases, 500 law students demonstrate outside Langdell Hall in protest, charging that the new policy was enacted without proper student input. About half of the crowd then mobs the dean's office and confronts the dean, demanding that he reconvene the faculty for an open meeting.

Vorenberg refuses, but schedules instead an open meeting of the Legal Education Committee, the advisory student faculty committee that submitted the resolutions for faculty consideration on May 4 Groups of students occupy the faculty library for several minutes, hold another rally outside, and threaten to shut down the school the next day.

May 6, 1983--The next day, 500 students again rally outside Langdell, and again march on the dean's office. They then stage a four hour sit-in on the connected second floors of Langdell and Griswold Halls.

May 9, 1983--The open meeting of the Legal Education Committee draws 450 students. For more than two hours, students and professors debate the new grading policy. The next day, in closed session, the committee votes to recommend that the faculty rescind its vote of May 4.

May 17, 1983--The faculty votes to reconsider the new grading policy next year, in effect delaying the implementation of the policy without passing judgment on the validity of the original vote.