The Friendly Committee Interim Report on April

(Following is the text of the Overseers' Committee interim report on the causes of the April student strike. The report was written under the direction of the Friendly Committee, chaired by Judge Henry J. Friendly, and passed by the Overseers Friday, Sept. 12.

The introduction to the report, omitted because of the shortage of space, calls for creation of a University-wide committee to study restructuring and recommend changes in University governance.)

I

BY SUMMER of 1968, student unrest and violence had repeated itself all over the nation and, indeed, the world. It seemed to reflect an almost universal generational conflict of unusual intensity, as well as a wide variety of particular dissatisfactions in different countries. In our own country, the combination of the draft and the war in Vietnam was the most important of these specific factors. A large segment of the nation disapproved of the war.

Students felt this much more strongly than the nation at large; the majority of Harvard students believed the war to be unjustified and many considered it to be positively immoral. The existence of the draft made the issue concrete and personal to them. Further, concern with racial discrimination and newly intensified awareness of other kinds of social injustice added to the feeling of many students that society as now constituted required basic change.

We emphasize that these problems are in no way unique to Harvard Rather it is a tribute to her that the students expect so much of the University, probably more than it can ever give. This is true with respect to how and what it can teach them, what it can offer in the way of an ideal community, and what it can do about the evils and deficiencies of the world at large. Inevitable disappointment in one or another of these expectations leads many students both to associate the University with the evils of the world and to want to make it come nearer to their hopes.

Students-and at this point we are speaking mainly of undergraduates-attack the educational process on two chief heads, the quality of teaching and the "relevance" of what is taught. The students' faith in the University as a teaching institution has been undermined by absences of senior professors, the impersonality of some of the instructional process, and the narrow, abstract, and technical mode in which the intellectual concerns of the faculty are sometimes expressed.

This last in turn leads to the major complaint about the content of instruction, its lack of "relevance." It takes a faith which many students cannot muster to agree with the view that . . .

. . . In a larger sense . . . the work of all members of a university is relevant, if by relevant we mean not useful or topical but developing new information and raising fundamental questions of purpose and value in such a way as to illumine contemporary problems.

They are far from sure that all the study in the world will illumine institutional racism, the Vietnam War, or the arms race sufficiently to show us how to stop them, and they are not at all certain that the time scale on which things are happening will allow the luxury of waiting to find out.

They feel a great pressure to do everything presently in their power to force reason and humanity on a world which they think in many ways to be inhumane and senseless, and they in turn ask "the university" to do likewise. As was well said by the Wilson Committee:

However small the direct effect of Harvard's actions . . . the university, because of its visibility, its symbolic importance, and the standards of conduct to which it is held by its own students and faculty, has special obligation to behave in exemplary ways. . . . We are, and we are judged to be, an institution devoted to humanistic values and thus accountable to higher standards of conduct than those which prevail among most business firms.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has also been undergoing changes that have affected both itself and its students. Some of these are vividly characterized in the Report of the Committee on the Recruitment and Retention of the Faculty. This reminds us that:

Down until the recent past the tenure members of the faculty did not consider themselves employees of the University doing a job for a salary. They were members of a community which assisted them in doing the work they wished to do. (p. 23)

(Now a faculty member's) loyalties are no longer narrowly focused on the Yard; and often he can very well conceive that his work could go forward from some other base than Harvard. . . . The availability of funds from government and the foundations encouraged the trend toward setting monetary equivalent for all the fractions of the faculty member's time-for research as well as for teaching and for administration. The subtle change in the view of the stipend-from a means of enabling the professor to do what he in any case wished to do, to a salary for doing a job-was scarcely noticed. But its ultimate result was to bring him unwittingly into the market place as a seller of his services. That role has begun to influence the meaning of membership in the University community. (p. 27)

Many professors have voiced concern to us over what they consider a lessened sense of teaching responsibility by their colleagues, especially in relation to undergraduates. Further, the quadrupling of the tenured faculty since the turn of the century has necessarily reduced the frequency and intimacy of contacts among faculty members, as has the increased specialization consequent on the explosive growth of knowledge. These considerations apply with even greater force to the junior faculty and teaching fellows, who have grown even more in numbers, and so many of whom are, and think of themselves as, merely transients with no strong lies to the community.