When a Princeton historian wanted to research the influence of anti-Communist sentiment on academic hiring during the 1950s, most of the nation's universities opened their archives to the scholar. Harvard did not.

While other universities are making it easier for scholars to do research on the history of higher education, Harvard has stuck by its rule that denies access to administrative records authored in the last 50 years.

This policy meant a dead-end for Princeton Lecturer in History Ellen W. Schrecker, who tried for several years to obtain Harvard documents from the 1950s. Published several months ago, Schrecker's book, "No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities," has renewed the battle between scholars and universities over access to archival material.

Archivists and some historians contend it is necessary to limit access to recent materials in order to encourage donors to leave full and frank records. To have more complete long-term historical records, the archives must protect the privacy of the living people mentioned in the material, they argue.

But scholars, including Schrecker, say that by restricting access to archival materia, universities, are preventing historians from obtaining a complete understanding of historical events.

This is clearly completely counter to the [University's] stated purpose of helping scholarship," Schrecker said last week. Archival restrictions harm scholarship because when the documents are made public, many of the key participants will be dead, Schrecker said.

"Fifty years is too long for anything in this business," said Stanford sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. An expert on the McCarthy era, Lipset pointed to a personal experience that exhibits the tension between scholars and universities.

While a young professor at Columbia University Lipset was asked to write an article tracing the history of the school's sociology department.

It didn't Lipset when the department chairman asked him to remove parts critical of living professors. But much to Lipset's dismay, the chairman also edited out any critical references to the dead faculty members, concerned that it would

"offend the [faculty member's] family."

Lipset was only researching the history of a