Keeping the heat on

Fueled by smouldering unrest, a brushfire of student activism once again swept the Law School campus this year.

Headed by the Third World Coalition, an umbrella organization for campus minority groups, a vocal core of student activists raised banners and bullhorns in a series of demonstrations calling for divestiture, affirmative action, and a student voice in faculty decisions.

While most students stood on the sidelines and some observers attributed the recurrent rumblings to a small group of agitators, the underlying sentiment evidently ran deep. Law School Council polls and referenda revealed widespread dissatisfaction on a variety of educational issues, suggesting that the protests will outlive the graduation of their most outspoken movers this spring.

Taking the lead as undergraduate activism waned, an ad hoc Divestiture Committee revived the perennial protest over Harvard's holdings in corporations that do business in the Republic of South Africa.

The Committee focused its attention on President Bok, who opposes divestment on the grounds that corporate influence affords. Harvard greater leverage in the apartheid state's human rights conflict. When Bok visited Harkness Commons in March, a crowd of students bombarded him with criticism, demanding that he defend Harvard's investment policy. Later, students and several faculty protesters twice marched on Massachusetts Hall to rally for divestiture outside Bok's office.

The strongest emotions and greatest turbulence, however, surrounded issues closer to the Law School.

The death of Stimson Professor of Law C. Clyde Ferguson in December left the Law School without a tenured minority professor and precipitated a new round of student protest.

A student-faculty forum sponsored by the Third World Coalition erupted in heated argument when students assailed faculty hiring practices as racially biased. Demanding a commitment to affirmative action, students called on the faculty to abandon exclusive hiring criteria that allegedly favor Ivy League law review editors at the expense of diversity. And students overwhelmingly endorsed a Law School Council resolution calling for stepped-up minority recruitment efforts.

The Council poll also revealed wide-ranging grievances with the quality of education at the Law School. Students faulted professors for neglecting their academic responsibilities and giving their outside activities first priority, and 92 percent of the respondents favored instituting mandatory faculty office hours.

Eighty percent supported a formalized student role in the Law School's decision-making process, and after months of preparation, the Council presented a package of proposals for student representation on the admissions and appointments committees combined with increased access to faculty meetings.

The faculty rejected the Council's proposals, however, unleashing a wave of protest that rivaled the upheavals of a year ago. The proposals had emerged from dialogue with a faculty liaison committee appointed by Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 to stem the tide of unrest after boycotts, demonstrations, and sit-ins locked the campus last spring. For may, their defeat signaled the failure of student efforts to work within established channels, and previously passive students entered the fray.

About 50 students, led by former Law Record Editor Louis J. Hoffman, staged a sit-in in Pound Hall, defying Vorenberg's demands that they disperse and forcing him to relocate a faculty meeting.

Intended to convey student's feelings of alienation, the protest instead shocked and angered many professors and threatened to polarize the campus. At a campuswide rally in early May, the full gamut of student grievances blurred in an outpouring of anger. Addressing a crowd of 500 from the steps of Langdell Hall, student leaders accused the faculty of ignoring their appeals for reform.

"It's not over," declared second year law student Douglas Q. Woo. "Until they listen, until they act, we'll be back as protesters bearing rocks and sticks and carrying signs, from the steps of Langdell to the dean's door."

But for several of the Law School's leading activists, it is over, Robert W. Riggle, former Black Students Association President Muhammad I. Kenyatta, and former Council President Kent R. Markus, among others, will be leaving their old battlegrounds after Commencement.

Nevertheless, this year's graduates passed the baton, to their successors at the May rally, and newly-elected Council President Edward H. Vela has vowed to continue to press for reform. And given the faculty's unwillingness to concede a student vote in appointments decisions, the storm of protest appears unlikely to subside.