While perhaps not politically conservative, the conservative caucus does tend to be the more staid, traditional professors. The group includes most of the Faculty bachelors, for instance, and the caucus reflects their characteristics-self-sufficient, nervous, more secretive than the liberals, less willing to take risks.

The liberals, on the other hand, include the younger married professors, whose personal lives tend to be more risque and open. Where the conservatives are prone to vote as a bloc on major issues, the liberals are much more loosely organized and highly independent. The nominal liberal caucus leader. Michael Walzer, professor of Government has often split with his liberal colleagues to vote against caucus-backed proposals.

Another difference in temperament can be seen in the relationship of liberal and conservative members to the University. Stated by a conservative, the difference is that "when we operate in the University we have as our dominant loyalty the University. The others have a different dominant loyalty they are trying to impose on the Faculty.

A liberal described the difference this way: liberal professors are more active outside the University. Their psychological lives are not dependent on the success of that University (as are the conservatives) and their position as Harvard Faculty members is only part of their lives.

WITH the schism between Faculty members widening, the growth of the caucuses during the Spring crisis seems not only logical but necessary. By taking over University Hall last Spring, SDS had forced the Faculty hand on ROTC. By calling in the police, Pusey forced the issue of Faculty power. White conservatives pooh-poohed the existence of an administration separate from the Faculty, President Pusey and his Council of Deans had shown it not only existed but could act powerfully and autonomously.

The students and the administration had been the major protagonists in the Strike, but both were looking to the Faculty for its resolution. "At the time, there was nothing else." Hughes said of the caucuses. "The Faculty was not, used to having big issues thrown at it and there was a lot of confusion within it. The caucuses where the only bodies in which professors could coalesce."

The Strike was a moment of both crisis and opportunity. (The two crisscross irrevocably in recent Faculty history.) The restlessness of student moderates and liberals, the Old Mole's publication of the inflammatory "Dear Nate" secret memos taken from Dean Ford's files, and the rifling of University Hall files instilled helplessness, anger, and fear in the Faculty.

Two days after the Wednesday building takeover, caucus politics came up with its first victory. While hundreds of Faculty members apprehensively waited for someone to act the leaders of the conservative and liberal caucuses met and coolly negotiated a resolution responding to the events of the last two days.

Several resolutions were before the Faculty. A conservative response, written by George B. Kistiakowsky. Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry, severely criticized the student takeover, calling it "the overriding moral issue." The liberal resolution, written by Wassily W. Leontief, Henry Lee Professor of Economics, emphasized the illegitimacy of the President's decision, and urged the Faculty to set up an independent Faculty committee-the Committee of 15-to report on the causes of the takeover and punish demonstrators. The two resolutions were combined, with the "overriding moral issue" clause dropped.

Faculty meetings came at a rate of one every two days during the strike. And through each, the polarization and strength of the caucuses in the Faculty grew. By the end of the first week, leaders of the caucuses were not only negotiating, but lobbying by phone for votes and lining up respected "independents"-distributed over the departments to touch all bases-to second their resolutions.

In such a fashion, the Faculty worked its way through two "no confidence" votes in President Pusey, two ROTC resolutions, several Harvard housing proposals, two scholarship proposals, and several points on the implementation of the Committee of 15-all in the span of two weeks. Of the major strike votes, only the Afro-American Studies resolutions did not come from caucus negotiations.

The caucuses emerged from the April crisis as the stabilizing force in the Faculty-charting its course through unknown waters. At the same time, however, the caucuses had smashed the last vestiges of cordiality and informality in Faculty meetings. "During the strike, meetings were nasty, threatening affairs," one professor said. "Professors did things you never would have expected before."

Noted Faculty professors like Henry Rosovky, who basked in the national attention that his work toward a Black Studies program brought, resigned from the Black Studies committee after black students ripped apart his proposals. Old friends whose offices in the Public Administration building were on the same floor walked stone-faced past one another on their way to their separate caucus meetings.

WHEN classes began again this Fall, both caucuses expected to continue holding weekly meetings. In the absence of a crisis atmosphere, however, the enthusiasm for Faculty politics waned.

Unlike the U.S. Senate-which had given the caucuses a two-party model-the caucuses had no "party discipline." Caucus leaders could not level political clouts on members to bring them into line. Patronage at Harvard is minimal. Presidential pressure would be an indignity. And what Harvard has of a seniority system is organized through academic departments.