MOST STUDENTS don't have to wrack their brains when they gripe about Harvard. They complain--often nonchalantly--about parietal rules, course requirements, restrictions on off-campus living, the inaccessability of many professors, the long march from Radcliffe and the Houses to the Yard, and a thousand other things.

Every so often a few activists get together, talk to some sympathetic Faculty members, and organize apathetic students to press for changes in Harvard's rules and procedures. Sometimes, as in the case of the parietals extension late last year, this works quite well. More impressive, because it concerned political matters. Collective student pressure--mobilized through a petition circulated in the spring of 1966--helped force the Faculty to make a surprising, if futile, attempt to take a position on the military draft last winter.

In almost every case, effective student insurgents at Harvard have rejected the tactic of mass civil disobedience. Yet the obstructive sit-in in Mallinckrodt two weeks ago, and the Faculty response to the students involved, seem to have provoked a more tortured, mind-bending reappraisal of university policies than Mem Church rallies, student government, and long-winded petitions ever have.

At first, most Faculty and students, including myself, chose merely to condemn the demonstration against Dow's presence at Harvard as a brutal infraction of free speech and movement within the University. This issue, of course, has been resolved by the Faculty vote to place almost one-fourth of the demonstrators on probation. But in the mean-time, it has become clear that much more was involved than the staunch defense of a few time-honored freedoms.

For some of the demonstrators sat-in not so much out of frustration at their inability to help end the war, but out of an honest conviction that the University should avoid connections with firms and government agencies linked to the U.S. war effort. These students--and a few Faculty members--are morally outraged by what some term "University complicity with genocide."

It is easy to take offense at this choice of words. No one likes to be told that his employer or his teachers are implicated in the mass murder of a people who pose little threat to this nation's security or economic interests. Nor is it much comfort to embrace the notion that the U.S. is engaged in the holier tasks of "nation-building" and preventing a bloodier conflict with Red China. Most people at Harvard, even those who affect a "tough-minded" outlook on American activities abroad, cannot help but be shaken by the tag of "murderer."

There are a few who take solace in the observation that hyperbole is fashionable in and out of radical political cirles these days. Convinced that the University has dealt properly and efficaciously with the demonstrators, they will slink back to their offices and libraries hoping they can get on with their work without any further intrusions.

But if the aftermath of the sit-in means anything, more than a few Faculty and students will spend at least a little time in the next few months thinking about the more serious issue raised in the crammed Mallinckrodt hallway. The Harvard community, in overwhelming opposition to President Johnson's policy in Vietnam, must evaluate in practical and philosophical terms the propriety of its financial and personal involvement with the government and its private contractors.

Most of us didn't worry about this much when President Kennedy was around. Actually, his reliance on the Faculty for official and informal advice was a source of pride--and complacency--in Cambridge. But his death, some of President Johnson's personal habits, and the Vietnam war made the community far more critical.

Now many students are wondering whether Harvard can be truly a "free market for ideas" while so many of the ideas in vogue on campus are the by-products of government and private grants for research and analysis. It is difficult to say whether this attitude is a bitter reaction to the war or symbolic of a far deeper malaise and concern over the position of a University in modern American society.

In either case, students and Faculty toying with the notion of ending Harvard's contacts with private bureaucracies and public governments know that they have their work cut out for them. They know that Harvard's ties to war machines and consumer industries are not limited to recruiting arrangements through the Departments and Office for Graduate and Career Plans.

The University has its own Research Contract Office which did $55 million worth of business with the government during the last fiscal year. Most of the money from Washington paid for individual professors' research into matters of concern to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But some of this money, paid for research into issues of interest to government agencies dealing with foreign problems--the State Department, Defense Department, Agency for International Development, and Atomic Energy Commission.

All the research contracted by professors through the Research Contract Office, is unclassified and publishable. But there can be little doubt that some professors' work--even if the public sees it--contributes at least marginally to the decision-making process in Washington. In that town, politicians and bureaucrats, not idealistic academics, pull the most weight, and they can do what they want with the research they have sponsored.

The existence of the Research Contract Office, however, doesn't mean that individual professors can't do classified work for the government. And as long as a professor fulfills his commitments to his students and colleagues, he is free to do what he wants with his remaining time--and this could include analyzing documents for the Central Intelligence Agency or helping to plan bombing raids into North Vietnam. Except for prohibiting teachers from abusing students, the University places few restrictions on the use of its facilities. In fact, most Faculty members who do classified work would defend their right to do so by invoking "academic freedom."

By the same token, most of them have defended professors who advocate politically unpopular causes. The McCarthy era aside, one only has to look back to 1965 to remember the outcry that arose when Republican politicians called for the resignation of a Rutgers University professor who complimented the Vietcong in from of his students.