These views on student-Administration relations are not held by two distinct factions battling for domination. Instead, they are held equally by nearly everyone concerned about the draft. The battle is within each student.

Dow Demonstration

The Dow demonstration can best be interpreted in terms of this inner conflict. Students were confronting the University, asking it to help them or to reject them: "We want you to help us, to protect us, to throw Dow out. But if you do not, we are willing to accept your rejection, your punishment," they were saying. But the University was again able to worm its way out of the problem with a traditional ploy: it neither accepted nor rejected.

The frustration is still there. Which side are you on is the question the activist asks of the University. You have to be on one or the other. Next time (and there will certainly be a next time) Harvard has closed its options off. It must either kick the students out, or by not doing so, assume the protective, moralistic position.

Faculty Decides

The ultimate decision, ironically, will be left to the Faculty--traditionally the group with the least power in Harvard's structure. What is most important for the Faculty and the Administration to realize is exactly what is going on here--how the students view the war and the draft, and what they think their relationship with the University should be. For many, understanding this is not such an easy matter. Leading academicians--President Pusey and George Kennan--showed an inexcusable ignorance in recent comments about campus radicals.

Pusey's whimsical description of anti-war activists is dangerously far off the mark:

Safe within the sanctuary of an ordered society, dreaming of glory--Walter Mittys of the left (or are they left?)--they play at being revolutionaries and fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down.

If Pusey means by calling an activist a Walter Mitty that the activist is only dreaming that he can change American society so that it will no longer be able to prosecute wars such as the one in Vietnam, then surely there is something rotten about society and about the President's concept of an individual's role in it.

Pusey went on to exclude from his epithets those "sincerely concerned about the war" and participate in "orderly demonstrations." He also disastrously underestimates the depth of support for the Dow demonstration. Six hundred bursar's cards were turned in, and 300 students participated. Is this the tiny minority Pusey characterizes it as being? Pusey does, however, recognize the extent to which the University is involved in the outside world: He notes students' "concern for the outside world and...desire to use knowledge for social as well as individual good." He would do well to recognize also the Selective Service System's new "concern" for students as soldiers.

Kennan may have set your mother clucking over her New York Times Magazine with his article of January 21, "Rebels Without a Program." He quotes Woodrow Wilson extensively on the virtues of the ivory tower in education. Then he writes:

There is a dreadful incongruity between this vision and the state of mind--and behavior--of the radical left on the American campus today. In place of a calm science, "recluse, ascetic, like a nun," not knowing or caring that the world passes "if the truth but come in answer to her prayer," we have people utterly absorbed in the affairs of this passing world.

Kennan is hopelessly disillusioned if he believes that the University today can function as it did in the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and his nuns. Universities have ties with business and government that are necessary for survival, as we have said. Students are "absorbed in the affairs of this passing world" because the world is making demands on them, with the draft, that are hard to reconcile with their consciences.

Along with this, students have, as Pusey notes, become more socially conscious. They use their knowledge and position to help people before they get out of the monastery. If Kennan thinks students should not involve themselves in the world, he is the real Walter Mitty. The fact is that they are forced to involve themselves.

IV.