Columbia's students had reached the point where they recognized that polite and relevant protests got nowhere with the authorities; faculty and students alike had bristled over the Morningside gymnasium issue for years. When they were not listened to on a reasonable issue, the students resorted to force.

At Harvard, there is no concentration of power in the hands of the President and Governing Boards. The Corporation, which holds ultimate au- thority, primarily approves faculty budgets; matters of educational policy and budgetary priorities rest with each faculty and dean through a system of committees and departments.

It is hard to tell exactly where power lies within the Administration and Faculty departments because of their interchanging roles as proposer and approver. Administrators' dependency upon the goodwill of the Faculty, and the Faculty's ultimate sanction through threat of resignation, tend to make the system operate without consistently devisive controversy. (The Corporation, which delegates away its policy-making role, also operates on a consensus basis--some Fellows cannot recall a single vote within the body.) This system is sensitive and vulnerable to pressure; as the Dow solution indicated, majorities do not necessarily matter so much when a minority is strongly aroused.

In this system of delegation and checks, student opinion can have considerable weight on any given issue. The sources of substantive power--the Administration and Faculty members--are accessible to students with only a few exceptions. Black students this spring have obtained a new field of concentration in Afro-American studies; the Harvard Policy Committee has successfully promoted a fourth-course pass-fail plan, an extension of the independent study program, a reduction in the language department, and an elimination of the junior general examinations in History; an ad hoc committee issued a report recommending weekday parietal extensions from 2 p.m. to midnight and had the plan approved.

There are of course other areas in which students have not been so successful, notably in inter-departmental and more socially relevant programs. But current student frustrations do not stem primarily from these shortcomings. One result of the delegation system is that it foils efforts to obtain power, run the College, or at least be an integral part in the decision-making. A student subcommittee, for example, will never be independent of the full committee's judgement regardless of the merits of a decision, just as a full committee containing students will not be independent of the Faculty's vote (which would usually be rubber stamp if students did not participate).

In addition, the Faculty and Administration both generally agree that students should remain in advisory capacities anyway. If a student has relevant opinions on a specific proposal, a committee may invite him to testify, but never to remain later and join in a binding vote. The HPC this year succeeded in all its substantive educational proposals before the Faculty Committee on Educational Polity, but it failed in its attempt to gain regular membership on the CEP.

FOR students who advocate "democratic" control of the University, not even this unattainable committee representation is sufficient. For they do not want a part in the decision-making process unless it would help produce a transformation of the University into a new and independent force against the trends of today's society. This collective program--of turning the University into an entity for coordinated social good--falls flat because Harvard is not a political or even a functional entity.

Its decentralization assures that decisions on most matters except physical growth (which is handled largely by a University-wide committee) are not applicable to all parts of the University. (One University-wide policy is Harvard's ban on classified research.)

As one professor aptly stated during the Dow discussions, "The University is a hyperheaded thing if not a monster." No one can speak or act for it in a political fashion, and this reality is frustrating to direct-action reformists.

Advocates of community responsibility in the University often contardictorily espouse support for a student's democratic utopia also, in which the individual may decide his own social regulations. For Harvard to permit as many students who wish to live off campus to do so, for example, would be detrimental to Cambridge families who are least able to afford the rent-competition.

The heavily black areas to the south in east of Dunster House would be hardest hit by the student influx into the market. The President's Assistant for Civic and Governmental Affairs constantly receives concerned letters from Cambridge residents and politicians over student off-camplus living. The student accepts a community responsibility when he enters Harvard, just as Harvard can be said to accept a responsibility to the Cambridge community for housing the 1200 minors it invites here every fall.

The needs of student power in this case, as in many others, are peculiar to students rather than something shared with all people.

Harvard's size and complex nature makes it impractical to have a participatory democracy in University affairs for students and, to some degree, for Faculty. That is not to say that student pressure should not be exerted. Nor does it mean that protest over substantive differences is not a valid part in the University's decision-making process.

It does mean, however, that the smallness of Harvard's full-time professional administration and the ease of student-Faculty-Administration dialogue are a major reason why Harvard holds together in times of crisis and functions flexibly otherwise. Without its decentralized framework, Harvard would need a larger non-academic administration which would result in greater isolation of students.

The Dow protest, which demonstrated the value of a loose administrative structure, also illustrated the difficulty of predicting what issues will be provocative enough to generate students' use of force. The protest against University "war complicity" was definitely secondary to opposition against the destructive war itself.