President Bok should catch Hell for his decisions concerning the DuBois Institute and especially for the appointment of an advisory board to that Institute. Each and every time the struggle for the democratic rights of Black people suffers defeat at the hands of the forces supporting white supremacy within this institution, the president of the University should catch Hell. When President Bok places himself at the head of this small but determined band of modern day "Tawneyites," as he has recently done, his authority should be challenged, and if need be, broken. That challenge should be mounted by all those who will have no truck with a Harvard that could find DuBois himself "unqualified" for tenure. This challenge must be directed against all those Harvard administrators who fell that the Afro-American Studies Department has no rights that they are bound to respect. Those who seem to spend their whole lives denying to others the simple rights that they themselves already possess should find no measure of tolerance within a community committed to ideals of equality and justice.

There can be no freedom to legitimize discrimination based on race. There is only the swagger of privilege and it is immutably political. It is privilege founded by the whip and the rope, erected by the few against the many, the self-styled "meritocrats" against the opponents of a racist meritocracy. It is a privilege which must be resolutely fought and just as resolutely rejected if offered. To do otherwise is to participate in the subjugation of the many at the behest of the few.

Though many (President Bok included, no doubt) would shun the sub-vocalizings of the more inept ideologues of white supremacy--the geneticists of a new type (scientists in name, white supremacists in deed)--a frank appraisal of the situation suggests that their influence at Harvard is stronger than Harvard's public liberal image admits. How they came to wield such power, even in the presidents' office, is a mystery which at this point only President Bok can unravel. Although some clues in that mystery can only be provided by President Bok, I would like briefly to locate a few essential components of that mystery.

The administration is attempting to cut off the Department of Afro-American Studies from other academic departments, the better to institute a special set of procedures for dealing with that department's affairs. This isolation is reinforced by the failure of other departments to hire Black faculty. It is promoted by those who would like to confine the sixties "Negro problem" to a single department. It is to accelerate this process that the president has acted.

Predictably, certain opportunists (how else to call them?) have begun preaching desertion of Harvard's bleached crimson banner, pegging their reasons to the ever changing climate of the gathering storm of controversy. No sooner did the cloud break than they scurried to higher ground, hoping to ride out the struggle. Like all true Christians, when the earth begins to shake, they look skyward for deliverance. They confess a change of heart while still supporting the administration's policies. They well know what is meant when it is said, "as the sun sets on your bloated master's careers, go and seek your graves in history by the torch of the national liberation struggles."

Other people persist in seeing moral issues where there are none. For the democratic rights of Black people are not to be secured by a moral system but a political one. Even Abraham Lincoln, no freedom fighter he, grasped this point: "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would also do that." Indeed, 330 years of political struggle will not be disturbed by days on end of moral posturing. What is needed is action of a decisive type.

To investigate the present situation is to confront the highly contradictory "logic" which guides the struggle against the democratic rights of Black people on this campus. The Bok administration has almost made a complete joke of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. As it stands now, we are all amazed but not amused. The appointment of the advisory board raises several points.

First, the reason for not naming Ewart Guinier, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department, to the W.E.B. DuBois advisory board, as was stated in The Crimson, is that he is "not in sympathy with the institute." Apparently not being in sympathy with the present conception of the institute is sufficient grounds to bar one from participation. The president has said as much. Never let it be said that the administration is doctrinaire in its outlook. When the faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department repeatedly insists that appointments in the department should be in sympathy with the work of the department, this criterion has been universally rejected by every administratively constituted body that has come into contact with the department, including the Faculty search committee, which Dean Rosovsky recently disbanded. Has Bok recently acquired enlightenment or is this simply an old double standard?

It should be spelled out. For the DuBois Institute, operating out of the president's office, one must be in sympathy with the concept, otherwise it would be an imposition to ask you to serve; to serve in the Afro-American Studies Department, however, one need not be in sympathy with the concept, one can even be a European historian with spurious credentials in Afro-American Studies a la Professor Lewis. It matters only that you be willing to serve--and in two departments at that, joint appointments being an implicit part of the bargain.

Bad management, bordering on outright incompetence, a hallmark of the Bok administration, can explain some but not all of the failure to consult the Afro-American Studies Department on the appointments to the W.E.B. Institute's Advisory Board. Better management could have staved off some of the present controversy by appointing at least one member of the department to the advisory committee of the institute. Apparently there was such an attempt, though the person was not yet a member of the department, and alas, the best laid plans of mice and men....

The problem, however, lies much deeper than such a superficial attempt at conflict-management can resolve. It will remain a problem even if Bok succeeds in naming someone from the department to the advisory board. Bok gave assurances that the department would have an input into the development of the institute. His appointments to the advisory board make a mockery of those assurances. As powerful as President Bok is, neither he nor the Humpty Dumpty of "Alice in Wonderland" can make words mean exactly what they want them to. to make good on his assurances would require the scrapping of the present board and a fresh start. Certainly if this were done, a more relevant criteria for selection of board members might emerge. From an examination of the people listed, with only a few exceptions, one might conclude that faithful service to the president, willingness, ignorance, and outright hostility to Afro-American studies, in varying degrees and with different mixtures, were the determining factors. Hopefully with proper consultation, those criteria would change.

In all fairness to the present members of the advisory board, the situation is not their fault and one would do better not to criticize the specifics of their appointments with two exceptions. The situation on this campus is such that it is relatively easy to be ill-informed on the issues surrounding Afro-American Studies even when one has been placed at the center of that controversy. The Committee to Review the Department of Afro-American Studies set a precedence for that. Nevertheless, the way to support a call for the president to live up to his assurances of input is for board members to resign and await future developments.

The appointment of Professors Kilson and Patterson to the board of the institute is an entirely separate matter that should wake even the dead to speak. In the early stages of the department's existence, Professor Kilson gained national notoriety as an aggressive critic of Afro-American studies, Black students and so-called lower-class Blacks. He has remarked that the courses in the department were so many examples of "basketweaving." For this slander and others too numerous to mention, his appointment to the board of the DuBois Institute would be objectionable even if he refrained from contributing. His appointment is an affront to the honor of DuBois's name, an insult to the Black community, in general, and a slap in the face to the entire faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department. It is hard to conceive of a more inappropriate choice.

Professor Patterson's appointment seriously calls into question the sincerity calls into question the sincerity of Bok's public statement that a "natural relationship would evolve between the department and the institute," whatever the sense we might ascribe to that vacuous phrase. Professor Patterson has said that the department is a "concentration camp." This is an outright slander which Professor Patterson has never seen fit to correct publicly. His appointment raises a speculative point of considerable interest: If the department is a concentration camp, how should the natural relationship between the department and the institute evolve?

The board appointments, either in their entirety or in specific cases, however, are not the overriding issue. The issue remains the fundamental one of the conception of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute. This is the issue on which we should focus our attention.