SFAC also reversed the order of Faculty deliberations. After debating issues, the Council was given the unprecedented right to bring student resolutions to the floor of the Faculty via Faculty SFAC members. This, more than anything else, upset the tradition-minded professors. There was no opportunity to take these resolutions and push them off into a 10-month study committee. To do so was tantamount to hypocrisy, not only in the eyes of students (who had after all come to expect this kind of paternalistic response) but also in the eyes of SFAC Faculty members who could not be so easily dismissed.

The trouble was not that there were students involved, Arthur Maass, Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government and later head of the Faculty's conservative caucus, explained. Professors were upset because SFAC was not properly integrated into the structure.

SFAC and the growing politicization of students in the fall, of '68 contributed to a feeling among many professors that the University was "falling apart." The focus of college political life turned completely on SFAC. Bouyed by its own newness and sense of self-importance, the Council was now swinging through issues like a full-fledged Congressional investigating committee. The SFAC held hearings, both open and closed, invited University personnel to "testify," then grilled them with questions.

At the time, SFAC had a little glamor for everyone: for student politicos, a straight student power victory; for radicals, a way to bring political issues to prominence; for liberal professors, a way of budging fellow colleagues; for conservatives, a Holy Terror worthy of a Holy crusade to stop it.

HENCE the beginning of the one thing that completely shattered the quiescent Faculty structure-the formation of the liberal and conservative caucuses.

A small group of senior Faculty members, led by the late Robert J. McCloskey, professor of Government, and including Wolff and Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History, began meeting informally in September. In January, after students sat in at the Paine Hall Faculty meeting, the professors agreed the Faculty was in a crisis situation and the caucus began meeting formally.

Composed of 45 to 50 senior Faculty members primarily from the Social Sciences, the caucus drafted its first piece of Faculty legislation-the resolution forming the Fainsod Committee on Restructuring.

Members of the caucus were united by several mutual concerns: Faculty meetings had gotten immensely larger, growing from an average of 200 persons per meeting to 400, and the influx was mainly of junior members. Order and structure were breaking down, the professors felt. People were demanding a Faculty steering committee and even students on Faculty committees. In addition, and perhaps most alarming to them, some professors, particularly Hilary Putnam, professor of Philosophy and the Faculty's lone wolf member of SDS, were making unheard-of-demands on political issues, like the War and racism at Harvard.

Many of these senior Faculty members were stunned by the rapidly changing events and repulsed at what they considered the erosion of that "academic freedom" which had brought many of them to Harvard during the fifties.

OUTLINING his personal reasons for concern, Maass is a good example of the kind of professors who attended those first conservative meetings. He is both a Democrat and in national politics a liberal, he proudly points out, a former New Dealer whose office contains only two mementoes on the wall-a picture of John F. Kennedy at his inauguration and the notorious Chicago Tribune front page which heralded "Dewey Defeats Truman" in Novem-1948.

A shirt-sleeves government office type, Maass scorns the "old school ties" that many associate with the conservative caucus. He did not graduate from the College and his reasons for coming here illustrate those things at Harvard which conservatives believed were being threatened:

1) The climate of academic freedom has been Harvard's foremost feature, Maass said. When he started teaching here in 1949, Harvard was the freest University in the country for doing scholarly work and teaching.

2) Although his research rarely required large sums of money, Maass believes Harvard provides a rare opportunity for professors who need money. Among the Faculty, there was a genuine confidence that if funds were needed, the Deans could find them.

3) "What's true at Harvard is that the Faculty has all power to itself in matters relating to scholarship and instruction, the President practically none," Maass said. Hence there is no administration to interfere with a professor's work. One of the most disconcerting charges of the strike last year, he added, was the claim that the administration was not doing what the Faculty wanted. "There is no administration, as you might think of it at a state school," he said. "Pusey has no provost or chancellor. There's Bentinck-Smith and a few others to help the President get things done, but little more than that."

4) Standards for Faculty members have been high across the board. There has been little fear of interference from one department in another's affairs.