KEN GLAZIER lives in a cramped single room on the fifth floor of Kirkland House. When I first went puffing up the narrow stairway to see him, I found a plastic dime-store sign on his door that read in mock-heroic, mock-executive terms "Kenneth M. Glazier." Above the sign, a little jingle about Great men from a Chinese fortune cookie was pasted. When I entered the room to arrange an interview, he tried to pawn off his old furniture on me. And when the first interview had been set up, he cancelled it in order to take a bartending job that afternoon and leave this university out of hock. Ken Glazier, former chairman of the Student-Faculty Advisory Committee, had never learned the fine points on the Harvard student-politico game.
Now Steve Kaplan, last year's president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, lives in a spacious quad on the second floor of the Leverett Towers. The elevator stops at his front door. While he too tried to unload furniture, the idea slid nicely into the course of conversation. Steve Kaplan has been a Harvard politician for four years.
As the two major student government leaders, both developed their own style for meeting Harvard's political crises this year. Both Kaplan and Glazier approached the changing political scene with a sense of practicality (i.e. business sense--witness the furniture) and few of the notions that in the past have doomed student government at Harvard to endless debates over whether girls should stay in the rooms legally or illegally after midnight.
In details, their styles flare away to separate poles, Glazier calls Kaplan, "Kaplan." Kaplan calls Glazier "Ken." Together they forged a coordinated student government attack on University problems for the first time in a decade.
This year was a political year, a year of confrontation, and the traditional Harvard politician fighting for parietals and girls in the dining room faded in the encounter.
Following the Dow incident last year, which seems farther and farther away as history telescopes before the strike, the Student-Faculty as both an advisory board and a political forum. Stanley Hoffmann originated the idea of SFAC as a place for the "rational and reasonable" discussion of the issues that he pleaded for this year after the bust.
On Hoffmann's recommendation, Glazier ran for SFAC from Kirkland House. This was the first time he had sought any student government position at Harvard. "I don't believe in student government in the traditional terms, and I would never run for HUC or HPC," Glazier said last week crumped down on the floor of his barren room. "SFAC seemed to be something different. That's why I ran."
Though the SFAC mandate was open through the Spring and into the beginning of this Fall, Glazier admits that he never considered it as anything more than Hoffmann's rational and reasonable forum. "People like to look at SFAC as a cure-all but it wasn't. The problems of this University are too deep. What the committee can do and did do is establish an extensive forum where issues can come out ad nauseum."
"The problem that SFAC encountered," he continued, "was transmitting the discussions that went on there to the University as a whole. The people in SFAC knew this and I don't know the answer for it."
SFAC did not need a clean-cut spokesman as much as it demanded a chairman who was acceptable to all sides. In the long debates, where Oscar Handlin lined up against Alex Keyssar, the Committee generated its own publicity. Glazier was a moderator more than a leader.
THE Undergraduate Council began last year without the emotional surge of the Dow incident. Everyone expected another year of parietal bickering, but Kaplan and the new HUC--which included active radicals for the first time--turned from the eternal struggle in the middle of the Spring. In May, the Committee on Houses passed its parietal extensions anyway.
After parietals, the HUC faced the choice of escalating its fight with the COH to bringing girls into the dining halls every night or revamping the HUC image, making student government relevant to the shifting student concern for political issues.
"We didn't know what we could do realistically," Kaplan said. "Students didn't perceive of the HUC as being a student government. The parietals obsession had made us mono-focused. The elections were indirect through the House Committees. And people at Harvard inherently don't like to feel that others represent them--they feel that they are capable of representing themselves. Besides, there was no reason for anyone to do anything with us."
Even greater than the problem of establishing legitimacy with the students was finding a place in the Harvard power structure. Unlike the new SFAC, which is a Faculty subcommittee, the HUC has never had the power to place its resolutions on the agenda in Faculty meetings.
Approval of any HUC resolutions and even consideration by the Faculty or administration depended first on getting an appointment with Dean Watson, Glimp, or Ford and second on convincing them that the HUC proposal was in line with what they wanted done. In short, the HUC, with a few exceptions, had been resigned to the task of working out the details of administration plans.
