5) Standards for the admission of students were also very high and the caliber of undergraduate education went unquestioned. "People on independent study really did scholarly work. They didn't go down and organize rent strikes, then try to get credit for it," he said wryly.

6) Finally, and most important, Maass notes that demands on Faculty independence have until recently been minimal. "When we signed up to be members of the Faculty we agreed to abide by the common rules set up to administer the college-practical things like dates for reporting grades and finals. We did not agree to abide by majority rule on political issues-racism, militarism, or the Vietnam War. It came completely out of the blue when we were asked to debate these things on the floor of the Faculty," he said.

THE LIBERAL caucus did not officially form until several months later, the day after police cleared students from University Hall last Spring. Composed of a more even mix of junior and senior Faculty members, and professors from the humanities and natural sciences, the liberals gathered not to defend the institution, but to give direction to the inevitable changes they believed must come.

The caucus formed, Martin H. Peretz, assistant professor of Social Studies said, because "a large number of Faculty members shared with the students the belief that the world is impinging on the University in manyways as never before and therefore it is somewhat impossible to go on with business as usual."

A loose coalition of anti-war professors, the liberals suffered from divided intentions-they were both liberals on a nationwide scale and liberals within the University, but there had never been a definition of the latter label.

Included in the group were most of the junior Faculty members who wanted to increase their voice in the Faculty, and senior Faculty who had been consistently left out of Faculty decision-making.

One of the long-range objectives of the caucus was to bring representative democracy to the autocratic Faculty structure. But in the short-range, the objectives were specifically to enforce the "no contracts" ROTC decision of the Faculty and bring a semblance of impartiality to the punishment of students arrested for taking over University Hall.

"I think that both the liberal and conservative caucuses like to think of the Faculty as a senate," one liberal caucus leader quipped. "The difference between us is that they think it's the Roman senate."

Even before the caucuses began to control the Faculty in the Spring of 1969, the lines between them had been drawn on small issues. The day after students sat in at Paine Hall, the Dean of the Faculty asked for a vote of confidence. The Faculty, restless and disturbed that this kind of disturbance was possible, tabled the motion. "That was the beginning of a revolution," one professor said. Very soon afterward, the conservative caucus met officially.

In January, when the time came to punish the Paine Hall demonstrators, the Faculty was faced with another unprecedented situation: the Ad Board reported back with an 8-7 recommendation on discipline and the Faculty was asked to review individual cases. "What kind of decision is that?" a conservative exclaimed. "The Faculty is the least equipped body to review individual discipline decisions."

The Faculty had always operated by consensus, but in the Spring of '69 the consensus was breaking down.

The debate over extending the experimental Social Relations 148-149 that Spring also cut directly into one of the Faculty's most sacred cows-departmental autonomy. The course was not only radically oriented, but by Harvard standards, radically structured, violating all academic standards that most conservatives had come to believe meant a Harvard education.

"We tore ourselves to bits over whether it might be necessary to interfere with that," Maass said. Conservatives were being forced to set priorities-departmental autonomy versus "academic excellence" -and the conflict did not help Faculty member relations.

WHAT divided the caucuses more than politics, however, were differences in temperament and style.

"We're not conservative and they're not liberal," Maass strongly protested last June. "We have lots of 'liberals' in our group, and they have many radicals. I would like to think of us as responsible and some of them as irresponsible. That's not entirely true, but it's as fair as them calling us conservatives. The best thing is to just call the caucuses the blues and the whites."