That ended my correspondence with President Bok, though not with Dr. Bok. After the publication of her books on Lying and Secrecy and following the appearance of her article on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on the dangers of secrecy. I wrote to solicit her support--given her strongly felt views about these matters--in changing Harvard's secrecy policy. Neither in her books nor in her many articles has Dr. Bok ever mentioned that policy. I appreciate the reasons for her reticence, but since they do not apply to me and since I feel that the fight for freedom of information, like charity, begins at home. I thought it would be helpful to call the matter to her attention. If, now, Dr. Bok continues to keep silent about Harvard's secrecy policy, as, judging from her article in The Crimson, she does, it is not because she does not know of it but because she chooses not to speak of it.
On March 16, 1983 just after her Op-Ed page article was printed. I wrote Dr. Bok that even the FBI provided at least limited access to its documents under the Freedom of Information Act, but that Harvard barred all access to Corporation documents for a period of fifty years. As a result, scholars interested in the relations between government and universities during the McCarthy period were severely handicapped. I enclosed copy of a recent article I had written on Harvard and the FBI, quoting several FBI documents indicating the existence, as one of them put it, of "a most cooperative and understanding association between the Bureau and Harvard University." Efforts to discover the nature of that "association"--how it worked, with whom it was established, who was affected by it-- were frustrated by the FBI's censorship of the documents it released and Harvard's refusal to release any documents at all for fifty years, a policy more restrictive than the Official Secrets Acts of many governments. I wrote Dr. Bok that those who petitioned Harvard for a relaxation of its policy were told by the administration that the passage of fifty years, by improving the perspective from which we view the events of the McCarthy period, will aid in maturing our judgment.
I pointed out to Dr. Bok that I had corresponded with President Bok about Harvard's policy, and that he had refused me permission to quote from his letters. And I concluded:
The veil of secrecy is drawn so tight that not only is it impossible to reconstruct the events of the past, but even to reveal the existence of a debate about the meaning of those events....One does not expect...university presidents to adapt Orwell's memory hole" to the governance of universities.
When I had not heard from Dr. Bok after nearly two months. I wrote her again:
Your books on lying and secrecy have looked into some dark corners and therefore have been called "consequentia." I think you would disclose still more ambiguities if your third book were to deal with silence. Merely to show the implications of some primitive distinctions would be helpful; for example, to distinguish between the silence that gives consent and the silence that is the product of the fear to dissent--or the silence that comes when one cannot find words with which to express the emotion of release from some oppressive affliction and the silence that makes one an accomplice to such oppression.
Sometime later, in May, 1983, Dr. Bok telephoned me to say that she had not written because of the press of work at the end of the academic year. She was interested in the letters and articles I had sent, she said, and I would soon hear from her at length, but I have not.
Sigmund Diamond is Giddings Professor of Sociology and Professor of History, Columbia University.
My concern is less with Dr. Bok's moral postures this with President Bok's administrative position. I do not expect a resuscitation of my correspondence with them, but my correspondence with Harvard continues fitfully, and I can report to The Crimson that President Bok's policy on official secrecy continues. In response to my request for access to archival materials at the Law School, Assistant Dean Stephen M. Bernard informed me that no waiver of the 50-year rule would be granted. The reasons? One,"--the task of going through these materials to extract the ones relevant to your request was daunting and would involve my spending an amount of time on this project that I simply do not have." Second,"...you would probably be dissatisfied with the results of a process that involved my filtering out--on the basis of factors relating to the purposes of the 50-year rule, such as issues of individual privacy -- documents you might judge, if you had access to them, to be relevant to your inquiries." Stone-walling at Watergate relied on the doctrine of executive privilege; at Massachusetts Hall it rests mainly on administrative convenience.
In my time at Harvard, the Confidential Guide to courses was useful in providing countervailing information to official blurbs. Perhaps the unofficial recital of events I have provided will help present and future Harvard students in making educational choices by providing a context for the Core Curriculum course. "Moral Choice and Personal Responsibility," officially described as dealing with: "The role of moral deliberation and choice in such personal conflicts as those having to do with loyalty, promises, secrecy, and truthfulness, and in weighing modes of conduct and life plans." I hope it will be helpful to them, as I hope it will be helpful to those scholars who will not be deflected from the search for Veritas because they are seduced by currently fashionable cant that covers up unpalatable particular truths by parading its preference for lofty, but unexceptionable, general truths