“I was disappointed that we did not get a lot more support from faculty,” she says. “Their attitude seemed to be that they weren’t sticking their necks out and they were really looking to the students for what to do.”

Platforms and Partisanship

While faculty members may not have been lying down in the streets, many were actively opposing the war. FIPJ met for the first time on February 9 and continued to meet every third Sunday for a few months. Unlike the students who focused on public demonstrations, the professors’ first act was to draft a statement directly opposing the war.

The joint mission statement of the Harvard-MIT FIPJ received almost 200 signatures.

While members joined for many different reasons, FIPJ members forced political issues to the foreground of their debates.

McCarthy says that it was inevitable that the Faculty’s first attempt to address the conflict was political given the enormous percentage of them who protested during the Vietnam War.

“We have seen this before. The range of Faculty opinions is always going to be constrained by historical precedent,” he says.

Mendelsohn says that faculty members who had advised the federal government were eager to bring political issues to the forefront of the debate.

“Faculty had to think through the use of American force in Vietnam,” he says. “You had to develop some sort of set of politics to be anti-war.”

Mendelsohn says that the Faculty’s experience in direct political engagement turned its attention to attacking the Bush administration from the start.

Mendelsohn, who has advised presidents on issues such as the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons testing and the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict, says that the Faculty’s political enthusiasm had begun to wane with this war.

“We were a little pessimistic,” Mendelsohn says. “We sent some letters and memos and got perfunctory responses.”

But if professors were not directly engaging on the political scene in Washington, they were certainly critical of it.

“We were realistic enough to know that this administration is a lot less prone to listening to us,” Mendelsohn says.

And McCarthy says that the Faculty never shied away from direct involvement in political issues.