But even here, there was no clear-cut division. Most of the members of the new Graduate School committees also belonged to the union. Conversely, imaginative Officials are as eager as Emerson could have wished to hitch their wagons to a star. Last spring, Quincy House was plastered with leaflets explaining CHUL candidates' positions on everything from women's rights to fighting imperialism.
Both the Provisionals and the Officials managed to get less political people involved, but the Provisionals do it more often. Presumably exclusively Harvard issues tend to seem a bit academic. CHUL managed to stir up a minor storm last year when it recommended that the University abolish sex quotas in housing assignments, including the guaranteed one to one male/female ratio the Quad Houses have enjoyed ever since Radcliffe women and Harvard men have officially lived together. When the going got tough, CHUL hastily battened down, so South House will still be sexually balanced this year. Meanwhile, the Provisionals managed several minor storms, in addition to the never ending battle black students wage about the Afro-American Studies Department, the DuBois Institute and, most recently, a proposed Third World Cultural Center. This battle used to have an extra measure of significance because the Afro Department was the one Harvard department where the students' power was a reality. But the Faculty amended its original resolution two years ago, so the fight no longer carries echoes of May, 1968.
The first other Provisional storm of last year was the New American Movement's 150-person-strong protest against a recruiter from the Honeywell Corporation, which makes most of General Thieu's anti-personnel bombs. The picketers marched in the rain chanting things like, "Want a job, step inside, great career in genocide," and they seemed only slightly disappointed that the recruiter had left before they arrived. As Provisionals, they were more interested in national trends anyway. It was the largest Harvard anti-war demonstration since the Mass Hall occupation.
Even more protesters turned out for then-Vice President Ford's visit to Boston to accept the Harvard Republicans "Man of the Year" award. And a coalition of groups managed crowds of 150 students for several weeks in a row in support of printers striking against the University--which didn't stop the University from declining arbitration, holding out until after Commencement, and breaking the back of the strike.
If you want to follow Harvard politics in any kind of detail, you should probably know the names of at least the larger groups. Here are some of them.
The Radcliffe-Harvard New American Movement (NAM), with perhaps 50 more-or-less active members, is probably the largest political group at Harvard, although the Young Republicans briefly claimed the title after a quarter of last year's freshmen expressed interest in them and they managed a separate introductory meeting.
NAM is a socialist group organized at an Iowa convention in 1971, and it's not mainly a student group--Harvard is one of three or four student chapters. It's pretty specialized, both nationally and at Harvard, but at Harvard last year it had committees working with the United Farm Workers, on the Honeywell and Ford demonstrations, with the printers, and with Afro for the Third World Center, among other things. Members also have consciousness-raising sessions for women, men and homosexuals, Marxist study groups and workshops on graphic posters and literate leaflets. At Harvard, they're probably the closest thing there is to the old SDS before it got torn apart by factionalism and anger.
The Harvard Republican Club is probably the second largest political group at Harvard. Its main coups last year were cabling Nixon to resign earlier than most other Republicans and inviting Ford. The year before Spiro Agnew informed its delegation that he would resign if anything every shook his absolute faith in the administration's integrity, and the club was also naturally the core of the small Harvard Nixon campaign in 1972. But as a group Harvard Republicans are generally not too politically active--the cable to Nixon was pretty exceptional. Similarly, the Young Democrats, which once billed itself as the moderate alternative to SDS and later disappeared altogether, is chiefly interested nowadays in placing members as aides to legislators.
The other three groups with some sort of College-wide political following are the Democratic Socialists, what's left of SDS, and The Crimson. The Democratic Socialists sprang up a year ago, along with Michael Harrington's national Democratic Socialist organizing committee. Last year the group worked some with the United Farm Workers and for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' boycott of Farah pants. They joined the printers' coalition, and a few of their members worked on the Honeywell demonstration.
SDS is now a tightly knit group of six or a dozen sympathizers with the Party for Workers' Power, which split last year from the Progressive Labor Party. The Party for Workers Power called itself Maoist at the time that it came to dominate SDS but later denounced Mao for selling out the working class. It sometimes joined other people's demonstrations. Then it concentrated on fighting racism, primarily by denouncing professors it disapproved of. Its members used to be the most indefatigable people on campus, but it seemed to me that last year they were starting to get tired.
There are also smaller groups (the Lowell House and other women's groups for example), groups that appear and disappear fairly frequently (the New Right Coalition and other libertarian groups, for example) and ad hoc pressure groups that spring up around particular issues. Last year there were groups interested in raising money for the victims of the North African drought, picketing military recruiters, changing the academic calendar, and raising money for Israel during the October War.
Specifics of what's likely to happen this year are naturally hard to predict. One possible storm center might be the Godkin lectures on foreign policy in the fall--former Pentagon director Elliot Richardson '41 is the lecturer, and he ran into some heckling at Class Day last year. Another likely possibility is another union battle--some of Harvard's secretaries have been talking about organizing, and there are a lot more of them than there were printers. In general, my guess is that Provisionals are more in touch with other students than they've been for some time, partly because the passions of '69 and some of their more grandiose ambitions have finally cooled. My roommate, a lovable Midwestern biologist, went to the Honeywell demonstration last year--it could be a straw in the wind. I wouldn't count on a building occupation, but then, you never can tell.