High school education tells us to sit back and learn while some authority outside us teaches us something for some reason we are not to comprehend. Political parties urge us to cast our votes one day and to get out of the way the next, while party leaders and candidates run our communities and our country. The corporate model reminds us that we each have our place, our aiche in the process, while those above our niche determine the frontiers of our decision-making and we provide the same constraints for those who, to their misfortune, remain below us.

Harvard University, in the condescending style of Richard Nixon, repeats every day--in its bureaucratic administration, in its hierarchy of scholars (leaving undergraduates at the bottom, of course), in its undefined defense of "academic freedom" and of the "sanctity of the university"--one single theme, one single idea. The idea is that Someone Knows Something that We Don't. If We sit back and listen, maybe Someday We will be Someone, too. Such absurdity reaches even the trivial level. For example, Buildings and Grounds responded negatively to a student wanting to paint his own suite; "The Faculty of Arts and Sciences will decide the colors of the rooms!"

Harvard students are now powerless to effect real policy change. Most are infused with a sense of meaninglessness, with a sense that whatever we're doing helps no one, including ourselves, and that each person is more interested in the preservation of his or her ego than in his or her contribution to the community. This is not an indictment of Harvard students per se; it is a sketch of the spirit of American society today, a spirit resulting from the deliberate, persistent attempt to preserve the economic, social and political status quo at all costs.

People at Harvard are unusually good targets for a campaign in support of passivity. Like Dr. Ellsberg, we have the most valuable interests to protect. Like Dr. Ellsberg, we have the most sins to confess. Like Dr. Ellsberg, we would have to take drastic initiative to break loose, even to preserve an academic integrity in an institution whose social attitudes often grow from nineteenth century intellectual seeds.

The trouble is that throughout our lives, we shall never leave our particularly dangerous perch. Not only are we alienated among ourselves, not only are we searching for leadership outside ourselves, but we are part of a system of other expectations that looks to us to provide leadership for the rest of the nation. We are supposed to plan wars. We are supposed to defend law and order. We are supposed to be active sentries in support of policies and ideals we are not to actively question. We will be paid well for our trouble.

Those of us who feel alienated from our political environment thus despair, retreat, reject, and disapprove. Those who feel at home in these surroundings do plan wars and plot their paths to corporate presidencies and material riches.

There is the minority, working on a community level, which tries to raise the level of awareness among students and faculty to the point where those who have power will join to help save all of us. To win even that interim power, however, there must be more who work, more who insist on making the political process a part of their lives and the welfare of the community their self-conscious self-interest as well.

If we can afford to be elitist about anything, we do have one dangerous irony to ourselves: because we are at an institution like Harvard, we are the most able to effect change through power in society, and the most likely because of our background to preserve the status quo.

We can choose our idols, or we can step out of the web. We can create more mythology, or we can steal more truth. Resistance is no more than a daily responsibility, no more than the effort to make community life one's own. Blocking our resistance is the inertia of an alienating past and a society predicated on our submission to impersonal, frequently inhuman, authority. We have left Bobby and Eugene behind us; when we turn to each other is yet to be seen