The roots of the dilemma at Harvard go back to the week following the King assassination. A Harvard service at Memorial Chapel attracted 1200 mourners, less than a dozen of them black. Other black students, numbering nearly 100, gathered on the steps of the chapel to hold a rival memorial service. During the course of that informal ceremoney, Jeff Howard, '69, reduced the issue to its basic:

"We want black people to have a place here at Harvard."

That same day the black student organization Afro ran a half-page advertisement in this newspaper putting the complaint into sharper focus:

"It is said that Harvard is a microcosm of American society....Has Harvard fulfilled its obligations to its black students? This year at Harvard there are only TWO courses on Africa. Next year there will be NONE. Yes, Harvard is indeed a microcosm of American society--there is no place for the black man at Harvard."

The relationship between black students and Harvard administrators at this point was more a confrontation of wills than a meeting of minds. Initial Afro demands--a quota system built into the admissions policy, an endowed chair for a black professor, a rapid increase in the number of lower-level black faculty members, a Concentration in Afro-American experience--were immediately rejected.

"That was a very interesting ten days," Dean Franklin Ford said recently. "Black students demanded some major symbolic act of atonement--so many black students admitted, so many black professors by such-and-such-a-date. Well, no one reacts to that kind of demand, that kind of tone, around here. Within a week the language had changed. Then they wanted two things--to set up a committee to explore a program of African-American studies and to set up this specific course."

What Long-Range Role?

The softened demands were both approved. A committee under Henry Rosovsky, professor of Economics, was named to study the long-range role of black studies in the Harvard curriculum. And on May 16 of this year Dean Ford announced plans for Soc Sci 5. That same day Richard E. Neustadt, chairman of the General Education Subcommittee in the Social Sciences, cautioned that experts in this new academic area were not readily available: "We felt the important thing was to get serious faculty working in a serious way rather than wait for the right expert to come along."

"We did see the dangers involved even then," Dean Ford says. "Since it was an experimental course, it would be quite uneven. And since it was emotional course, a lot of people would have their own ideas on how it should be run."

The springtime drama at Harvard was simultaneously replayed at dozens of other universities. Even as Harvard announced its plans for Soc Sci 5, 100 representatives of 35 colleges and universities were meeting at Yale to listen to many leading black intellectuals arguing in favor of including black-experience courses in the curriculum.

Some attending that meeting urged caution. Gerald McWhorter, professor at Fisk, warned that few universities were adequately prepared to establish such courses or departments. McWhorter went on to propose a preliminary foundation-financed study of the problem.

One of the spokesmen at that conference personifies the problems that Harvard has begun to encounter. Nathan Hare, special coordinater of black studies at San Francisco State College, recently authored a memo that sets strict standards for a teaching staff ("Any white professors involved in the program would have to be Black in spirit in order to last. The same is true for 'Negro' professors"), specifically excludes the possibility of whites teaching black history ("The white man is unqualified to teach black history because he does not understand it") and finally wonders whether white students should be permitted to take black classes ("It may be necessary eventually to distinguish Black education for Blacks and Black education for whites.")

"I don't see how you can take this position," argues Dean Ford. "It leads to segregation. This is to isolate cultures in a way no national culture could stand. There are two main reasons we don't agree. One, we don't set up a course to teach any particular kind of student. Two, this would make a shambles of any curriculum, this hang-up between national and intellectual criteria. It is our feeling that a narrative can be honestly taught by honest men."

Center of the Storm

The man selected to launch Soc Sci 5 at Harvard--and the man bearing the brunt of the criticism--is Professor Frank Freidel, 52, senior member of the History Department and noted Franklin D. Roosevelt biographer. Freidel, approached both by members of Afro and by the faculty committee last spring, abandoned his plans to teach a course this year on the New Deal and accepted the draft. After soliciting recommendations from black students and other faculty members, Freidel spent a summer on Cape Cod gathering together his lecture material and drawing up a reading list.