DISRUPTIVE DEBATES over University finance and graduate education have become an annual Harvard Spring rite. For the second consecutive Spring, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) instituted a new financial aid policy that met with widespread student hostility, erupting into a strike of about 700 graduate students and scattered undergraduate sympathizers.

Since Spring 1972, when the GSAS abruptly discontinued its program of Staff Tuition Scholarships for all teaching fellows, fundamental disagreements and confusions have cloaked the three-way debate between students, Faculty and administrators over financial aid to graduate education. At the heart of the debate are the questions of Harvard's budgetary prioities, decisionmaking process that sets those priorities, and the effect of both on the tone and quality of education.

If the parties in this year's debate agreed on nothing else, they concurred on the urgency of answering these questions. At least they did so verbally. In the end, however, the controversy produced no more than a few sadly vapid conversations between students and administrators. The unanswered questions at the heart of the problem were hardly brought out of the closet, and remain unanswered, which could lead to further disruptions when the plan comes up for revision next Fall.

Massive cutbacks this year in Federal aid to education can only bode increasing ills for Harvard's budget. The Nixon cutbacks hit Harvard right where it hurts--in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences budget--to the tune of at least $700,000. Rapid disappearance of Federal and other outside funds--previously dependable supports for large graduate student bodies--intensified Harvard's problem of setting priorities with its own income. In response, the Corporation upped its allotment for graduate student aid to $1.9 million, an increase of $400,000 over last year's budget, and the GSAS instituted its third financial aid plan in as many years to spread the additional funds around.

THE NEW plan, instituted in February and devised by Richard A. Kraus, financial assistant to the dean of the GSAS, was billed as a minor revolution in graduate education finance. Given the loss in outside funding, the Kraus plan in Harvard's effort to distribute the limited resources to those who need it most. The student's need is calculated from the students' parental income, personal resources and living expenses, which is applied to all first-through fifth-year students as a yardstick for determining aid. Under the plan, however, departments can choose to fund students $1000 below their calculated need, and use the difference to swell their number of "merit scholarships," which are awarded at the discretion of department chairmen.

Previous plans left most funding to the chairmen's discretion, and merit was the sole criterion for financial aid. Other plans had used need criteria to determine aid for teaching fellows only, but had awarded them enough to cover tuition plus living expenses. The Kraus plan evaluated teaching students in the same category as non-teachers--salaries counted as "resources" and were figured into the need estimate.

An important part of the Kraus plan was its stipulation that the graduate school reduce the size of its first-year class by at least 50 students. This reduction constituted the only response by an Ivy League university to the sudden financial crisis facing graduate education. Conferences in February with other Ivy League graduate school administrators revealed that although all schools had suffered equally from cutbacks in outside funding, Harvard alone had reduced the scope of its merit scholarship program.

As a result, department chairmen reacted to the plan with predictable anxiety. Because the Kraus plan's need criteria cut into their freedom to recruit and encourage the most "meritorious" applicants and students, the chairmen warned that such students might be lured away to Yale or Berkeley, where merit scholarships still rule graduate student financing. In short, they warned that the quality of graduate education was at stake. Nonetheless, department chairmen agreed unanimously to adopt the Kraus plan on a trial basis only for next year.

Graduate students were not quite so docile when they received word of the Kraus plan. What administrators had called "revolutionary" was billed "revolting" by graduate students who led the work stoppage in Spring 1972. Their objections dealt not only with the plan itself, but with the Administration's decision to institute it over student protests.

Student members of the Commission on Graduate Education had unanimously rejected the plan less than a month earlier. The 12-member student-Faculty advisory body--established at a Spring 1972 Faculty meeting in the aftermath of the graduate students' first protest--was charged with formulating a financial aid policy acceptable to both students and Faculty. A series of delays kept the Commission from taking shape until December, however, and a January deadline for the GSAS budget ruled out chances that the group would influence the 1973-74 plan. Kraus, who had met regularly with members of the Commission, showed them his plan before it became official, but the time factor took precedence over members' objections or recommendations.

Student objections, like those of department chairmen, centered on the plan's need criteria--but for opposite reasons. Their argument sounded generally like this:

* The Kraus plan's tax on parental income and other student resources is virtually prohibitive for students from middle income families. Within three years, half of the graduate student body will be bright, poor scholarship students and the other half will come from upper-class, professional backgrounds. Furthermore, the idea of asking graduate students--many of whom have been independent for the last few years--to turn to their parents for support is ludicrous.

* Harvard has no justification for cutting back on its financial commitment to students; if the government pulls out, Harvard should make up the difference.

* The option of funding students $1000 below their calculated need undermines the purpose of need criteria. Under the Kraus plan, need is clearly subordinate to merit. The plan should provide full funding up to need.

* The Kraus plan discourages teaching. If a student gets less aid because he has a teaching fellow's salary, only the richer-independent students will be able to teach undergraduate sections. And with the rising cost of education, who can afford to extend his school years by teaching?

At the heart of student objections was a fundamental challenge to Harvard's budgetary priorities and the absence of student input into financial and educational policies that shape the educational community. Student spokesmen on the Commission had called for a larger financial commitment to graduate student aid--either a shift of funds away from other programs or a dip into the endowment--and a revision of the Kraus plan to redress student grievances.

Their arguments received little response, and an open meeting in late February attracted over 200 graduate students who voted unanimously to revive the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow Union from the previous Spring. The group enrolled a total of 700 students--one-third of the resident student body--who endorsed demands for changes in the Kraus plan, more student influence on educational and financial policies, and recognition as the sole bargaining agent for graduate students.

The Union incorporated its grievances into seven specific demands and threatened an open-ended strike if administrators failed to respond. With no sign of recognition by March 19 from President Bok or Franklin L. Ford, then acting dean of the Faculty, Union members walked off the job, began picketing all classroom buildings, and waged campaigns to gain sympathizers among undergraduates and Faculty members.

THE STRIKE, which petered out after four days, was over before it started. Internally, the Union lacked the necessary numbers to threaten Harvard's daily business-as-usual atmosphere. Furthermore, administrators clarified immediately that the Kraus plan as well as the budget would not be revised. Confronted with the immovable object of the Harvard Administration on the outside and confusion and apathy of graduate students within their own ranks, the Union could conduct no more than a symbolic protest.

The Administration and Faculty dodged student charges of inequity and selfishness in the Kraus plan by shifting most responsibility for the financial squeeze to the Federal government's cutbacks. The strategy enabled administrative spokesmen to ignore the question of Harvard's internal financing policy, a question the Union tried specifically to address, but which proved to be forbidden territory as the dispute evolved.

Even before the Kraus plan took effect, Administration and Faculty members were reluctant to address student grievances about the state of financial aid. Students on the Commission on Graduate Education--all of whom had belonged last Spring to the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow Union--accused the Administration of bypassing their recommendations. They claimed that administrators had acted in bad faith and had never intended to recognize student input into policy decisions.

Several Faculty members on the Commission denied student charges. The Commission's decisions had never been designated as binding on the GSAS, they said, so student complaints had no basis. The distinction was only an academic one, however, and the six student members voted to disband the Commission after reaching a six-six deadlock.

The Union's momentum went unnoticed, however, at the Faculty meeting one week before the strike, when administrators and professors met to discuss issues raised by the Kraus plan. The Union's demands and the entire thrust of the student protest never entered the Faculty's discussion, except peripherally when a Union member presented his position during the question and answer period. Instead, professors, deans and President Bok spent the entire afternoon discussing an official presentation of GSAS financial affairs, delivered by Edward T. Wilcox, acting dean of the GSAS.

The Administration's position which emerged from the meeting went something like this:

* Five years ago, we would never have had to make these decisions. Then, everybody--the Federal government, foundations, etc.--wanted to subsidize graduate education. The cutback in Federal funding has created a crisis for all of us, and there is no reason that GSAS student deserve a larger share of the pie than students in other schools. Furthermore, all income from the endowment has been spent on operating costs, and there is no money available for aid to graduate students. * Given that we all must tighten our belts, the Kraus plan is a valiant effort at compromise between the two extremes of opinion about aid to graduate education--those who call for totally merit-based funding and those who advocate a strict set of need criteria. We will not relinquish our merit scholarships; they are essential to the quality of graduate education.

Harvard can rightfully expect students to seek parental assistance, especially those who come from wealthy families. Now that we are all squeezed for money, there is no reason for students with available resources to deprive others who have no such option.

The general tone of the meeting was hostile to Union demands. By its end, all professors had tacitly enlisted in Harvard's valiant struggle to made ends meet in the face of the government's indiscriminate cutbacks. In this context, graduate students' efforts to gain more funds sounded like a selfish tactic that merely served to split the ranks in the good fight.

Once again, questions basic to any future financial aid plan were left unanswered. What, for example, is the place of merit scholarships in graduate education when available funds cannot even cover those who qualify for aid on the basis of need? Furthermore, if Harvard shifts completely to a need-based analysis for financial aid, what criteria should it use--parental income, personal resources, etc.? Finally, can Harvard and other private universities find a systematic solution, as standardized as the Kraus plan, to the future demands of financing graduate education?

If the Union had been stronger the debate might have touched more closely on these questions. But even a majority of graduate students seemed unconvinced that the Kraus plan posed a threat. Wilcox told them that every student would receive more aid than they had under last year's program, and most decided that this assurance was sufficient. The 700 students who did join the Union included only 300 teaching fellows, hardly enough to disrupt normal class attendance. Undergraduates were equally unwilling to join the boycott; no more than 30 per cent observed the strike on any of its four days.

By the strike's third day, many Union teaching fellows had ceased their protest and returned to work. The steering committee thus concluded that a vote to extend the strike would be a vote to extend the strike exhausted picket force circling one or two buildings in sub-freezing weather. Except for a few exceptions, the students themselves were not willing to continue the battle for the sake of symbolism.

So ended the year's only visible, organized, insurgent movement against the Administration. When the strike ended on March 22, administrators seemed to have won an unqualified victory in the debate.

Two months later, however, the administrators discovered that current and incoming students qualified collectively for almost half a million dollars more aid than Kraus had estimated. Graduate students at Harvard would actually fare more favorably than their counterparts at Yale and Berkeley. (It was still unclear whether the first-choice applicants had found Harvard's offers uniformly more attractive than others). All their earlier statements notwithstanding administrators would have to find the extra funds which they maintained were unavailable: the highly touted Kraus plan still created a deficit in the Faculty's 1973-74 budget.

Two things are certain: Harvard will have to cut back on some of its current programs, and Faculty members will make certain that merit scholarship programs are not among the losers. One can also predict that Union members--if they retain a voice, which is still an open question--will adamantly oppose any policy that shifts power over limited funds to department chairmen and those who immediately supervise graduate students.

Thus, the lines are already drawn for another painful, but probably unproductive debate over financing graduate education. The Union will probably be here. The remaining share of federal funds may even be here. Administrators are eternally here. And the problems of priorities and power which necessitated the Kraus plan and then turned it into a powder keg will undoubtedly be here to loom over the entire community as soon as the Kraus plan comes up for revision.