Likely Result Today: No Official Linkage

With the issue on the docket for this afternoon's Faculty meeting, it appears that Harvard will not join M.I.T. as an institutional sponsor of the highly controversial, Defense Department-funded Cambridge Project.

Herbert C. Kclman, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, will introduce a resolution today asking the Faculty to recommend "that the University, as a corporate entity, refrain from participation in the Cambridge Project."

And Edwin B. Newman, professor of Psychology and chairman of the Harvard participants in the Cambridge Project, indicated last night that-after Kelman's resolution is made-he will withdraw the Harvard-M.I.T. Project advisory board's request that President Pusey appoint Harvard representatives to the official Project policy board. Kelman then would withdraw his proposal.

Newman met with Keiman and with Mark Ptashne, lecturer on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, yesterday and will meet with them this afternoon before the Faculty meeting. "We reached a detente today and worked out the outline for a scenario," Newman said last night.

Both Could Gain

As Newman sees it, both the anti and pro-Cambridge Project factions on the Faculty would gain some and give some if this afternoon's "scenario" goes as planned. The anti forces, led by Kelman and Ptashne, would prevent Harvard fromjoining the Cambridge Project institutionally, and the pro forces would be spared the embarrassment of the Faculty's going on record against the Cambridge Project, which it could do by passing the Kelman resolution.

The Faculty, however, will have another opportunity to speak out as a body against the Cambridge Project. Hilary W. Putnam, professor of Philosophy, has placed a motion on today's docket "that it is the sense of the Faculty that no member of the Harvard community should... have any connection to Project Cambridge."

According to Putnam, this resolution would have no binding effect on individual participation in the Cambridge Project, but "would be a clear statement of the Faculty's attitude toward research of this kind."

Autonomy Jeopardized

In a statement which he prepared for today's meeting, Kelman said that "the Cambridge Project would represent an institutional link to the Defense Department that might undermine University autonomy."

Kelman was a member of the minority of a Faculty subcommittee which recommended last November that Harvard join the Cambridge Project institutionally. The Committee on Research Policy approved that suggestion and recommended unanimously that the matter not be discussed by the Faculty.

But at a Faculty meeting on December 2, Ptashne and other liberal Faculty members refused to allow the matter to go over their heads. They won Pusey's promise not to appoint Harvard representatives to the Project policy board until the Faculty had debated the issue.

And it looks now as if the liberal group has won what it considers to be an important concession from supporters of the Cambridge Project: no official Harvard involvement.