Harvard and Beyond: The University Under Siege

IT finally happened to Harvard, too. In a sequence of confrontations that has now become a deplorable custom on American campuses, a small band of student rebels seized an administration building to protest university policies and to deliberately provoke a crisis. Police were then summoned to oust the intruders; moderate students, angered at both the fact of the "bust" and what they felt was police brutality, were radicalized into organizing a strike. The three-day boycott of classes was the first in the modern history of a venerable institution that prides itself on its devotion to learning and the rational resolution of differences. It was a shock--to faculty, students and administration alike--that for a time the "Harvard way" had failed. No matter how soon the present crisis is resolved, the great temple of learning on the Charles will never be quite the same.

The conflict began at noon on Wednesday. About 250 students from Harvard and Radcliffe, most of them members of Students for a Democratic Society and the pro-Mao Progressive Labor Party, appeared outside University Hall, the three-story administration building at the center of Harvard Yard. They reiterated six "unnegotiable" demands made on the Harvard Corporation.*The issues: the abolition of ROTC and an end to what the radicals consider Harvard's "expansionist" approach to its urban surroundings.

Chanting "Fight! Fight!," the students marched into the hall, which contains the offices of the Harvard deans, though not the university president's. When one of the five deans asked the students to leave, he was jeered and shouted down. The rebels then forcibly evicted the deans and their assistants. They locked themselves inside the building, securing the doors with red bicycle chains, and proceeded to hold meetings to discuss further strategy. "The Corporation," their proclamation grandly noted, "can issue a statement when it gives in."

Locking Up a Lock-In

Initially there was widespread disapproval of their tactics: seizing a building is simply not the Harvard way. Two students in the crowd outside University Hall even burned S.D.S. in effigy, and there were cheers when Franklin L. Ford, Harvard's ranking academic dean, announced through a bullhorn that the gates of Harvard Yard would be shut at 4:30 p.m., thus locking up the lock-in. Ford also warned the radicals to vacate the premises within 15 minutes or face charges of criminal trespass. The radicals sat tight.

The radicals were also unmoved by a scathing answer to their demands from President Nathan M. Pusey. They had charged that the university planned to tear down Negro slums in Roxbury to make room for the expanding Harvard Medical School, and that members of the Corporation had illegitimate vested interests in preserving ROTC on campus: "These businessmen want Harvard to continue producing officers for the Viet Nam war or for use against black rebellions at home for political reasons." Pusey flatly denied that the university planned to destroy the housing. He also noted that Harvard had recently taken account of student objections by stripping ROTC of course credit, but was prevented from abolishing it entirely by "contractual obligations" to the Government. He began his statement by challenging the rebels' sincerity: "Can anyone believe the Harvard S.D.S. demands are made seriously?" He ended it on the same note: "How can one respond to allegations which have no basis in fact?"

Within 30 minutes after the seizure, Pusey began a six-hour round of conferences with his deans, his administrative board and the masters of the nine Harvard houses at the presidential residence, 17 Quincy Street. "It was all very informal," said one participant in the talks. "Very simply, he sought advice, and we gave it."

Letters about the CIA

In essence, Pusey had three options before him. One was to send in the police; a second was to try to negotiate with the intruders in hopes that they would abandon the building; a third was to seek resolutions from the faculty condemning the occupation, thereby encouraging the student majority to coalesce and isolating the radicals. Against substantial opposition from his advisers,

Pusey eventually decided to use force. A major factor in his decision was the legitimate fear that the radicals might rifle the university's confidential files. Friday morning, in fact, the Boston underground newspaper Old Mole printed seven Harvard documents that had obviously been discovered by the invaders. (see box page 55).

Shortly before dawn on Thursday, 400 policemen entered the Yard. About half were state troopers; the rest were drawn from the constabularies of Cambridge, Boston and other parts of the metropolitan area. Facing them on the south steps of University Hall were about 120 students, with wet pieces of torn bed sheets ready to put across their faces in case tear gas was used. Dean Fred L. Glimp of Harvard College gave the radicals one last chance. "You have five minutes to vacate the building," he announced over the bullhorn, but his words were drowned out by students chanting in unison "Pusey must go; ROTC must go!"

The troopers charged. In less than a minute, the students were pushed and shoved, punched and clubbed, and driven from the steps. Then, after unlimbering sledgehammers, chain cutters and a 4-ft.-long iron battering ram, the troopers forced their way into the building. Screams of anger and pain were heard inside. The troopers began removing the protesters, dragging some away by their long hair and butting others with billy clubs. By 5:30 a.m., a mere 25 minutes after they made the initial charge, the police had cleared the building. In all, 184 persons were arrested on charges of criminal trespass; 45 were injured seriously enough to be treated at hospitals. Four more were hospitalized: a Harvard student, a policeman and two women outsiders, one with a broken back and the other with a broken ankle.

The radicals' seizure of University Hall and their implacable demands were deliberate attempts to disrupt the good order of the university; the tactics succeeded beyond the fondest dreams of their perpetrators. Even moderate students who agreed with Pusey about the demands of the radicals were shocked that he had called in the police at all. At midday Thursday, 1,500 students assembled in Memorial Church for a heated four-hour discussion. Calling for Pusey's resignation if he refused to accept their demands, the moderates passed a resolution that students, faculty and administrators besides the president be given voting seats on the Harvard Corporation and that all those arrested be granted amnesty by the administration and the courts. They backed up their demands by calling for a three-day strike. Class attendance next day was down 75%.

Beards as at Berkeley

The largest and most important body of professors in the university--the Faculty of Arts and Sciences--preferred compromise. Dean Franklin Ford insisted to his scholars that there had been "no real alternative" to police action. "Some now insist that storm troopers entered University Hall," he said. "This is true, but they entered it at noon Wednesday, not dawn Thursday." In other words, he was saying, the storm troopers were the radical students, not the cops. Ford also emphasized that continued rifling of university files could have compromised virtually the entire faculty. Almost lightly, he noted that one of the stolen documents already published by Old Mole revealed a secret 1967 trip to North Viet Nam by Presidential Adviser Henry A. Kissinger, then a Harvard professor.

The academics also listened carefully to five students. Then the faculty resolved, 395 to 13, that all criminal charges against the Harvard intruders be dropped (the administration immediately agreed to do so) and that a committee be elected to study changes in the governing of the university. The resolution, reflecting faculty anger at not having been consulted on the police action, emphatically did not endorse President Pusey's decision, although it denounced the student seizure of University Hall. Under the circumstances, it was not only a sharp rebuke to Pusey, but it also opened up the whole question of who should rule the university. The answer implicit in the faculty resolution: the faculty.

Privately, a number of professors and administrators have worried for months about the possibility of "another Columbia." Like the troubled campus on Morningside Heights, Harvard, to many of its students, is a large impersonal school with a faceless administration and a brilliant faculty who are as much concerned with the demands of research as with the art of teaching. Despite its past reputation as a prim, proper school for the elite, Harvard today is undeniably hip (TIME, March 14). It has as many beards as Berkeley, as much grass as Columbia--and one of the nation's most active S.D.S. chapters.

At the same time, though, the majority of students and faculty never seriously expected that the campus really would explode in the way it did. The rights of dissent and discussion are sacred at Harvard, and in the past six months, the faculty has been alert to accommodate student requests that it recognized as legitimate. In addition to abolishing course credit for ROTC, the university readily agreed to establish a program of Afro-American studies when Negro students insisted on it. It is, moreover, in keeping with the Harvard way that basic decisions are not, as at less democratic universities, made only by a small inner circle of deans. Proposals for major changes are discussed widely among faculty members--and students too--before they are acted on. There may be tension at Harvard, but there is communication as well.

Quality of Life

The S.D.S. radicals and their allies had clearly violated Harvard's tradition of open communication and rational discourse. Yet there was some feeling on campus that Nathan Pusey himself, in a much lesser way, might have violated the tradition by summoning the police without gaining a consensus of his community. A distant and pompous-seeming figure to undergraduates ever since he became president in 1953, Pusey rules his campus more like a guiding presence than an order-giving commander, and he has admitted to being perplexed by youthful demands for instant action. At the same time, he says that he admires the idealism of this generation of students. As he told TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand recently: "Insofar as they are expressing a deep displeasure with the quality of life and want to see it changed, I am wholly sympathetic, and it is my hope that the students will continue to work for these ends."

Pusey said in a news conference that he called for the police because continued occupation of the administration building would have made it "virtually impossible" for the faculty to conduct its business and would have brought the university to an indefinite standstill. In defending the autonomy of Harvard against McCarthyism in the '50s, and in countless speeches since then, Nathan Pusey has amply proved his deep commitment to intellectual freedom.

That he should see no alternative to the use of force in defending that freedom is symbolic of the dilemma facing the American university today.

Violence and History

In one sense, the Harvard drama is still an isolated phenomenon. More than 6,700,000 students attend the nation's 2,500 colleges and universities. Fewer than 2% of those millions are destructive radicals, and only a handful of campuses have erupted so far. Still, that 2% amounts to perhaps 100,000 activists, quite enough for a sizable guerrilla war. Over the past year, in fact, disorders have leaped like firebrands from campus to campus--Berkeley, Brandeis, Chicago, Columbia and Howard, to name a few. At Duke and Wisconsin, the turmoil required the National Guard. Black militants and striking teachers closed San Francisco State College for five months, a shutdown punctuated by police raids, arson attempts and bomb explosions.

If perspective helps, student violence has been a recurrent problem throughout history. The college years are those of peak physical energy, a search for identity, freedom and power--all reasons to lash out at frustrating restrictions. Medieval students often scorned learning in favor of brawling and thieving; early American collegians were equally unruly. In 1825, the University of Virginia faculty requested police protection against "personal danger" from belligerent students. Professors at other 19th century U.S. campuses were shouted down, pelted with refuse. Not only have students frequently rioted against one another; they have also started quite a few revolutions.

Happily, there is an antidote for student violence. It is intellectual fulfillment --the discovery of fascinating knowledge under the guidance of a teacher one truly admires. Such was the formula at England's 14th century colleges, the seeds of Oxford and Cambridge, where a mere dozen students lived and learned together with a single master. In the early 20th century, U.S. colleges forestalled violence by offering elective courses and extravagant athletics. The consequent peace was enforced by colleges' acting in loco parentis and the growing national canon that education was salvation. Only a few years ago, U.S. collegians were widely lamented as "apathetic."

Faceless Factory

Today's bewildering change from apathy to anger is partly caused by the fact that most students are now physically (if not always emotionally) about two years older than their chronological ages. Huston Smith, an M.I.T. philosophy professor, believes that the campus discipline system, "designed for adolescents, is now appropriate for high schools and needs to be superseded by a new system befitting adults." Alternatively, many freshmen could enter college two years earlier.

The feeling that campus rules are childish is only one reason that the university's moral authority has been discredited in the eyes of the young. More significant is the profound transformation of the university from an academic cloister to'a mass industry producing society's key skills and specialists. Bigness has eroded the university as a community--just when campuses are flooded with students yearning for community. To many students and some professors, the university is now a giant corporation that manufactures human cogs for other corporations while performing "complicit" war research for the country's alleged militarists. "The college, after all," says L. D. Nachman, a young radical political theorist at the City University of New York, "functions as the personnel bureau of American society." Indeed, once the university is postulated as the linchpin in a hopelessly corrupt system, it becomes a key target in the radical politics of confrontation. Again and again, radical voices call for the transformation of the university into "a bastion or launching pad for total revolution."

Absurd as the charges often seem, they cannot be easily dismissed. No other nation has remotely matched the U.S. ambition of higher education for all. Yet, if enrollment has doubled in ten years, the results are mixed. One reason is the sheer incoherence of big, bureaucratic universities that allow "research"--much of it trivial--to overshadow everything else. Jacques Barzun likens the current U.S. campus to the medieval guild which "undertook to do everything for the town." The university today, he writes in The American University, "aids the poor, redesigns the slums, advises the small tradesmen, runs a free clinic, gives legal aid, and supplies volunteers to hospitals, recreation centers and remedial schools. The only thing the guild used to provide and we do not is Masses for the dead, and if we do not it is because we are not asked."

Movable Fiefdoms

Research has turned scholars into entrepreneurs, switching their loyalty from universities to the Government or corporations that pay the bills. As universities raid one another's top scholars, the stars take their research grants with them, as well as their close colleagues. Where faculty members were once devoted to their university, many now focus on their own movable fiefdoms. Worse for students, they view mere teaching as an onerous chore. Graduate students do most undergraduate teaching, while top professors shuttle to Washington to advise men in power.

Meantime, the pressure for diplomas has created a mandarin system or "credential society" that sows intense competition for college admission and reaps intense disappointment when teaching turns out to be only incidental to the process. Many jaded students would agree with Eric Solomon, an English professor at San Francisco State, who says that college is "a place where people simply go to wait four years before they get married or go to work." It is also a legitimate alternative to an unpopular war, a fact that worsens the tendency to flatter teachers and cheat if need be.

A recent poll conducted for FORTUNE showed that about 40% of students enter college with the hope of bringing about change in the world. And that may be the crux of the problem. In hitting out at the university, the student rebels hit out at a society that they do not respect. Why don't they? Perhaps because the society does not sufficiently respect itself. It is a commonplace that today's young are raised permissively. More important, they are raised in an atmosphere in which conviction is too often asserted either apologetically or with an excessive, bullying vehemence that only masks a lack of true certainty. Increasingly, American society has failed to persuade its young that experience (hence age) counts for something, and that reasonable patience in the attainment of goals is necessary. The cry is for instant gratification, instant realization of ideals. Rosemary Park, former president of Barnard College, urges adults to "examine their judgments. We will find then that their concern with public issues off the campus is a search for absolutes, an absolute wrong to be righted, civil rights; the exploitation of an innocent society to be protected, Viet Nam."

Professors are probably not meant to provide absolutes. Unfortunately, they no longer provide even models, unless they happen to be political activists. The civil rights movement, the Kennedys, McCarthy--each of these sufficed for a time, until submerged by death or defeat. But Viet Nam continued, Chicago receded. Nixon won. The remaining target is the nearest at hand: the vexed, vulnerable university.

By now it takes a cool head to distinguish between campus reformers, who hope to salvage the university, and campus revolutionaries, who hope to savage it. When extremists halt classes, they kill the spirit of a university in somewhat the same way that the Nazis did in the 1930s. Seizing buildings is only slightly less dangerous. A recent Harris poll showed that 89% of Americans wanted police to quell campus rebels, whatever the radicalizing effect on moderate students. Voters are pushing state legislators for repressive laws. California has more than 100 such bills before its senate and assembly: One provides five-year sentences for class disrupters; another would empower a new state agency to seize a troubled campus and fire every official, from the president down.

Do extremists want that? Some do. In their view, it would ripen the U.S. for revolution. And yet the university is one of the best possible bases from which sane radicals can expect to mount sizable political support in the U.S. Only the campus is ideally equipped to analyze or attack poverty and pollution, to appeal to the ghetto as well as suburbia. How it should so use those skills is an open question, but if radicals seriously hope to change society, destroying universities is sheer lunacy. The trouble is, of course, that their goal is less reform than romance--coming alive in action. At the Sorbonne last year, one rebel happily chalked on a wall: "The more I make revolution, the more I make love, the more I make love, the more I make revolution."

Like all visionaries, the student rebels believe that ultimately their ideas will become infectious. The cops at Berkeley, for example, roll up with their loudspeakers and say: "You are ordered, in the name of the people of California, to disperse." The students often reply with chants: "We are the people." They mean that they are fighting for the things people want: racial justice, peace in Viet Nam, economic equality.

Toward Human Scale

In the face of such cosmic complaints, specific university reforms at times seem almost minor and beside the point. And yet they are necessary, just as is the reform of other American institutions. Universities are in for trouble until they mobilize a moderate majority that respects institutions as much as individuals. The way out is to restore democratic governance on campuses across the country, chiefly by creating coalitions of moderate students and the all-too-aloof faculty. Indeed, students are being added to faculty and administrative committees and presidential selection boards at a rapid rate, admittedly in response to their demands. At some colleges, students have gained seats in academic senates, and there are proposals to place them on boards of trustees. At the University of Kansas, where there has been no disruptive protest movement, students have a majority on the disciplinary committee and equal representation on a screening committee that recently selected the next chancellor.

Beyond governance is the problem of reducing huge, impersonal universities to human scale. One approach is the "cluster" college patterned after Oxbridge colleges--autonomous units linked for services but with their own special areas of study. At the University of California in Santa Cruz, four cluster colleges, with an average of 600 undergraduates each, have been opened on a rolling site dotted with redwoods and overlooking the distant Pacific. Each college takes a differing approach to the liberal arts, and the students mingle easily with their professors in the lounges and the dining halls, to their intellectual profit. So far, Santa Cruz has five applicants for every place available. The University of Nebraska will open an experimental college next fall aimed at interdepartmental teaching. Students will also teach one another. "It will be a thinkin, live-in, learnin situation," says English Professor Robert Knoll, who will head the college. "Everybody knows we've got to do it over," he says. "Within the past generation, a new kind of student, a new kind of faculty, and a new kind of university have developed in response to a demanding world."

Even where living and learning together is not possible, efforts are being made to end student isolation. M.I.T. President Howard Johnson seeks "student advice on educational policy and curriculum design," wants students to start planning their own courses. In The Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman argue that community colleges should take over the first two years of college for virtually all high school graduates. "Senior colleges" might then de-emphasize the B.A. and enroll most students in mas-ter's-degree programs. This would ease college-teacher recruitment, and postpone the college-admission trauma two years, allowing students to choose when they are older and better equipped to do so. Another approach, being tried at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., is for an "early college," a four-year program combining the last two years of high school and the first two of college. David Henry, president of the University of Illinois, speaks for many who want to upgrade the prestige of vocational schools so that adolescents not inclined to prolonged academic study would have an acceptable substitute. "There are a lot of people in the universities who would prefer to be somewhere else," he says. "Before technical and vocational schools can make a real contribution, our society has to put a higher status on them."

Other proposals: >Abolish entrenched departments and create "overarching" disciplines in order to end artificial boundaries between subjects.

> Eliminate terminal examinations, instead rate students on their class contributions and written work, also poll them on which students contributed the most.

> Require professors to hear themselves lecture on tape recordings; the results, says Economist Peter Drucker, are "often embarrassing and usually salutary."

The Role of the University

Whatever the structural or procedural reforms, one central question remains: To what extent should universities become active participants in changing society? Even in merely training people, they change society. But activists want more. Charles Palmer, student-body president at Berkeley, argues that "the university must respond to minority needs instead of just the agricultural and business needs if it is going to be moral." Says David Kemnitzer, a 22-year-old anthropology student at Berkeley: "The university should be examining this society and constructing alternative societies. It should be enshrining Black Panther Spokesman Eldridge Cleaver and [Herbert] Marcuse. It should provide an environment where people can become loving, intelligent and sentient beings. It should be finding ways to run companies so employees don't have to have the -- exploited out of them. Universities should free people from labor."

Berkeley's Chancellor Roger Heyns disagrees: "We should play an advisory and consultative role, but the university should never be a political action unit. I don't think we should run things." Says Ray Heffner, president of Brown University: "The university must not be aloof from the most pressing problems of our time. And yet the university cannot be so committed to transforming society along definite lines that it loses its function as objective analyst and critic of society."

This disagreement between activist students and the men who run the universities will continue to provide occasions for demonstrations and disorders. Even so, the university must remain what Rosemary Park calls "the place where discussion between generations is possible." Above all, it must have the courage to remain independent, refusing to seek approval for approval's sake, whether from students, politicians or the public at large.

Such courage ought to be the ultimate product of last week's ugly confrontation at Harvard. The lesson is that force, at best, offers only temporary solutions. What the American university needs above all is a new integrity--moral authority, the unsolicited respect of the young and the old alike. Only thus can the university be immune to extremism and able to follow its calling of truth and reason--the role that Sir Eric Ashby of Cambridge University defined as providing an "environment for the continuous polishing of one mind by another."

*A governing body that is responsible for most policy decisions. It consists of the president of the university, the treasurer and five fellows, who elect their own successors.

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