A half-decade after 35 black students took over Mass Hall in protest of Harvard's $20 million investment in Gulf Oil Corporation stock, University administrators and the takeover participants themselves present vastly different analyses of the decline in activism among Harvard students, and the changes--if any--in Harvard's role as an institution investing over $1 billion in funds.

Most people--including Stanley Surrey, Smith Professor of Law and first chairman of the University's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR)--agree that the Mass Hall takeover hastened the move by President Bok to set up the ACSR. Since 1973, the advisory committee, composed of equal numbers of students, faculty and alumni, has counselled the Corporation on socially responsible Harvard shareholding, coming up with recommendations on how Harvard should vote on each shareholder-sponsored resolution it receives as stockholders in hundreds of companies.

President Bok himself disagreed this week with Surrey's analysis of events, claiming that the establishment of a shareholder advisory committee had been among his plans from the start of his term as president in the fall of 1971. At the same time, in light of the Mass Hall takeover, Bok regrets not having established ACSR promptly--before the development of the Gulf Oil protests. "To have had those procedures implemented promptly before the problem arose would have been a good thing," Bok says. "Of course, hindsight is always easy. In the fall, there was no problem, and it didn't appear that moving on that ACSR deliberately would matter. In retrospect, it did, and to that extent I suppose I have some regrets."

Bok would not say whether the establishment of the advisory group before the incident would have forestalled the protest, but "it would have been interesting to find out."

Although the protesters explain it in different terms, almost all of them express a pessimistic, almost fatalistic feeling that the University can never truly become an institution which ethically invests its funds. Many see the problem not simply as a function of the individuals who form the Corporation, however.

Clement Cann '74 believes the takeover highlighted a continuing contradiction at the heart of the University as an institution. As a capitalist institution trying to maximize the yield of its investments, Harvard is necessarily forced into a position "in opposition to human potential and growth," Cann says.

"You have to be subjective to amass a billion dollar portfolio," Cann says. "It's an insoluble contradiction. As long as the University is involved in investment which is subjective by its very nature, trying to maintain intellectual freedom and objectivity within its own walls is impossible.

"The University can come up with any number of programs for people they target as oppressed. This cannot make up for the fact that Harvard investment restricts human development," he adds. A nationalized Harvard University would perhaps be a positive step, although an unrealistic one to consider at this time, he suggests.

Although many said they had never followed the progress of the Corporation's committee on shareholding decisions, protesters who had kept tabs on ACSR suggest the body is simply an effort at appeasement. One student reminded this reporter that several Houses had even boycotted the elections of a student representative to ACSR in the first years of the committee's existence. "The rationale for the University's policies have absolutely no connection with what a little committee feels is ethical," Mary Basset '74 said.

The former campus dissidents' attitudes are not completely at odds with the views of some ACSR members, both past and present. Some members suggest that a bias exists in ACSR membership because of the strong predominance of individuals with business, corporate law, and economics backgrounds, among the group's alumni and faculty members. As Sabine Rodriguez '75, a second-year student at the Law School and a member of ACSR during its first three years says the University appears to believe that an alumnus who works in the arts in Boston is not as capable of judging the social value of shareholder resolution as a corporate lawyer. As a result, some suggest that the Corporation's overwhelming acceptance of ACSR recommendations on voting stock may be more the result of a complete identity of views between the two decision-making bodies, rather than any real advisory power the ACSR group possesses.

Although most of the protesters say they have been out of touch with the University since their graduation, all agreed that student activism at Harvard has declined dramatically since the early 70s. "People just aren't thinking in the same critical way. The level of questioning has seriously declined," Basset says, adding with a nervous laugh, "I'm glad I'm not there now."

Scott Minerbrook '74 believes that today's students question things less because "the University is not offering exactly the same academic curriculum." Attributing much of his own personal motivation for participating in the Mass Hall occupation to courses he had taken as an Afro major, Minerbrook says the University no longer allows students to "experience the same kinds of intellectual crises."

Many of the students cite reasons for the decline in activism other than the standard sociological "tight job market--pre-professional preoccupation--gotta get good grades" synthesis. Some of them reject the absence of an overwhelming issue like Vietnam. The issues are still there, only the interest is not, they suggest.

A recurrent theme voiced by the protesters is that the University has made a conscious effort since the late '60s to admit a more inward-looking group of applicants, screening out social activists who might cause the University trouble. Cann, Basset and others believe this admissions policy has been most intensely implemented concerning black applicants. Cann suggests that the University has stopped admitting many blacks of working-class background, focussing instead on admitting blacks from professional families who will be less likely to take social-activist positions.

At least one student who took part in the takeover now works for the University. The current coordinator of a federally-funded Harvard program that attempts to aid minority group and disadvantaged students in following health careers at Harvard was a graduate student in Biology at the time of his participation in the Mass Hall occupation.