Radical activity on various issues--mainly Harvard's investment policy and the war--reappeared in varying degrees in the Yard last April.
This time, however, the activists met with a flexible response on the part of the Administration. In contrast to the spring of 1969, there were no police busts, so threatening rhetoric. no bloodied heads. President Bok and his advisors handled a black student six-day occupation of Massachusetts Hall with a maximum of finesse.
Radicals learned last Spring that they can no longer count on Administration blunders to hand them tactical victories. The day has passed when the liberal majority on campus could be radicalized by reactionary rhetoric and police violence. Successful activist campaigns must be characterized by reasoned argument and innovative publicity techniques.
The prototype for such an effort was waged last Spring by the Pan African Liberation Committee (PALC) and Harvard-Radcliffe Afro. The campaign, against Harvard's ownership of 700,000 shares of Gulf Oil stock, began inauspiciously in September when the ten PALC members wrote and began circulating a position paper explaining their position.
They charged that Gulf aids in the oppression of black Africans in the Portuguese colony of Angola because the company maintains oil drilling facilities there and provides the Portuguese colonial regime with direct payments and needed foreign exchange. A little-known war of liberation has smoldered in Angloa since 1961.
PALC demanded that Harvard divest itself of its Gulf stock and issue a public statement condemning the company. In this way, they hoped to trigger a series of similar divestitures nationwide, and force Gulf out of southern Africa.
When the dispute began, few students could even locate Angola on a map. But the PALC organizers used a carefully orchestrated series of tactics to rally support for their cause.
They issued well-written and researched pamphlets, staged demonstrations and teach-ins, and gradually attracted attention and support from Afro and the Harvard black community, and then from the white liberal majority. In perhaps their most novel ploy, the blacks early one March morning implanted 500 black crosses in the middle of the Yard to commemorate blacks killed in Africa by Portuguese colonial armies. PALC and Afro supporters spent the day explaining the purpose of the crosses to curious passers-by and gathering petition signatures in support of their position.
The campaign was so successful that when 35 blacks staged the Mass Hall takeover in April, a picket line of supporters numbering at times as many as 1000 circulated outside the building constantly for the duration of the six-day occupation.
Since Harvard has not divested the Gulf stock. PALC and Afro plan to continue the campaign this year. They are waiting until later this month, when Stephen B. Farber '63, special assistant to President Bok, will make public a report on his summer fact-finding mission to Angola. The issue remains one to watch in coming months.
White radical groups--students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Cambridge New American Movement (NAM)--will necessarily follow a scenario similar to PALC and Afro if their proselytizing efforts are to affect large numbers of students.
The size of SDS at Harvard has dwindled from hundreds to tens since the national organization split at the SRIMONIOUS 1969 Chicago convention.
Harvard-Radcliffe SDS spent most of last year waging a prominent campaign against Richard J. Herrnstein, professor of Psychology. Herrnstein, whose theories concerning the inheritability of intelligence were labelled "racist" by SDS, is on leave this year and the organization will have to look for new issues to drum up support.
The Herrnstein campaign was unsuccessful largely because SDS, influenced here by the rigid doctrines of the old-Left Progressive Labor Party (PLP), remained isolated from most of the University community.
After the 1969 split in SDS, the New Left elements within the organization formed various shortlived local groups. At Harvard, the New Left, which tends toward flexibility and a freedom from 'correct' doctrine, was represented first by the November Action Coalition and liberation by the Radcliffe-Harvard liberation Alliance.
Both groups were dormant in the beginning of the 1971-72 school year, but with last Spring's revival of activism, the New Left once again came to life as two similar ad hoc groups, the New American Movement and the Cambridge Movement.
In additional to these organizations, various women's groups, including an increasingly active Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS), plan to continue organizing around the University's sexist hiring and admissions policies.
Chicano and Boricua students are also showing increasing militance. Last Spring, they vehemently opposed the appointment of Phyllis Kazen as an assistant professor of Anthropology because they felt the Department was hiring a Boricua and Chicano Studies professor without their consultation.
Kazen maintained that her course dealt with the entire ethnic experience and not only with Chicanos and Boricuas. The students rejected this interpretation and threatened to disrupt her class.