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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