Still, these "smudges on the escutcheon" only serve to throw the more honorable University actions into ironic relief, for Harvard's actions can probably be judged better than those of many other American universities. Many other schools fired professors who invited the Fifth Amendment. Harvard expressed its disdain but in most cases allowed the professors to stay on. Until more information emerges, the best measure of Harvard's actions may be a study which Riesman conducted in 1955. "I found that what really mattered was the atmosphere among the scholars. People at Harvard at least felt free to do whatever research they wanted."

But in the '60s, Riesman noted, that atmosphere disintegrated. After the period of calm that swept the country in the late '50s and early '60s, the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture and radical student activism splintered campuses around the country into angry factions.

At Harvard, as at many other schools, the administration seemed to lose its way. Early in the decade Pusey had made statements lauding what he saw as a new burst of student activism, but he could hardly have expected the upheavals that the next few years would bring. Where Harvard's public reputation during the '50s as a foe of McCarthy produced a feeling of collective purpose, in the '60s groups within the University turned on each other. In the opinion of many, demagogery had proved to have a home on the left as well as the right. Pusey was perplexed. "I just didn't understand what was going on. I was upset that people within the University would think that it was a wicked sinful place," he said last week.

To those who were politically more moderate and conservative, the administration's failure to censure the students who harassed professors, and also its overreaction to the biggest student action--the strike of spring '69--revealed a leadership that had lost its bearing.

"In many of those situations in which professors were harassed, the administration acted in a cowardly way. In effect and sometimes in word the administration said 'they have a right to harass.' That was ludicrous," said Ford Professor of Social Sciences Daniel Bell.

Not surprisingly, this administrative lack of purpose extended to the faculty as well. Harvard had the largest Students for a Democratic Society chapter in the country, and it counted a number of prominent professors as members. "The administration was in a dilemma," said Riesman, himself a strong critic of the war and active in the peace movement, but a moderate in the sense that he rejected the revolutionary calls of the new left and the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out ideology of the counterculture. "What was the administration to do with professors who incited violence? What to do with [Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus] George Wald out there orating in the Yard?"

Given the confluence of events and personalities, the answer was a resounding nothing. Pusey, a religious man with a passion for civility and reason, seemed particularly ill-suited to handle or even comprehend the conflict. After the bust in April 1969 the Faculty, divided into factions, began to assert its power. As Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs Samuel P. Huntington said at the time. "After the bust, there was basically no legitimate authority in the University." Authority had lost all claims to respect, and the ascendancy of President Derek C. Bok in 1971 did not offer much promise--Bok was known as a cautious player of interests, and he was sure to build his power slowly and carefully.

In addition to faculty activism on the left, a number of faculty members in this period who were identified with the government or espoused ideas construed as conservative, faced student harassment. Heckling crowds disrupted the classes of, and sometimes followed around the campus, George D. Markham Professor of Government Edward C. Banfield, who had criticized Great Society welfare programs in the ghettoes; Huntington, who had advised the government on Vietnam; and particularly Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology Richard J. Herrnstein, Herrnstein had written that genetic factors contributed to intelligence more than environment, and although he never mentioned race in his articles, he was branded a racist by campus groups.

The administration dodged involvement in this conflict until early 1972 when Bok followed the Faculty Council's lead in condemning the student harassment.

But only two months later James Q. Wilson, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, wrote in Commentary that Harvard's position as a university where "free and uninhibited discussion' was possible" was slipping. "The list of subjects that cannot be publicly discussed [at Harvard] in a free and open forum has grown steadily," he wrote.

While no one compares the present troubles to those of the McCarthy years, heckling continues to be a contentious issue. It raises the same, complex issues that have been raised throughout Harvard's recent history--and the University doesn't seem to have found a satisfying answer yet