OBU's gains were not without costs, however; 45 OBU members received punishments ranging from one year suspensions to warnings. Phillip N. Lee, a third-year Law student and head of OBU, was placed on probationary status until his graduation.

Harvard handled the conflict with OBU largely as a labor matter. President Pusey appointed Cox, an expert in labor management negotiations, to handle the talks with OBU. The agreement which was reached was a compromise, but it marks a considerable stride forward in Harvard's hiring practices. Yet the punishments meted out to the black students leaves a wide area of mistrust and bad feeling between blacks and the administration. This area of mistrust could result in new takeovers next year, for blacks feel they cannot trust a University which accedes to a large extent io their demands and then punishes them for militant, yet non-violent tactics which won these demands.

Discipline in the University

Shorty after the disciplining of 138 University Hall occupiers last June, the Faculty voted approval of the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities and delegated virtually all disciplinary authority to it. The CRR was modeled closely after the Committee of Fifteen, a student-Faculty committee which meted out the first punishments. But the CRR-unlike the earlier disciplinary committee-was enabled to act with summary power, and thus lost much of theacceptance it might have gained if it had been more responsive to, and representative of, all members of the University.

During the Fall semester, the CRR acted on 65 cases of alleged student misconduct, and its punishments were harsh. The committee ordered 16 students to leave the University, two of whom could not return without a majority vote of the Faculty approving their readmission. Most of the rest were given stiff warnings and told that they too would be made to leave if they participated in another disruption.

As the year progressed, it became increasingly evident that the CRR was punishing only those students who appeared at political demonstrations-despite the committee's mandate to deal with all forms of discipline-and that it was willing to ignore those instances of administrative negligence which were characterized by official unresponsiveness to petitions, peaceful picketing, and other forms of "acceptable" protest.

And the CRR was becoming extremely unpopular among students and Faculty for precisely this reason. One undergraduate House and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences each refused to elect representatives to the committee. The Astronomy Department, voting in an official department meeting, censured the committee for its pro-administration bias. "Irresponsible acts on the part of [the] administration have, in our opinion, contributed substantially to the growing disaffection of students and its more active manifestations," their resolution stated.

But when the proposal for a permanent CRR came before the Faculty, it was not adopted until all passages in the resolution defining administrative responsibility were deleted. And this Spring, as the CRR punished almost 100 more students, requiring 11 of them to leave, it ruled that student demonstrators did not have to be warned that their actions were illegal in order to be prosecuted for them. In a situation where peaceful demonstrations could easily erupt into violence, the effect of this latest ruling was to scare students out of political activity and stifle legitimate dissent.

The CRR, by Faculty vote, is now a permanent institution at Harvard, but it will almost certainly have to reform its procedures and past practices in order to gain the approval of any sizeable segment of the Harvard community.

Harvard and the War

Last year saw three major political demonstrations of dissent from the President's war policy. The reaction of Harvard's administration and Faculty to those demonstrations changed radically. That they changed at all was a prime reason that the University did not meet the fate of Kent State or Ohio State. Whether they will continue to change will determine the course of Harvard's future.

The first demonstration, the October 15 Moratorium, was the occasion for a dramatic reversal of long standing Faculty policy against taking political stands. At a confused and bizarre meeting the Faculty first voted down a motion supporting the Moratorium-apparently because the Moratorium was too political an issue-and then it turned around and approved by a vote of 255-81 a motion calling for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam-a highly political decision.

The two votes marked a turning point in Harvard history. Ending the era of the myth of the ivory tower university, the Faculty at last realized that Harvard is not separate from the rest of the country, but that national issues were a proper, and indeed necessary, area of concern for the Harvard Faculty.

On October 15, however, President Pusey was not ready to take that step. He issued a statement which said "Though the war and the tactics for settling it are quite properly subjects of individual concern or group concern and action, they are not, in my view, matters on which the University as a corporate body should take a policy position.

"That the University should not express views on political issues-a point which has been much argued over the years-is the principle of chief concern to me. I feel strongly that the long range health of this and other universities depends on observing it."

Pusey refused to acknowledge the demonstration's objective of a moratorium on business as usual and denied a request to close the University for the day. He refused to add his name to a statement signed by 79 other University President, including Mrs. Bunting, which expressed opposition to the war. As Nixon spent the day ignoring the protest, so did Pusey. Each President spent the day working in his office on matters not connected with the war.

Thousands of Harvard students were among the 500,000 people who marched in Washington on November 15. It was the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's history, yet again the President of Harvard remained silent.