1969 The Mood Then...

April 11

The Corporation Must Go

The Corporation as it is now constituted cannot legitimately act as the principal governing body of the University. Wednesday's demonstration revealed an Administration which was from its own point of view, protecting Harvard-but which in fact was hopelessly at odds with the Harvard community. It is clear that faculty and students must be given the determining voice in matters now decided by the Corporation.

Because the decision to bring police on campus was only an extension of the Corporation's fundamental policies a movement mainly directed at forcing President Pusey's resignation would be a mistake. The nature of the President's office, the manner by which the men who occupy it are selected and their invariably intimate relationship with the Corporation, were all forces which pressed Pusey toward his decision, while insulating him from moderating influences. Only a comprehensive reform of the Administration will guarantee that Pusey's successor will be more responsive to the feelings of his constituents.

April 12

Wires

TO THE STUDENTS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND RADCLIFFE COLLEGE:

YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS AT STANFORD SALUTE YOU. STAY TO GETHER AND YOU WILL PREVAIL. OURS IS A COMMON STRUGGLE. FIGHT ON. THE STANFORD SIT-IN

April 14

Strike

The current student strike at Harvard should continue.

Various moderate student leaders are now calling for a "moratorium" on the strike. Such a moratorium, regardless of what its proponents say, would amount to calling off the strike entirely. The strike is the only solid asset that students interested in bringing about real changes at Harvard possess, and should not be discarded until those real changes have been won.

...At the moment, no group represents everyone who supports a democratic, non-militarist and non-expansionist University. But unity can be achieved. The strike steering committee set up by students who initially supported SDS's six demands was designed to be expanded, and the six demands can be added to and clarified. Students who find themselves for the most part in agreement with this group's demands should, as the strike proceeds, attend and participate in the meetings of the radical strike group. These are not SDS meetings, but simply meetings of people who support the radical demands.

April 15

Smash HBS?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

While the SDS demands are well-founded and directed, it is my opinion that equally valid arguments can be found for the termination of the Harvard Business School.   Jeffrey B. Perry

April 16

Supports Radicals

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Add us to those older alumni who support the radical students at Harvard and Radcliffe. President Pusey's unreserved support for ROTC following the clear faculty vote against it showed how authoritarian is the administration philosophy.

Where alternate ways to exert pressure to end the great crime of the war are cut off, how better should the students act against a system of society which has failed itself by failing the poor, the Blacks, and also the students?   John C. Gray '30   Helen L. Gray '32

April 17

Politician

To the Editors of The Crimson:

FOLLOWING IS A COPY OF TELEGRAM SENT TO PRESIDENT PUSEY. DEAR PRESIDENT PUSEY AS YOU MAY RECOLLECT I'M UP FOR ELECTION ON THE BOARD OF OVERSEERS. AND WOULD LIKE TO WIN, AND AM SUFFICIENTLY A POLITICIAN TO RECOGNIZE THAT CASTIGATING YOUR ACTION IN CALLING THE POLICE WILL NOT NECESSARILY GAIN ME ALL THE VOTES OF OLD ALUMNI, NONE-THE-LESS, I RUSH HAPPILY TO SAY THAT YOU ARE CONCEIVABLY A LIAR IN PRETENDING HASTE AND NIGHTSTICKS WERE NECESSARY TO SOLVE AN EXPLOSIVE SITUATION FOR WHICH RECENT HISTORY MIGHT HAVE PREPARED YOU WITH MANY AN ALTERNATIVE. SINCE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS REVEAL YOU AS INCONTESTABLY CLOSE-MOUTHED, I AM SIMULTANEOUSLY RELEASING THE TEXT OF THIS TELEGRAM TO THE HARVARD CRIMSON FOR PUBLICATION. YOURS I HOPE. AT THE FIRST MEETING NEXT YEAR OF THE BOARD OF OVERSEERS UNLESS. KIND FELLOW, YOU FIND IN THE INTERIM THAT YOU GOTTA GO.

FUTURES IN TRUST.   NORMAN MAILER

April 21

Charges

Harvard should not be surprised by the failure of its efforts to get criminal charges dropped against those students who sat in last week at University Hall. Neither Judge Edward M. Viola nor the people of Cambridge take kindly to seeing Harvard use outside police as a kind of private army, to do the University's rather than the community's bidding.

Even if the arrested students should eventually be acquired, that will give Harvard no excuse to discipline them by its own processes. The demonstrators were subjected to police action, including the threat or actuality of brutal action, thrown into jail, and obligated at least to seek legal help. In short, Harvard placed them on the in-basket of the judicial process, under circumstances where the University's power to extricate students was both practically and logically compromised...

April 25

Harvard Leavening

Basic to academic freedom is the concept that a student may follow any course of study, or study a subject that he feels suits his needs. The corollary is equally basic, that the University should try to offer any course or course of study that a reasonable number of students seek to pursue. The new Black studies programs around the country are only the most recent, and newsworthy, examples of this. Any action by anyone which seeks to limit the freedom of the University to offer courses smacks of censorship, and is distressingly similar to the recurrent incidents in which PTA's try to get books with dirty words removed from school curricula, or vigilantes try to remove such works from public libraries....

. . .Really, sir, do you think the College should be made over in your image? If you despise the flute, should no one study it? Would you deprive the military of the small leavening that its complement of Harvard-educated officers provides, and leave us to the tender mercies of an officer corps wholly derived from West Point. Annapolis, and Colorado Springs?...   Thomas Lumbard '58, L '62

1974 April 15

Five Years Later

...Many of the specific victories of 1969 have disappeared. The Faculty quietly took away student power in the Afro-Am Department last year. The committee the Faculty set up to bypass its in adequate disciplinary methods developed into the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, a political disciplinary group with a catch-all constitution used primarily for suppressing student protest. The new flexibility of the president who succeeded Pusey proved to be less substantive than procedural. Students are allowed a voice, now, through student-faculty committees and even, as the University's non-reaction during the 1972 occupation of Mass Hall showed, through demonstrations. But after students have had their voice, the Corporation still does what it wants to. Last year President Bok even suggested the ROTC should come back--speaking as a private citizen, not a university president, he hastened to explain.

Universities should be democratically run for the same reasons people should choose their own governments and workers should own their factories--because people should rule themselves and the places they live and work. But in a university that is supposedly devoted to free inquiry irrespective of power or position, rule by a small group of powerful people is ridiculous as well as reactionary.

We still need 1969's students' refusal to become part of a system designed to keep control of people's lives--by promoting insidious racial and sexual distinctions, by making concessions on minor points, by all the marketing techniques made possible by modern technology, and ultimately, as in Indochina, by killing people who insist on resisting. That's why it's still important to understand the real issues of 1969. The lawlessness and violence liberals complained of came mostly from the administration and the police, but even if that hadn't been so, laying exclusive stress on it would obscure the real issue--the Strike's effort to provide an alternative to the unimaginative, compliant University offered by the rationalized, centralized bureaucracy that runs things now. We still need such an alternative, and that's why the Strike is still our history and our heritage.

1979 April 10

Ten Years After

Even more to the point, the administration of Derek Bok--the man who, more than anyone else, profited from the strike and the ensuing tumult that forced Pusey's retirement--has shown a familiar contempt for the views of students and junior faculty. When Bok and his Corporation seek to ignore the ethical dimensions of corporate responsibility, when they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of students' calls for a real hand in determining Harvard's investment policy, or when Bok and Dean Rosovsky smugly dismiss students' attempts to gain a real say in the formulation of their own curriculum, the silence is an echo. Granted, Bok is a smoother man than Pusey--as the Corporation and Overseers realized when they named him, he is the sort to rely on calm words, rather than police violence, to settle confrontations--but he has shown little more sensitivity to student concerns than did his predecessor. The echoes of 1969 grow louder with each day that Harvard waffles on its ethical responsibilities. The faces have changed, but little else.

This is why we must look to the lessons of that spring of a decade ago. Because, in fact, the strike was a good thing--it produced concessions, albeit small ones, on each of the issues of concern to the students of that day. The victories were hard-fought--most of the violence that so alarmed the press was in fact directed against student demonstrators by the police' Pusey had called in--but they were real, vivid proof that students can, when they choose, have an effect on even this school. In the 10 years that have passed since then, however, those victories have slowly eroded--partly from declining student interest, but also from a renewed tendency of the men who run Harvard to ignore those interests.