Universities: A New Balance of Power

WHO rules Harvard? According to the university charter, final authority is vested in the 32-man board of overseers, or trustees; in practice, most major policy decisions are handled by the Harvard Corporation, a seven-member council that includes President Nathan Pusey, Treasurer George Bennett and five alumni (who choose their own successors). But the six-day student strike, an event for which the administration was ill prepared, subtly changed the balance of power at Harvard. Each element in the academic community in turn asserted its right to speak for the university and to prescribe cures for the institution's ills. To foment the crisis, Students for a Democratic Society had raised two issues: ROTC and university expansion. These were the specific topics of debate. Underlying these themes, though, was the larger question of how the university should be governed--and who should govern it.

Athenian Democracy. The Harvard Corporation offered its prescription on Sunday, three days after the police "bust." Five moderate students were invited to present their views to the corporation at the Quincy Street residence of President Pusey. Then the corporation created a new, 68-member advisory board of students, professors and administrators to consult with the president in times of crisis. The corporation reiterated its support of last February's faculty decision to strip ROTC of academic credit and ordered a fresh report on the university expansion program, which is accused by many students of dispossessing poor blacks from their homes. Finally, the corporation suggested that it might close the university if there are further disorders. The man in the middle, Nathan Pusey, had already received strong support from alumni. Next day, he received a vote of confidence from the board of overseers. Though they endorsed Pusey's actions and sustained the corporation's positions on ROTC and expansion, the overseers promised to re-examine the proper role of students and professors in Harvard's decision-making process.

Initially the students were in an angry, anti-administration mood; 8,000 of them gathered in Soldiers Field for an extraordinary mass meeting. When a motion repudiating the right of the corporation to close down the university was introduced, the chairman ruled it out of order. The students demanded that it be presented anyway, then passed it with an overwhelming "Yes!" that bounced off the stadium walls like a football cheer on an autumn afternoon.

The Soldiers Field meeting, called by an ad hoc committee of moderate students, looked like a modernized version of Athenian democracy, set appropriately beneath the neo-Doric colonnade that rings the top of the stadium. Three microphones in the stands let the crowd reply to statements piped over loudspeakers from a moderator's table set up outside one end zone. Red-shirted tellers in the audience counted standing votes, then passed results to yellow-jerseyed section men who ran the totals to girls operating adding machines.

The students approved a list of tough new stands, including abolition of ROTC; no further university expansion without the consent of citizens facing dislocation; establishment of a student-faculty committee to recommend changes in Harvard's government; and direct election of the corporation by students, faculty and alumni. The students also backed a new demand by Negro undergraduates that Harvard's infant black-studies program be made more "meaningful." Then they voted to continue their strike for three more days.

The professors, many of whom were annoyed because the administration did not consult them before ordering in the police, spoke at two faculty meetings broadcast live on WHRB, the student radio station. In the presence of Pusey and Arts and Sciences Dean Franklin L. Ford,* the professors agreed on the make-up of a faculty-student committee to review Harvard's governing process. The faculty also supported the conclusions of a report on expansion prepared by Professor of Government James Q. Wilson at the administration's request and issued last December. Among the conclusions reached by Wilson's committee: Harvard should establish a powerful new administrative position, that of vice president for external affairs. Two days later, the professors voted overwhelmingly that Harvard should abandon all official ties with ROTC and no longer allow it any special privileges or facilities on campus.

End of the Strike. At week's end, the students reconvened in Soldiers Field and agreed to suspend their strike for seven days. The faculty's resolution on ROTC had removed the sting from that issue--though not as far as the extremists were concerned; they set up a mock graveyard, planting wooden crosses in front of University Hall. Shortly before the students met, the corporation had given them further encouragement by announcing that it would strip ROTC of all but extracurricular status. The corporation was also trying to persuade the Cambridge courts to drop criminal charges against most of the students arrested in the bust, and it promised to find housing for families dislocated by Harvard Medical School expansion.

Neither students, faculty nor administration could claim a clear-cut victory in the Harvard strike. Student radicals had to admit that their demands were not fully met. The decisions of the administration had been repudiated by moderate students and faculty alike. What did seem clear was that Harvard's students and professors were demonstrating their ability to influence the university's future. The brightness of that future depends largely on how well the academic community of Harvard, with its long-established tradition of teaching, has learned the lessons of its very recent past.

* Who later was hospitalized with a circulatory ailment after the underground paper Old Mole published another revealing confidential document from the Harvard files. In a letter to Pusey, Ford attacked the faculty's decision to take credit away from ROTC and suggested ways of circumventing it.

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