At an SDS meeting, members heard about chances to work as fruit-pickers this summer under a program sponsored by the Cuban government and national SDS. The meeting also approved two resolutions, one demanding that Harvard expel ROTC, the other saying that the Corporation should not drive working-class Cambridge residents from their homes.
Students at the Design School were also interested in Harvard's building plans in the community. About 25 third-year students started work with the University Planning Office on designs for possible housing sites near Harvard.
March 3: The Corporation agreed to open merger talks with Radcliffe with a goal of achieving full merger by the Fall of 1970. The Corporation also outlined several problem areas to be ironed out--including financial and legal arrangements, co-ed housing plans, and the ratio of male and female undergraduates--before the merger could be consummated.
Statistics from the Registrar's Office showed that only one per cent of the 1646 students who took pass-fail courses in the Fall ended up with a "fail" grade.
March 4: The Faculty killed a proposal to add voting student members to the Fainsod Committee. Several students from the Harvard-Radcliffe Policy Committee came to the meeting and said that student membership was important, but the Faculty stayed with the Fainsod Committee's plan of letting students act as non-voting consultants. The Faculty also approved a section of the year-old Dunlop report dealing with Faculty salary ranges.
President Pusey named the seven members of the new Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies that would oversee the development of Harvard's Afro-American Studies program. Dean Ford agreed to serve as temporary chairman until the department found a leading black scholar as its permanent chairman. Henry Rosovsky, chairman of the special committee that first investigated Afro-American studies here, also was appointed to the committee.
March 5: A Faculty committee that had been studying the basic problems of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for more than a year released its report. The committee, chaired by Robert L. Wolff, recommended that the GSAS cut its enrollment by 20 per cent over the next six years to combat the school's "unwieldy and impersonal" size. The report also suggested pay raises for teaching fellows, a plan of long-term financial aid to grad students, and creation of a student center as part of an effort to improve sagging student morale at the GSAS.
The Corporation reversed part of a long-standing policy that had prevented conscientious objectors from performing their required alternate service here. After previously refusing to tell a local draft board that a CO was working at Harvard, the Corporation agreed to cooperate with draft boards on CO information in the future.
March 6: A group of non-students led by a former Columbia grad student named King Collins disrupted a Harvard class. Collins and his band interrupted Alex Inkeles' lecture in Soc Rel 153 and demanded that Inkeles have a "dialogue" with them on the "repressive nature of the lecture system."
A Divinity School student-Faculty committee with three black members prepared a special report for release, but the school's nine black students said they would reject the conclusions of the still-unpublished report. The committee had studied plans for recruiting more blacks and helping the School play a bigger role in black churches. The black students said that the committee was "unrepresentative" because the three blacks listed as members had not been consulted about the conclusions.
March 7: Harvard got a cheering letter from the National Science Foundation announcing that the NSF had boosted its 1969 grants to Harvard by $300,000. But the increase was just enough to offset previous cuts and barely brought the NSF grant total up to the 1968 level.
The chairman of the Soc Rel department, Roger Brown, said he would ask the department to drop Soc Rel 148 and 149 from next year's course offering. Brown said he was not mainly objecting to the courses' political orientation, but rather to the technical problems the courses caused by having undergraduates and non-students act as sectionmen. The director of Soc Rel 149, Jack Stauder, said the Brown's complaints and a rumored plan to transfer the courses to the Gen Ed department were "attempts at political suppression."
March 9: King Collins and several companions ran head-on into the Harvard Administration at Eliot House. Two of the girls and one of the boys from the group attracted a large crowd when they took off all their clothes and put them in washers in the Eliot House laundry room. Later, the entire group refused to leave a Harvard students' suite and left only after a showdown with House Master Alan Heimert, Dean Glimp, and Dean Watson. The administrators threatened to call in police if Collins tried to remain.
March 10: The Divinity School's group of black students formally lodged their protest against the school's committee report on educating black clergymen. The students said they were "distressed by the racist paternalistic assumptions" in the report--especially in the sections dealing with remedial education programs for black students without adequate preparation.
Four Harvard Faculties announced that they had pooled their resources to start a new doctoral program. The new program--called "Clinical Psychology and Public Practice"--would start in the fall of 1969 as a joint effort of the Education, Medical and Divinity School plus the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The purpose of the program, its organizers said, was to make clinical psychology "socially relevant."
March 11: King Collins and four of his followers were arrested when they disrupted a Soc Rel 153 class for the second time in a week. Cambridge police said they were holding Collins on a variety of charges, including assault and battery, possession of narcotics, and trespassing. The group was arrested after another argument with course instructor Alex Inkeles. When Collins ignored Inkeles' repeated requests to leave, police moved in and carried the group away.
The SFAC subcommittee that had been investigating the relation between scholarship and probation re-