Student Militancy Divides, Changes Faculty

The Faculty room in University Hall--site of formal meetings, ancient oil paintings, the traditions of Harvard's oldest faculty--had an unusual set of overnight visitors 20 years ago.

The several hundred students who occupied the building to protest the University's involvement with the Vietnam War effort and its expansion in Cambridge used the Faculty room as their forum during their day-and-a-half-long stay.

They debated strategy, talked politics, smoked cigarettes and dope, sang protest songs, took naps. And long after the students had been forcibly removed from the building, the effects of their visit were felt in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

The foundations of the Faculty room had been weakened by the unusually large crowd of student protesters, and had to be reinforced later that year.

The faculty itself, while less physically damaged by the takeover, also contended with the necessity of adapting to the changing times, a thing that the traditionally static body had always resisted.

"The whole movement of these recent decades has been to make the [faculty] community more responsive to student needs," says Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman '31. "That was expedited by the events of 1968-'69."

And Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of the Faculty, says, "Those of us who can compare before and after can see that there were changes, but it is not a wholly different place."

The angry debates among students about Black studies, the ROTC--the Reserve Officer Training Corps--and Harvard's expansion into Cambridge were mirrored by the conflicts in the faculty over those issues.

And as students' demands became more focused and their tactics more militant, the faculty was forced to take action. First, in February 1969, they voted to demote ROTC to extracurricular status and to institute a concentration in Afro-American Studies.

After the University Hall takeover, they acceded to student demands to create a formal department in Afro-American Studies controlled largely by students, and to gradually move ROTC off the campus.

When the debates grew heated, attendance at the normally routine meetings of the full Faculty increased dramatically, forcing the professors to move from their normal University Hall room to Paine Hall, Sanders Theater and, eventually, the Loeb Drama Center.

At the height of the disputes in the spring of 1969, faculty meetings were held almost daily, with then-President Nathan M. Pusey '28 and then-Dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford presiding. For the first time, student visitors were allowed after the takeover, and the faculty voted to allow WHRB broadcasts of their highly charged sessions.

"Meetings of the faculty, which had generally been rather quiet affairs, began to get larger and larger, as more people came to debate issues which had not been debated before," says Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus Arthur Maass.

Maass was one of the leaders of the conservative caucus of the faculty that emerged during the debates. The caucuses were a phenomena of the time, with the faculty divided into two groups--one representing professors who were sympathetic to student demands and believedthat the University should become more"democratic" and the other representing those whowere more interested in maintaining the statusquo.

"They called themselves the liberal caucus andus the conservative caucus," says Maass. "Wepreferred to call ourselves the responsible caucusand them, the irresponsible caucus."

The faculty in-fighting continued throughoutthe spring and for a good part of the next year,as the FAS shaped a new system for facultygovernance and created a permanent--andpermanently controversial--committee to overseecampus discipline.

Pusey, concerned about the intense divisionswithin the faculty, had created a Committee onRestructuring in February, 1969 to investigatemethods for creating a new faculty governancesystem. Led by Pforzheimer University ProfessorMerle Fainsod, the group was composed largely ofmembers from the conservative caucus.

"I kind of lost my faith in the faculty,because they didn't make the decisions along theline and they let this thing fester until it gotto the point where you had to have real surgery,"Pusey said in a recent interview.

Before 1969, the faculty was overseen by theCommittee on Educational Policy (CEP), a groupwhose membership was appointed by the dean of theFaculty. When specific issues needed to be lookedat, the dean would appoint a special committee toinvestigate.

"[The dean] had to convince the faculty thattheir general views were represented, butnonetheless, he appointed the committees," Maasssaid. "But there developed a demand that thestructure become more democratic."

Faculty members say there was a growing feelingwithin their ranks that unless the faculty hadsome elective governance structure, only thoseprofessors whose views were parallel to then-DeanFord's would be represented. As well, many of theyounger faculty members believed that studentdemands for increased involvement in the runningof FAS should be met.

After all the debates of the previous spring,the Pusey-appointed Fainsod Committee finallypresented its report to the faculty in the earlyfall of 1969. Professors say that the FainsodReport was almost entirely amended after intensedebate to create the Faculty Council, the18-member elected faculty body which is still thecentral structure for faculty governance.

Some professors contend that the most importantchange resulting from the creation of the FacultyCouncil was the institutionalization of thestudent input to faculty decision-making. Underthe terms of the agreement, seats were reserved onvarious faculty committees for studentrepresentatives.

Students, however, continued to assert thatthey were not adequately represented, and mostradicals felt that even the most 'liberal'professors did not really have students' interestsat heart during the protracted debates aboutgovernance.

Still, faculty members contend that the changeswere important steps towards democratizing FAS'structure. Yet some professors say now that thechanges in the faculty could have occurred lesspainfully if professors had not been as concernedabout the militant political mood of the students.

By the early 1970s, the liberal andconservative caucuses had ceased to meetseparately, faculty meetings had returned to theFaculty Room in University Hall, and attendance atthe meetings dropped off to its normal, sparselevel.

But faculty members are still quick to add thatthe tensions which divided them in the spring of1969 did not die quickly. "It took some years forthe faculty to recover from the intensity of thedissents and disagreements that divided us thatyear," Maass says