Even if the arrested students should eventually be acquired, that will give Harvard no excuse to discipline them by its own processes. The demonstrators were subjected to police action, including the threat or actuality of brutal action, thrown into jail, and obligated at least to seek legal help. In short, Harvard placed them on the in-basket of the judicial process, under circumstances where the University's power to extricate students was both practically and logically compromised...
April 25
Harvard Leavening
Basic to academic freedom is the concept that a student may follow any course of study, or study a subject that he feels suits his needs. The corollary is equally basic, that the University should try to offer any course or course of study that a reasonable number of students seek to pursue. The new Black studies programs around the country are only the most recent, and newsworthy, examples of this. Any action by anyone which seeks to limit the freedom of the University to offer courses smacks of censorship, and is distressingly similar to the recurrent incidents in which PTA's try to get books with dirty words removed from school curricula, or vigilantes try to remove such works from public libraries....
. . .Really, sir, do you think the College should be made over in your image? If you despise the flute, should no one study it? Would you deprive the military of the small leavening that its complement of Harvard-educated officers provides, and leave us to the tender mercies of an officer corps wholly derived from West Point. Annapolis, and Colorado Springs?... Thomas Lumbard '58, L '62
1974 April 15
Five Years Later
...Many of the specific victories of 1969 have disappeared. The Faculty quietly took away student power in the Afro-Am Department last year. The committee the Faculty set up to bypass its in adequate disciplinary methods developed into the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, a political disciplinary group with a catch-all constitution used primarily for suppressing student protest. The new flexibility of the president who succeeded Pusey proved to be less substantive than procedural. Students are allowed a voice, now, through student-faculty committees and even, as the University's non-reaction during the 1972 occupation of Mass Hall showed, through demonstrations. But after students have had their voice, the Corporation still does what it wants to. Last year President Bok even suggested the ROTC should come back--speaking as a private citizen, not a university president, he hastened to explain.
Universities should be democratically run for the same reasons people should choose their own governments and workers should own their factories--because people should rule themselves and the places they live and work. But in a university that is supposedly devoted to free inquiry irrespective of power or position, rule by a small group of powerful people is ridiculous as well as reactionary.
We still need 1969's students' refusal to become part of a system designed to keep control of people's lives--by promoting insidious racial and sexual distinctions, by making concessions on minor points, by all the marketing techniques made possible by modern technology, and ultimately, as in Indochina, by killing people who insist on resisting. That's why it's still important to understand the real issues of 1969. The lawlessness and violence liberals complained of came mostly from the administration and the police, but even if that hadn't been so, laying exclusive stress on it would obscure the real issue--the Strike's effort to provide an alternative to the unimaginative, compliant University offered by the rationalized, centralized bureaucracy that runs things now. We still need such an alternative, and that's why the Strike is still our history and our heritage.
1979 April 10
Ten Years After
Even more to the point, the administration of Derek Bok--the man who, more than anyone else, profited from the strike and the ensuing tumult that forced Pusey's retirement--has shown a familiar contempt for the views of students and junior faculty. When Bok and his Corporation seek to ignore the ethical dimensions of corporate responsibility, when they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of students' calls for a real hand in determining Harvard's investment policy, or when Bok and Dean Rosovsky smugly dismiss students' attempts to gain a real say in the formulation of their own curriculum, the silence is an echo. Granted, Bok is a smoother man than Pusey--as the Corporation and Overseers realized when they named him, he is the sort to rely on calm words, rather than police violence, to settle confrontations--but he has shown little more sensitivity to student concerns than did his predecessor. The echoes of 1969 grow louder with each day that Harvard waffles on its ethical responsibilities. The faces have changed, but little else.
This is why we must look to the lessons of that spring of a decade ago. Because, in fact, the strike was a good thing--it produced concessions, albeit small ones, on each of the issues of concern to the students of that day. The victories were hard-fought--most of the violence that so alarmed the press was in fact directed against student demonstrators by the police' Pusey had called in--but they were real, vivid proof that students can, when they choose, have an effect on even this school. In the 10 years that have passed since then, however, those victories have slowly eroded--partly from declining student interest, but also from a renewed tendency of the men who run Harvard to ignore those interests.