Passionate Harvard?

For Harvard, the implications are enormous. Berkeley-style demands for student power will soon overwhelm the University. The next step for Harvard students will be sitting in to protest CIA recruiting on campus. Passionate radicalism is on its way, and as soon as a brutal confrontation happens here as it happened at Berkeley and Wisconsin and Brooklyn, then Harvard will be into it for good.

STUDENT power now is confined to demands for granting more parietal hours, revising some course reading lists, and ending class ranking. The war, no doubt, will become more and more a focus. And one act could be the catalyst for hot opposition to Harvard traditionalism and paternalism.

The potential is definitely there. Admissions policies have changed. Fewer and fewer students are coming from upper middle class families. The stability element is vanishing. As intellectualism plays more of a role in the opposition to the war and demands for Negro equality, Harvard students will find a stronger identity with the opposition.

Bnt even more important is the position of the cool-liberal Harvard student. He is being left in the dust. If he wants to be relevant, he has to join the movement. The frustration will grow and grow. To be against the people who sat in at the Pentagon is to be against morality and equality and justice--things the cool-liberal has always supported. But worse, to be against the people who sat in at the Pentagon is to be for Lyndon Johnson, at best, and maybe Ronald Reagan at worst.

Robert Strange McNamara is somewhat the epitome of the University cool-liberal. He went to Berkeley and then to Harvard. He taught at Ann Arbor. He recites Yeats. He led a movement to abolish ROTC as a student. He is well-to-do. He has a computer-brain. He is cool and aloof. Robert Strange McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, was looking out of the window of his Pentagon office, watching the confrontation below last Saturday. Maybe he was wondering what his liberal brain was thinking.

There are hundreds of potential McNamaras at Harvard, really wondering what is going on in their liberal brains. They are agonizing over the war and the riots and the role of students, mainly because now they are forced to decide. Standing still is on the wrong side, they are learning. But when it is over, when they do decide, or have the decision made for them, as it was at the Pentagon, they will feel very clean and very good. That is how Israel and his friends were describing it.

You cluk your tongue or nod your head. Eisenhower was dull and stupid; Kennedy had style,you known; the Cuban invasion was bad; the Dominican Republic bit was ridiculous; join the Peace Corps; the Poverty Program should at least be given a chance. Many of us don't sign petitions because, well, what of our political careers and all.

The coolliberal Harvard student is being left in the dust. If he wants to be relevant, he has to join the movement. The frustration will grow and grow. To be against the people who sat in at the pentagon is to be against morality and equality and justice-things the coolliberal has always.