There are two main kinds of student politics at Harvard, one mainly centered around University committees and the other centered mainly around demonstrations. I'll call them "Official" and "Provisional," like the two wings of the Irish Republican Army. Neither of the two is likely to affect you much, unless you want them to.

Of course, there was a time, only a few years ago, when Harvard student politics occupied the attention of people even outside Cambridge. There had been glimmerings of it earlier on. For example, big headlines gave national play to Harvard student politics in 1965, when hundreds of students surrounded Robert McNamara outside of Quincy House and forced him to answer questions about the Vietnam War. The headlines continued, reched a climax during the Strike of 1969, when students angered by the bloody eviction of anti-ROTC protestors from University Hall shut Harvard down, but began to recede.

Harvard's last stand in the limelight was in spring of 1972, when I was a freshman, Richard Nixon was president, and American mines filled Haiphong Harbor. A group of black students wanted Harvard to sell its stock in Gulf Oil, whose payments for offshore drilling rights in Angola helped support Portuguese rule there. The students seized the occasion of the University-wide strike against the minint of North Vietnam, and occupied Massachusetts Hall. For a week the Yard resounded with bongo drums and abounded with picketers, but the occupiers finally left quietly and Harvard asked them to withdraw for a year. Portugual is leaving Angola now, but Harvard still has its stock in Gulf, and hasn't seen a large illegal demonstration since that one.

In other cities with large university populations, students became involved in local campaigns--in Berkeley, Madison and Ann Arbor they elected radical city governments. Cambridge City Councilor Saundra Graham may have had something like that in mind for her Grass Roots Organization, but the GRO's candidates--except for her--did miserably their first time out. Individual Harvard students have gone in to electoral politics quite frequently--McGovern's pre-convention pollsters in 1972 were Harvard seniors--and back in 1968, Harvard students ran an anti-war referendum campaign. But even then it was clear that Cambridge was not Berkeley. Even if the city did discourage students from voting, its rolls would remain convincingly working-class and considerably more hostile to Harvard as an institution than receptive to worker-student alliances.

So that leaves the two kinds of student politics, meeting around the edges--when a Provisional runs for a University committee, when a University committee endorses a demonstration, or in concentrations and classes (Social Studies or Soc Sci 2, "Western Thought and Institutions") that breed a lot of political types.

The Officials, who seem almost universally to be future lawyers, concentrate on Harvard student - faculty - administration -or- alumni-committees. Harvard used to have a student government, the Harvard Undergraduate Council, but it voted itself out of existence several years ago because of lack of interest. The Radcliffe Union of Students is still reasonably viable, but people's universal confusion about what Radcliffe is and where it is going blurs RUS's functions a little as well.

The surviving Official committees--not counting ad hoc appointed groups, like the ones that study the relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe--are the Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, the House committees and the Freshman Council. (There are also supposed to be students on the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, which steps in when demonstrators get out of hand, but the House Committees won't send representatives to it because they say that would legitimize a repressive group.)

The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) has a certain amount of power because it decides how people are assigned to Houses and therefore in theory what the Houses are like, and makes recommendations on such day-to-day issues as changing the academic calendar. The Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, which President Bok established after the Mass Hall demonstration, has no power at all, although the Harvard Corporation often follows its recommendations in voting its stock on controversial shareholder resolutions. The House committees and the Freshman Council organize dances, milk and cookie hours and whatever other social activities the Houses run, and occasionally take stands on other issues.

In general, few people not running for positions on these committees seem to take a passionate interest in how the elections come out, and it's not uncommon for an election to be uncontested. Maybe this is changing: One candidate for the Freshman Council last year went so far as to buy an advertisement in The Crimson to boost his campaign. He was accordingly disqualified, but not even this breech of political ethics gave much sign of denting his constituents' indifference. Presumably they had their eyes on bigger game.

The Provisional wing of student politics is more extracurricular. Most of its practicioners are leftists but the distinction between them and CHUL people isn't any more ideological than it is clear cut or fixed. You could undoubtedly find any number of issues on which the views of the two wings are mainly the same. When CHUL votes on something that's politically controversial--it doesn't happen too often, but largely because of the touchiness of the Harvard-Radcliffe merger, it's not unheard of--CHUL's student members often couch their arguments in ideological terms.

Actually, an overwhelming majority of Harvard students are probably at least slightly left of the American center anyway, especially if you exclude a few pockets of contrary sentiment, notably the final clubs--it was one of these venerable institutions that, after all, shocked Sarah Roosevelt by rejecting her Franklin. Three years ago, the last time anyone polled them, 80 per cent of Harvard students wanted McGovern to be president. Shirley Chisholm ran second with 8 or 9 per cent, and Nixon, Humphrey, Jackson and Wallace split what was left. Even a lot of the Young Republicans were for Pete McClosky.

So I distinguish the Provisionals from the Officials chiefly by their attitudes: CHUL members are more likely to be interested in Harvard politics for its own sake; the Extracurriculars more often because they think that it reflects national trends that they're interested in. In the more politicized time of the ROTC controversy, when people had to make their arguments explicit and defend their premises, the differences came out quite strongly. Most of the Provisionals, then centered around Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), wanted ROTC kicked off campus because they thought an organization like the United States Army didn't have the right to exist. The Official committees of those days, on the other hand, had long and involved debates about whether ROTC courses met Harvard's academic standards and whether Army-appointed instructors undermined the autonomy of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As you might expect, neither side felt too friendly toward the other. If your chief concern was whether Vietnamese peasants died, you were likely to think that debates about academic standards were a waste of time. On the other hand, if your chief concern was a committee debate on academic standards, you were likely to think repeated references to dying Vietnamese peasants irrelevant intrusions of radical doctrine.

A more recent but somewhat similar contradiction--this time within one group of people--helped keep the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellows Union from successfully striking in 1972 and 1973. The union sprang up when the University imposed an unpopular new financial aid plan without talking to graduate students first. But most of the Union's organizers viewed the financial aid plan as a logical more from a university they thought was more concerned with churning out staffers for American capitalism than with students or even research. So they jumped at the chance to unionize, whereas most other graduate students who joined the union did so reluctantly and evidently felt a little uncomfortable with the union leadership.

The union's organizers were still grumbling occasionally last year, and there's no reason to expect that most teaching fellows would oppose higher salaries or a more generous aid plan. It's even possible that many of them shared the union militants' belief that Harvard has overly close ties with corporate America's military-industrial complex. But most union members didn't think of themselves as fighting the military industrial complex. They thought of themselves as fighting the Kraus Plan, and when the University modified it and set up a few committees with some student representatives, the union fizzled out.