The Responsibility to Teach, 1966-­‐1970 Tiago Mata t.mata@ucl.ac.uk Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL Note: Please do not cite without permission. This paper is an edited version of a chapter from my book on the history of radical economics. The chapter sits between a discussion of the creation of the Union for Radical Political Economics at Ann Arbor and a review of the ASSA encounters between radical economists and their mainstream peers in the years of 1969-­‐1971, when the first outlines of radical economics were expressed. It is one of two chapters in the book dealing with academic freedom. The other addresses accusations of political discrimination and harassment in the employment of radical economists in the mid to late 1970s. In this piece I am putting together what I discovered from archival research at Michigan, Chicago and Harvard. *** In the early years of the Cold War, administrators and scholars at American Universities accepted political tests imposed by patrons and the state as a way to identify and expel potential subversives.1 The apologists of academic self-­‐government volunteered to phrase loyalty oaths and to staff investigative committees. They acted in defense of autonomy and peace at the same time as they betrayed both. The fraught relationship between university and extramural actors is the crucible of academic freedom, present since the birth of the social sciences and codified by such organizations as the American Association of University 1
E. W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York 1986), and J. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC 1999). 2
M.O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-­‐1905 1 Professors.2 This essay examines an under-­‐researched challenge in the history of American academic freedom.3 I review how a social movement imposed a different kind of political test on the University. This social movement emerged from within the campus, and comprised of a vocal minority of its undergraduate and graduate students, teaching staff and over time, even some among the tenured faculty. Just as the red scare of the late 1940s and early 50s had a repressive agenda, so did the New Left seek to purge the campus of a “foreign” agent, this time the defense establishment. The social movement had also a positive program. It looked to reinvent social science for social change and to redesign the curriculum to prepare graduates to confront authority and power in the American polity. The student protest movement unrested the campus. It scandalously unveiled toxic links with corporate and military agencies, interrupted its routine functioning, and the movement both endorsed and denied the ideal of academic freedom. Some commentators in the late sixties, following the old dichotomy of Lehrfreheit and Lernfreiheit, interpreted the New Left as seeking a novel compromise between ‘freedom to teach’ and ‘freedom to learn.’ They believed radicals wanted less of the former, more of the latter, with the curriculum updated to the appetites of their generation. This interpretation does not acknowledge that contrary to the classic conception of ‘freedom to learn’ -­‐ predicated on individual choice and bespoke education,-­‐ the student radicals militated for a collectively agreed, civically relevant 2
M.O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-­‐1905 (Lexington, KC 1975). T.L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-­‐Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore, MD 2001). R. Hofstadter and W.P. Metzger, The development of academic freedom in the United States (New York 1955). 3
Although see K. Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-­‐1975 (Princeton 2009), M. Wisnioski, Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Cambridge, MA 2012), and H. Brick and C. Phelphs, Radicals in America: The US Left since the Second World War (New York 2015). 2 education. They demanded that Universities subscribe to a ‘responsibility to teach’ the causes and solutions to poverty, racism, and militarism. In this essay I follow the career of this ideal in the years of 1966 to 1970, the height of student unrest, before the tragic events of Kent State, the end of the Vietnam war and the silencing of the campuses. Michigan At midnight 25th of March 1965, several hundred students huddled together on the freezing lawn of Ann Arbor’s central quad for a rally against the Vietnam war. They were warmed by the oratory of a stuttering Liverpudlian voice. A dedicated member of the Society of Friends, economist Kenneth Boulding was practiced in addressing assemblies with charged moral conviction. That evening’s proceedings in America’s first teach-­‐in, had been disrupted by a sequence of bomb threats. Boulding channeled the sentiment of his listeners when indignant he saw ‘a sneer across the face of America… and I don’t like it.’4 The communion of purpose on show in the 1965 teach-­‐in contrasts with the angry arguments over the tactics of protest that would follow a couple of years later. Between 1965 and 1967, University governance became the urgent and intransigent subject of campus protest and it unmade earlier alliances between faculty, students, and activists. I will contrast campus activism at the University of Michigan in the late sixties with similarly salient events at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University. The three cases give us insight into the range of intellectual and institutional responses that met the student protest movement. One can trace the geography of protest moving in the early sixties from the large universities of the Northeast westward to the public Universities of the Mid-­‐west and West, from there it spread across the nation in 1966-­‐68.5 Similarly, one can describe the causes, 4
L. Menashe and R. Radosh (eds.) Teach-­‐ins, U.S.A.: reports, opinions, documents (New York 1967); C.E. Kerman, Creative Tension: The Life and Thought of Kenneth Boulding (Ann Arbor, MI 1974). 5
See K.J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York 1993). 3 slogans, and tactics as changing and as unified. Hence, it is not a gross simplification to describe the subjects of campus protest, as trading opposition to the Vietnam war, military presence on campus, and the student deferment at mid-­‐decade, for claims of ‘student power’ over the composition of faculty, content of curricula and urban Universities’ responsibility to their neighboring communities by decade’s end. One can also glean differences in the collective responses of universities to the demands and provocations of the New Left. At Michigan only the demands within the domain of academic units were met as the faculty refused to confront the administration in support of student causes. At Chicago scholars took on the part of disciplinarians and most emphatically denied the claims of student power. It was at Harvard that the student demands got the most traction thanks to the support of the Faculty, who leveraged the unrest to advance its influence in University governance. That the student uprising could become and remain a national phenomenon is evidence of the coordinating role played by the Students for Democratic Society, and allied organizations, several of them designed at Ann Arbor such as the Radical Education Project and the Radicals in the Professions collective. The national character of the movement demonstrates a structural similarity joining American institutions of higher education. Research Universities were faced by the same patronage regime dominated by large national actors. For the social sciences these were a handful of philanthropies, for the natural and physical sciences the defense establishment and corporate research and development.6 A few leading university administrations, conspicuously the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sought partnerships with major federal agencies and corporations but at most institutions administrators stood by as the faculty took the initiative of bidding for contracts and 6
H. Heyck, ‘Patrons of the Revolution: ideals and institutions in postwar behavioral science’, Isis, 97, 3 (2006), 420–446. P. Mirowski and E. Sent, 2008. ‘The Commercialization of Science and the Response of STS’ in E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. E. Lynch and J. Wajcman (eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, (Cambridge, MA 2007), 635-­‐690. 4 donations.7 The professoriate enjoyed ample discretion to manage personnel and funds. At Michigan, institutes proliferated to captivate funds giving Professors of renown near fiefdoms.8 In 1967, Michigan was the second largest recipient of federal obligations for research, although at some distance from first place MIT. Federal funds made up for three quarters of Michigan’s research budget in the mid-­‐1960s, industry contracts brought just over 5%, the philanthropies made for just under 5% of the budget, and the University budget funded the remainder.9 A radiant example of Michigan’s academic entrepreneurship was project Phoenix. It tapped alumni contributions, government and business to build a nuclear reactor on campus for the study of civilian uses of radiation. The device began operation in 1957 and took the name of Ford Motor Company after the firm’s pledge of a million dollars for its construction. An evangelist for this enterpreneurial University was Clark Kerr, the President of the University of California. Kerr in an (in)famous play of words transmuted the uni-­‐versity into a ‘multi-­‐versity’.10 Kerr, a labour economist, spoke of his institution as part of the ‘knowledge industry’ and himself as a ‘captain of industry’. His vision of indiscriminate pluralism, of an institution ready to meet all causes and clients, was abject to the students experiencing a political awakening. They took it to be a debasement of the University’s humanism by a commercially minded licentiousness, as ‘the Kerrian whore is unlawfully joined’ ‘not to the public, but to its many publics’. A detour through Berkeley is justified because Berkeley 7
R. L. Geiger, Research & relevant knowledge (Oxford 1993). 8
D. A. Hollinger, ‘Academic Culture at Michigan, 1938-­‐1988: The Apotheosis of Pluralism,’ in M. A. Lourie (ed.) Intellectual History and Academic Culture at the University of Michigan: Fresh Explorations (Ann Arbor 1989). 9
National Science Foundation, Federal support to universities and colleges. (Washington, D.C. 1967), table 12, 24. University of Michigan, The President’s Report for 1966-­‐67 (Ann Arbor, MI 1967), 151. 10
In his Godkin Lectures on delivered at Harvard University in 1963. C. Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA 1963). 5 and Michigan had much in common, but although the story of Berkeley is often told and well known, Michigan is less well understood. The President of the University of Michigan, Harlan Hatcher, lacked the visionary insight of his Berkeley counterpart, but his restraint did not denote a fundamental difference in orientation between the two Universities. Michigan compared with its eastern (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton) and its public university competitors (Berkeley, Wisconsin) excelled at comprehensive fact collection in neglect of theory or interpretation. Michigan social scientists were proud of their distinction in quantitative social research. The Institute for Social Research claimed its prestige and commercial success thanks to its vast collection of cross-­‐
section data sets, notably the Survey of Consumer finances (with data on savings, assets, spending and consumer attitudes) and the National Election Study (describing voter behavior and profiles).11 The toil of seeking clients and striking a balance between intellectual interest and commercial value was unwelcomed by most faculty and still Michigan social scientists took pride in the technical competence and empirical focus that was its outcome, and in how their facts circulated in the American polity. Michigan housed numerous institutes designed to inform policy making, including the Center for Research on Economic Development, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Institute of Public Policy Studies, and the Population Studies Center. Michigan’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics oversaw the design of the first macroeconometric model of the United States published in 1955 by Lawrence Klein and Arthur Goldberger. Michigan economists’ reputation within policy circles earned Gardner 11
Hollinger, ‘Academic Culture at Michigan’. The Institute for Social Research budget was not part of the University, and its mix was far more commercial than the standard research unit at Ann Arbor. J. M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-­‐1960 (Piscataway, NJ 2011). The National Election Study led to the publication of The Voter Decides and The American Voter. 6 Ackley in 1964 the invitation to chair the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.12 Professional sobriety and a suspicion of theory were salient features in the consultancy work of the Michigan professors and they may have even inoculated Ann Arbor’s activists with their distinctive pragmatism. The freedom to create institutes, to sponsor appointments, to enter contracts and even retain overhead, offered no guaranties of autonomy or security for the faculty. In their records of academic freedom as in their extramural entrepreneurship, Michigan and Berkeley are alike. In the famous 1949-­‐50 loyalty oath controversy at the University of California, eighty faculty members refused to sign the oath imposed by the President and the Regents. In an effort by the faculty to assert control over the disciplinary proceedings, Kerr served on a panel of peers that cross-­‐examined the offenders and vouched for their integrity. President Sproul disregarded this guidance, and those that did not repent, thirty one, were fired. What is often forgotten is that the faculty panel recommended that six of the original eighty be dismissed and came to this judgment without any evidence of disloyalty, on account of the eight’s failure to prove their innocence to their peers.13 The equivalent events at Michigan in 1953, less remarkable in the number of careers and lives disrupted, were singularly pathetic. They were prompted by Congressman Kit Clardy’s attempt to increase his reelection chances by hosting one-­‐man hearings of the House of Un-­‐American Activities Committee at Lansing. Like at Berkeley, a faculty committee exonerated all those that admitted scrutiny of their political beliefs by their colleagues. In this conception, there was no violation of academic freedom provided that the inquisitor was a fellow scholar, even when the political test was 12
Less happily, after years of outspoken Council chairmen, Ackley inaugurated an age of the Council’s acquiescence to the President. For a contemporary indictment see L. S. Silk, ‘Truth vs. Partisan Political Purpose,’ The American Economic Review, 62, 1/2, (1972), 376–378; an also polemical account that brings some historical perspective is H. Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America: Policy in Pursuit of Reality (Washington, D.C. 1996). 13
Schrecker, No Ivory Tower. 7 alien to scholarship. At Michigan like at Berkeley, the faculty’s gestures of self-­‐government were of little consequence, two of the three who refused to attend Clardy’s hearings were fired.14 By the early 1960s it was plausible to recall such traumas as the excess of an anxious era interred with Joseph McCarthy and Kit Clardy. As President of the University of California, Kerr proudly reappointed several of the dismissed in the oath controversy. This mood of atonement explains why the Michigan professors were so proud of their civic leadership and ingenuity when they initiated the teach-­‐in movement. But there was a great measure of self-­‐
delusion in this celebration, since it purposely ignored that the teach-­‐in was born of compromise. The original idea by a group of nineteen professors was for a strike, euphemistically labeled a ‘work moratorium’ to protest the Vietnam war. Upon hearing this news, Michigan’s Governor George Romney and the legislature demanded immediate punishment for the proponents. President Hatcher however was patient and with the mediation of Boulding and others, the plans were revised for a voluntary, minimally disruptive overnight festival of debates and rallies. In the words of Marshall Sahlins, who conceived the format of the teach-­‐in, ‘we will show them how strong we feel about the bombings – and teaching.’15 The University administration eagerly heeded all the requests of the protesters under the new format. Political expression on campus was not free of external scrutiny and meddling but it was indubitably more vigorous than it had been in the early 1950s under the shadow of McCarthyism. The University of Michigan’s commencement address of 1966 was delivered by John Kenneth Galbraith on the subject of ‘the pleasures and accomplishments of the recent past and the horrors of the immediate future.’ Galbraith congratulated Ann Arbor for 14
H. H. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817-­‐1967 (Ann Arbor, MI 1967). 15
J. Rothman, ‘The Radical Liberal Strategy in Action: Arnold Kaufman and the First Teach-­‐In,’ Social Theory and Practice, 2 (1972), 33–45. 8 changing America’s thinking and mobilizing interest and passion for foreign relations.16 Galbraith’s address spoke to the two crucial campus controversies of that year: the revision in the student exemption for the military draft and a reinvigorated House of Un-­‐American Activities. In March 1966, the agency that administered conscription in the United States, the Selective Service System, requested Universities to rank their male students. The lower half of freshmen, lower third of sophomore, lower quarter of juniors and lower three quarters of seniors were to be reclassified as eligible for the draft. The change to the student exemption and the escalation of the Vietnam war was met with immediate and vigorous response at Ann Arbor. Student groups and prominently the chapter of SDS, VOICE political party, made the case for civil disobedience. They argued that no ranks were being computed as a matter of course, and the University could refuse to comply, as Cornell, Antioch, Wayne State, and San Francisco State were promising to do. To match rising student numbers in the previous decade, much of the teaching and grading at Michigan was done by graduate students. Several of them were longstanding campus activists and refused to release grades. Their defiance did not last. The University bureaucracy threatened that in the absence of grades it would award fails to all students and rankings would still be calculated. On the eve of the final exams the group of teaching assistants surrendered the grades.17 Compliance with the requests of the Selective Service System made the faculty and administrators at Ann Arbor seem docile and complicit but without malice; events a few months later offered a grimmer prospect. On August 11, Vice-­‐President for Student Affairs, psychologist Richard Cutler, ordered release to the House of Un-­‐American Activities Committee of names of students and faculty members of three campus organizations, VOICE –
16
J. K. Galbraith, Foreign Policy, Politics, and the University (Ann Arbor, MI 1966). 17
M.C. Brazer ‘The Economics Department at the University of Michigan’ i n S. Hymans (ed.), Economics and the World Around It. (Ann Arbor, MI 1982), 133–275 and 248-­‐9. 9 SDS, W.E. Dubois Society, and the Committee to Aid the Vietnamese.18 HUAC was holding hearings on whether to forbid fundraising for the Viet Cong and intended to use the 65 named as incriminating witnesses. The request was misguided since neither VOICE nor the Dubois club (the latter existing only on paper) had fundraised for the Viet Cong. In a ‘Report to the University Community’, Cutler ‘deeply regretted’ not having informed the involved before giving away their details but accepted no criticism for his acquiescence to HUAC. The liberty with which the administrators dealt with the identity of students and faculty was testimony that the University was not a sanctuary for critical thinking as many believed. Whatever trust remained in University officialdom was depleted. And yet, the ideal of an academic community autonomous and impervious to foreign pressure gained new lease of life with calls for students participation in the running of the University. At Ann Arbor it was a joyous revival of SDS’s Port Huron slogan of ‘participatory democracy.’ The collaborative moral outrage of the 1965 teach-­‐in was replaced in 1967 and after by a exhausting campaign to change University governance. The prospects for civil disobedience (the ranking) and for shelter to political discourse and action (the HUAC episode) were believed to rely on giving students a voice in University policy and management. Most of the functions and services such as housing, financial aid, admissions, placement, counseling, health service, to which students sought greater say, were assigned to Cutler and his office. In 1967-­‐69 Cutler fought off successfully the students’ demands over such matters as a student-­‐run bookstore and better and cheaper housing.19 Cutler finally left academia for business consultancy as the founder of Attitudes, Inc., and in 1973, published a 18
The Subpoena was addressed to Dr. Duncan Sells, ‘Director of Student Organizations’, and the VPs did not want the employee to be in trouble with contempt of court. But then the employee was not asked to decide… 19
H. H. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817-­‐1992 (Ann Arbor, MI 1994). 10 book blaming the University for lack of focus on teaching, and for creating a radical consciousness that weakened the nation.20 The substantive reform the activists sought was repeatedly averted. However there was consultation of students within most academic departments. A centerpiece of calls for ‘student power’ was curriculum reform and the hiring of new faculty that could link subjects to pressing political issues. At the economics department, for instance, a few courses were added in this spirit. A course on the guetto began in 1968, another on Marxian and Neo-­‐
Marxian Economics started in 1970.21 Success was limited and it relied on the sympathy of a handful of professors, in the case of economics of two senior members of the department who redirected their research to radical concerns. Chicago If at Michigan the faculty and students could find common cause, at Chicago the faculty came together to purge protests from the campus, rejecting any consideration of their merits. Disciplinary actions were pursued as a principled stand against coercion and as a defense of academic freedom. At Chicago the administration and faculty rejected not an ambitious civically minded call of ‘responsibility to teach’ and curriculum reform but rather a tamer call to preserve existing diversity. At Chicago like at Michigan, protests intensified in 1966 with changes to the student exception to the draft. Students were split by the demands of Students Against the Rank that called for no rank to be calculated and the Students for Free Choice requesting that each student be allowed to decide whether to share his placement or not. Albeit in practice, a student withholding the information would be found delinquent and as a result be made eligible for the draft, the semblance of individual choice was attractive and the University 20
R. L. Cutler, The Liberal Middle Class: Maker of Radicals (New Rochelle, NY 1973). 21
Ibid. and URPE, ‘Political Economy for the University of Michigan’ Newsletter of the Union for Radical Political Economics, 2, (1970), 12–16. 11 adopted it as its policy. The University of Chicago would formally remain out of the relationship between student and draft board and not violate Selective Service rules.22 In response to this decision there were teach-­‐ins on April 14, and again on May 15 and 25.23 Some students went on hunger strike. More significantly for later events, Students Against the Rank led a 400 person sit-­‐in of the administration building from May 11 to 16. Appalled by to the five day sit in, the Council of the University Senate resolved that ‘any student who engages in such an act be subjected to appropriate disciplinary action, not excluding expulsion.’24 At the same time, a special committee of students and faculty was charged with review of the University policy on the rank, with three students ‘against the rank’ and three ‘for free choice.’ The chairperson was Law Professor Allison Dunham, and the committee included social scientists Benjamin Bloom, Fred Eggan, and George Stigler. Their report deemed the ranking as without merit as a record of educational attainment and a source of ‘moral dilemma and mental anguish’ for faculty and students.25 Although the report’s practical recommendations did not differ from the status quo, it was a clear statement against the rank and thus agreed with the protesters. 22
‘Immediate Release’, ref. 66-­‐236, 5-­‐7-­‐1966; and ref. 66-­‐266, 5-­‐24-­‐1966, by Office of Public Relations, in University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 33, folder 9-­‐10, ‘Students against the Rank, 1966-­‐1967’. 23
Hans Morgenthau, after his fallout with the Democratic administration, was a regular participant in debates about Vietnam, in May 25 1966 Mandel Hall filled to listen to Morgenthau debating a State department official, and in February 3, 1967, Morgenthau debated Charles Wolf of RAND. B. Lyttle, The Chicago Anti-­‐
Vietnam War Movement (Chicago 1988). 24
Letter by Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr. to Faculty and Students of the University of Chicago, April 30, 1969 University of Chicago Archives. 25
‘Report of special student-­‐faculty committee on the University policy of submitting rank to draft boards’ June 1966, University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 33, folder 9-­‐10, ‘Students against the Rank, 1966-­‐1967’. 12 It took a year before the new disciplinary regulations of May 1966 were exercised. On May 29 1967, a anti-­‐draft demonstration turned into another takeover of the administration building with 120 students engaged in a ‘study-­‐in’ for several hours. Fifty-­‐eight students were suspended for the following Fall term, although most punishments were not carried out. The procedure and precedent was however put in place whereby employees of the University, typically the Deans, served a ‘summons’ to students found engaging in actions deemed ‘disruptive.’ The student would face a hearing at a disciplinary committee. The University of Chicago professoriate was thus codifying ‘disruption’ as a felony. It permitted political views to cohabit in the campus provided they never entered into open confrontation. Students were free to meet and express views on University grounds provided they did so to the converted and in their own time. The New Left conception of an universalist moral mission was incompatible with this formulation of campus discipline and this understanding of pluralism. In the anti-­‐draft and anti-­‐war campaigns, students had the solidarity of members of the Chicago faculty, the most prominent being Richard Flacks, Marlene Dixon, and Jesse Lemisch. They were members of SDS and acted as sponsors to numerous campus political clubs and societies, including SPAC, a student political party.26 Flacks was a sociologist, a graduate of the University of Michigan and one of the drafters of the Port Huron Statement. Dixon was a sociologist with a doctorate from UCLA and was a member of the Committee on Human Development. Lemisch was an historian with a doctorate from Yale. They were forceful speakers, dedicated and popular teachers. By the summer of 1969, neither of the three remained at Chicago. 26
University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 30, folder 5, ‘Student Political Action Committee, 1965-­‐1969’. The first registration from is from 1965. The 1966 registration explained the purpose of the society as ‘to work for a university + a society organized around the principle that the people should participate in the decisions that affect their lives.’ 13 Lemisch was the first to leave. In December 1966 his contract was not renewed. The standard procedure at Chicago was for 3 plus 3 year appointments followed by a tenure decision. A non-­‐renewal for the second 3 years indicated disbelief in the ability of the scholar to secure tenure. The students wondered if it was Lemisch’s involvement with the May 1966 sit-­‐in that doomed his continuation at Chicago and asked for an explanation. They petitioned for a reappointment and demanded transparency in employment reviews.27 Two years later, Dixon faced the same decision. The uproar was immediate and this time students wanted more than transparency. A student committee of only a few dozens, but that gathered supporters in the weeks that followed, demanded that Dixon be rehired, and that students be given equal vote with faculty over hiring and re-­‐hiring. The protesters had numerous reasons to believe Dixon’s dismissal was prejudiced. Dixon was scandalous. She had walked out of the innauguration procession for University President Levi to join student hecklers. She prioritized teaching and public speaking before scholarly publication. She was among a minority of women on the faculty.28 To quiet rumors and suspicions, a committee was appointed to review the decision. Its report explained that the Committee on Human Development was unanimous in support of Dixon, but sociology was unanimously against. Dean Gale Johnson was the final arbiter reading Dixon’s tenure submission and sanctioning dismissal. He reported lack of enthusiasm by external referees that had examined Dixon’s research writings. The committee also reviewed the quality of Dixon’s teaching, the centerpiece of the protesters’ case in her defense. From interviews with students it concluded that ‘Mrs Dixon is an energetic, warm, dedicated, open and compelling teacher’ but has ‘not demonstrated […] power and incisive 27
‘A Political Firing at the University of Chicago’ UC-­‐SDS. University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 33, folder 9-­‐10, ‘Students against the Rank, 1966-­‐1967’. 28
D. Janson, ‘U. of Chicago Protest Seeking Major Change in Hiring Policy,’ New York Times, 2 February 1969, 61. 14 competence for inducing advanced students to the higher levels of scholarship.’29 Its judgment was that Dixon might have impressed the freshman but could not direct the scholar-­‐to-­‐be. As the review committee was conducting its inquiry, on January 23, 1969, a petition by 85 students issued an ultimatum, either their demands were met or else ‘militant action’ would be taken. It was as promised. Four days later, several students filed into the offices of Dean Johnson demanding that he discuss the merits of the case. Johnson was held ‘captive’ for two hours. The students did not physically restrain him but they threatened to take files and Johnson felt obliged to stay. File cabinets were eventually opened and Johnson at his desk witnessed two votes by the group on whether the files should be seized. In both instances a majority said yes, but their resolve faltered and nothing was taken. Protesters left once they were served official notice that they were being disruptive and thus avoided disciplinary sanction.30 Two days after the incident in Johnson’s office and with broadcast on the community radio of the University of Chicago, 350 students voted to defy disciplinary norms and occupy the administration building, 200 were against. Early morning the next day, students moved into the building carrying bedrolls. They filled corridors and stairways to make themselves a nuisance, while staff members closed up files and relocated elsewhere on campus. By noon two hundred students were inside the building and the incident was 29
‘Report of the Faculty Committee to Review the decision with regard to the reappointment of Assistant Professor Marlene Dixon’ University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐
1975, box 123, ‘Demonstrations, Chronology of Developments Relating to Sit-­‐In At Administration Building, 1969.’ The committee panellists were Robert Fogel, Jacob Getzels, Helen Perlman, Stuart Rice, Susanne Rudolph, M. Brewster Smith and Hanna H. Gray (chairman). 30
Chicago Maroon, January 28, 1969, and ‘Statement to University Disciplinary Committee’ Charles O’Connell, February 8, 1969, University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 2, folder 14 ‘Dixon, Marlene, sit-­‐in activities, 1969.’ 15 declared ‘disruptive’.31 One estimate placed 400 students in the occupation that evening. Elsewhere an assembly of one thousand condemned the action in a 4 to 1 vote but asked for amnesty for the protesters. The previous year at Columbia University the forced eviction of the occupiers of Hamilton Hall led to 148 injured and 712 arrests.32 Seeking to avoid ‘another Columbia,’ President Edward H. Levi refused to call in the city police or the National Guard to restore order.33 Levi’s patience was only superficially magnanimous since it was coupled with creating a special disciplinary committee that within a few days of the occupation began issuing subpoenas to the ‘disruptive’ students. With members of the law faculty at the lead, the University of Chicago made its own swift justice. Over a hundred students were identified and summoned. On February 12, the committee reviewing the Dixon decision shared its conclusions. It recommended that Dixon be offered a one-­‐year terminal reappointment at the Committee on Human Development, solely because the resolution of her status had been delayed by controversy. Dixon rejected the offer and prepared to move to McGill University. On February 15, the few student protesters who were still occupying the administration building voted to end the sit-­‐in. They explained their defeat as ‘there just wasn’t enough faculty and student support of us. Perhaps our movement is too radical for the campus at this time.’34 The 31
D. Janson, ‘300 Stage Sit-­‐In at U. Of Chicago,’ New York Times, 31 January 1969, 18. 32
Vivid accounts of the Columbia uprising can be found in J.L. Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (New York 1969); R. Kahn, The Battle for Morningside Heights (New York 1970). 33
The approach was not unique to Chicago. At the University of Wisconsin the campus police force and new disciplinary codes were being reinforced to preserve self-­‐policing. At Brooklyn College in 1968 and at Oberlin College in 1969 protests had been dealt with academic discipline. UPI, ‘61 Suspended by U. of Chicago as Students’ Protest Continues,’ New York Times, 3 February 1969, 22. 34
‘Students End Chicago U. Sit-­‐In as Leaders Concede Its Failure,’ New York Times, 15 February 1969, 16. 16 administration had won by seemingly doing nothing, waiting for the protesters to be isolated and exhausted and dulled by a diet of peanut butter sandwiches. The ‘disruption’ had in fact been minimal. No offices were damaged. No teaching or research was interrupted. The administration had been forced out of its premises into the President’s residence and the squatters missed classes. The sanction however was not mild. On the judgment of the disciplinary committee, forty-­‐two students involved in the sit-­‐in were expelled, eighty-­‐one students were suspended, and three were placed on probation.35 To many in the faculty this result was a heroic feat by ‘scholars and scientists who sacrificed countless hours of labor, under difficult and even dangerous circumstances, in order to preserve the integrity of the University.’36 This was an overestimation of the threat. The number of students involved in the sit-­‐in was by many accounts small, by February 5 there were less than 50 left in the building. On February 8, the group was physically attacked by ‘non-­‐university’ persons and the day after it was target of a bomb threat, inside a ticking closet they found an oven timer.37 The incidents of harassment were not reported, investigated or sanctioned. The punishment of the occupiers was not proportional to the disruption. Instead it matched the anxiety that the occupation engendered. During and after the sit-­‐in the Chicago professors recruited alarm and anger at the students’ attempted coercion. The Dean of the Law School expressed eloquently the frame of mind in a convocation speech in March. The threat, he noted, was ‘the violence that lurks in provocative non-­‐violence.’ The strength of feeling levied against the protest tactics foreclosed 35
‘Report on Disciplinary and Appeals Decisions’ Charles O’Connell, April 8, 1969, University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 2, folder 14 ‘Dixon, Marlene, sit-­‐in activities, 1969.’ 36
Open Letter to alumni, by Edward Rosenheim, Jr., 9 April 1969. 37
Chronology of Significant Events, Wednesday, February 5, 1969’ Chronology of Significant Events, Saturday, February 8, 1969’ Chronology of Significant Events, Sunday, February 9, 1969’, University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐1975, box 123, ‘Demonstrations, Chronology of Developments Relating to Sit-­‐In At Administration Building, 1969.’ 17 any consideration of student demands to have a say in their education. On the second day of the occupation, Bruno Bettelheim called a press conference to diagnose ‘Many of these kids are very sick’.38 The head of the department of sociology concurred a week later by adding that the protesters suffered from a bad case of displacement. Similarly uncharitable was Edward Shils’s scathing public evaluation of Dixon’s research. In a long document Shils described Dixon’s submitted writing as repetitive with ‘no sign of independent imagination, new insight, or erudition’ and ‘at best unqualifiedly mediocre.’ More cool headed, the economists Milton Friedman and Ted Schultz held an early morning press conference advising that punishment should be enough to discourage future use of force and coercion by students.39 In private correspondence, Levi was greeted by the support of the faculty, alumni and colleagues from other institutions. Praise from Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow was quick, flat but sincere. By contrast, sixty four faculty members petitioned for amnesty, quoting the American Association of University Professors’s judgment that disciplinary committees were illegitimate without student representation. Folk singer Pete Seeger wrote to Levi that ‘I know some of the young people’ and also asked for amnesty. The voices of discontent however were the exception, too few and too quiet. Among the academic divisions only the 38
Janson, Donald, ‘Chicago U. Ready For Sit-­‐In Siege,’ New York Times, 1 February 1969, 32. 39
‘Seven of the papers are about engineers…’ by Edward Shils, February 12, 1969, University of Chicago Office of Student Activities Records 1921-­‐1981, box 2, folder 14 ‘Dixon, Marlene, sit-­‐in activities, 1969.’ ‘For Release: A.M. Tuesday, May 13, 1969’, ref. 69-­‐195, 5-­‐9-­‐69, Office of Public Information, University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐1975, box 125, folder 1 ‘Demonstrations, comments, faculty, 1969’. ‘A chronology of significant developments relating to the occupation of the administration building’ February 5, 1969. University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐
1975, box 123, ‘Demonstrations, Chronology of Developments Relating to Sit-­‐In At Administration Building, 1969.’ 18 mathematicians seemed to be in majority for pardoning the students. The bulk of the faculty wanted exemplary punishment and applauded Levi and the disciplinary committee.40 The University of Chicago’s peculiar brand of conservative elitism aids in explaining its uncompromising disciplinary response. Although the University consulted students on a number of welfare issues, it barred them from having a say on the design of the curriculum and who was to teach it. The militant attempt to protect a popular teacher turned into an exemplary purge. The vehemence of Chicago’s faculty’s reaction to student direct action was shared by many beyond Hyde Park. A survey of 1969 recorded seventy-­‐seven percent of professors endorsing expulsion or suspension of students disrupting the functioning of colleges even if only a quarter thought that demonstrations had no place on campuses.41 Walter Galenson from Cornell spoke of: ‘only one solution to close the place down for several years, and to start with a new corps of students -­‐ and perhaps a new faculty as well. . . . the neo-­‐fascists must be rooted out regardless of other considerations. … It is they or us.’ Kerr, always ready to look for a mediated compromise, was sympathetic to student power but also cautioned that the initial losers may be the Dean of Students and the President but soon may turn out to be the faculty.42 Flacks, the last of the sponsors of ‘student power’, had earned tenure at the College, but the department of sociology offered him only a fixed contract of two additional years. The campus newspaper editorialized in his support, arguing that ‘personality and politics have gotten in the way of the sociology department's thinking’ and that ‘the university cannot 40
Letter from Hannah Arendt to Levi, May 1, 1969; letter from Saul Bellow to Levi, March 13, 1969; letter from Pete Seeger to Levi, May 5, 1969; letter from I. N. Herstein to Levi, March 14, 1969, University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐1975, box 125, folder 1 ‘Demonstrations, comments, faculty, 1969’. Anon, ‘64 Faculty Sign Disciplinary Petition’ The Maroon, 1969, 1. 41
E.C. Ladd, Jr, and S. M. Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (New York 1975), 34-­‐35. 42
C. Kerr, ‘Governance and Functions’, Daedalus, 99, 1, (1970), 112. 19 afford to lose [him].’43 On May 6, Flacks was found by a student slumped on his desk, bleeding from head wounds and two skull fractures. A man impersonating a reporter from St. Louis gained access to Flacks’ office and assaulted him.44 Flacks never recovered from some of his injuries. In June 1969 he left Chicago for Santa Barbara. Harvard By contrast to Chicago where student demands were unheeded, the students’ craving for critical social science was met at Harvard, albeit more so by benign neglect than by genuine encouragement from the academic departments. A number of student initiated courses were crucial in the unraveling of Harvard’s famous occupation and strike of April 1969. The most important initiatives of this kind began in the Fall of 1968, in the course list of the Department of Social Relations. The course Social Relations 148 ‘Social Change in America’ was led by Thomas J. Cottle and attracted nearly 350 students split into 23 sections. In the Spring term, Social Relations 149 ‘Radical Perspectives on Social Change’ was led by Jack Stauer with 46 sections and 775 students registered, about one eight of the student body.45 The popularity that greeted the 149 course was crucial to the events that unfolded at Harvard in the Spring of 1969. Although the protests addressed several grievances (in various versions six, seven, eight demands) the central issue was once again the University’s relationship with the defense establishment. After the campaigns against the Selective Service ranking, repealed in March 1967 with the return of a full undergraduate deferment, SDS outlined a national strategy to eradicate the military presence from the campuses. One facet of that campaign was to denounce military research, as happened at Chicago and Columbia for instance around 43
‘Professor Flacks’ Editorial of Chicago Maroon, May 30, 1969. 44
Newsweek, May 19, 1969, p. 19. 45
Nossiter, B.D., 1969. Soc Rel 148-­‐9. Boston Globe. 20 the Institute of Defense Analysis, another facet was to protest Reserve Officer’s Training Corps programs.46 On December 1968 students protesting the ROTC programs sought to gain admission to a Faculty of Arts and Sciences (‘Faculty’) meeting at Paine Hall.47 Of the hundred students involved nine were identified, suspended, and lost their scholarships. On February 4, 1969, the ‘Faculty’ discussed the ROTC programs and heeding student demands, requested the governing boards to deny credit to the programs. The Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation, upon which rests most of the executive power at Harvard University, interpreted the wishes of the ‘Faculty’ as less than full elimination of ROTC but as a change in its status and privileges. SDS and allied groups began planning a response. In that planning, occupation was discussed and in an open vote rejected, so the University Hall takeover was part design, part wild action by the more militant wing of SDS. The students entered the building at noon April 9, by 1:45 pm they had been warned, by 2 pm they had been suspended and by 3 pm there was a restraining order issued by a Superior Court Judge. Estimates were of 350 to 450 students inside the building, and three thousand more onlookers on Harvard Yard in the late afternoon. Their demands were varied. Amnesty for the Paine Hall protesters and the end of ROTC headed the list, but they also called for the creation of an African-­‐American studies program, and for halting Harvard led gentrification seen to be displacing its poorest 46
On the changes to the selective service system and national campaigns against the draft see M.S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC 2003). SDS favoured a draft lottery as the only socially just arrangement. ‘Get out of IDA’ by UC/SDS, and ‘Toward Institutional Resistance’ by Carl Davidson, University of Chicago Office of the President, Levi Administration Records 1918-­‐
1975, box 121, ‘Demonstrations, 1966-­‐1975.’
47
Only a small portion of the records generated by the Harvard committees of 1969-­‐71 are available for research, most remain restricted with 50 or 80 years embargos. It was only possible for me to research the most publicly available documents, distributed to the Harvard community and preserved in the subject file ‘Harvard University Student Strike, 1969: General File’ in the Harvard University Archives, henceforth ‘Student strike, general file’. 21 neighbors. The President and the Deans responded to the occupation as ‘a direct assault upon the authority of the University’. On the dawn of April 10, 400 local police and state troopers, nearly a one to one to protesters, forcefully evicted the protesters with 48 registered injuries and 196 arrests. The police raid was broadcast on TV and made frontpage of newsprint in the weeks that followed. 48 Time magazine reported ‘a shock – to faculty, students and administration alike’ that at Harvard ‘the rational resolution of differences … had failed.’49 The headline was perceptive. The students were shocked and in response went on strike. Three quarters of the student body boycotted classes for a week. On a major gathering the next Monday, April 14, an estimated six thousand persons congregated at Soldier’s Field stadium, to review the crisis. Students and faculty took the pulpit, but the main protagonists were the teaching assistants. Alexander Korns drew the loudest applause when he motioned ‘This body repudiates the right of the Harvard Corporation to close this University.’ Having just closed the University themselves, the students and teaching fellows wanted to assert their claim upon the institution. The motion that was endorsed at Soldiers Field reiterated the demands of the University Hall occupation and added a call for restructuring the governance of Harvard, with larger roles for students and faculty in decision making and a reform of the composition of the Board of Overseers and in particular of the Corporation. The motion admitted disciplinary action against the protests provided that it was executed by a body including faculty and students. The group of teaching fellows, reconstituted with a title of Committee for Radical Structural Reform and with a postal address on campus, volunteered to monitor the execution of the demands but entrusted the ‘Faculty’ to fill in the details. 48
Ladd and Lipset, The Divided Academy, prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, situated the sixties protests within a wider frame of Harvard’s historical experience with politics and student unrest. The long outlook however led the authors to shy from discussing the issues of their own time. 49
Time, April 18, 1969. In national newspapers it was front-­‐page news, the majority running reports of the unfolding events over several days. 22 The ‘Faculty’ met on the second day of the strike. In a motion by Wassily Leontief, it ‘deplore[d] the entry of the police into any university’ but expressed the full range of feelings on whether the students or the President or no one was to blame. Leontief speaking to the Boston Globe, believed that calling the police had been ‘drastic’ and that ‘the confidence of many members of the Faculty in the administration [was] undermined.’ The ‘Faculty’ asked that no criminal charges be laid on the students. It also created a committee with a triple charge of inquiring into the ‘causes of the crisis’, disciplinary action for the protesters, and suggestions for governance reform. This Committee of Fifteen took more definitive shape in the day of the Soldiers Field meeting by including five students, a couple of non-­‐tenured faculty, and drawing its remaining members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. When the demands of the teaching fellows were presented and endorsed at Soldier’s Field, much of their content had already been accepted by the ‘Faculty.’ The concern with governance was in the purview of a committee headed by Merle Fainsod and convening since February. In the following meeting on April 17, the ‘Faculty’ accepted a resolution by Jerome Bruner to deny ROTC of any campus and academic privileges and be phased out completely and swiftly. The demand to create a Black Studies department was more controversial. On April 22, Alex Inkeles motioned that three students be given voting rights in the decisions regarding the creation of said department. Henry Rosovksy, who had joined Harvard from Berkeley and was a veteran of the Free Speech Movement controversy, was heading a committee to advise on how to advance Black Studies. After the ‘Faculty’s’ decision, he resigned. He believed there was not enough intellectual ability in the burgeoning field to create an independent major and an independent department, instead he proposed a joint major to build capacity within pre-­‐existing departments. The ‘Faculty’ also accepted students’ indictment of Harvard’s real estate plans.50 The University eventually committed itself to provide low to mid income housing for those displaced by new construction surrounding the 50
Barth, A., 1969. Rosovsky’s role in Harvard crisis. Washington Post, p.B6. 23 Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government. As the various demands were met, only the issues of discipline and of governance remained of complex and slower resolution. The ire towards the students’ actions was intense among those professors that joined in an informal meeting club, a ‘conservative caucus’. One of them said of the student assault, ‘I felt as if I had been raped.’ Economic historian and Russian émigré Alexander Gershenkron distinguished himself within this group as a public supporter of the University administration stating that ‘Force and crime must be met by force.’ Gershenkron had little regard or sympathy for the students’ motives, adding ‘how preposterous, how irrelevant the issues are about which we are talking here.’51 Although the disciplinary impulse was strong in the months after the occupation and strike by the Fall of 1969 it waned. The Committee of Fifteen’s first statements were that ‘it is clearly the right and the responsibility of the University to defend itself’ against the ‘right to disrupt, a right to assume, so to speak, vicarious oppression and to use the tactics of despair.’ A revised resolution on October 24, and again edited after consultation on March 3, 1970, replaced the definition of the University as devoted to ‘primary functions’ of teaching and research by a definition of ‘a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change.’ The Committee of Fifteen evolved into a Committee on Rights and Responsibilities that drafted a social contract for Harvard that looked more permissive than disciplinary.52 The record of punishment of the Committee of Fifteen and its successor was also not severe. It asked 13 students to leave the University, 20 were given condemnations of various gravity 51
Herbert Gintis referring to Gershenkron in interview to Nicholas Dawidoff, noted: ‘I admired him and he hated me.’ And as in the case of Gershenkron and Galbraith wounds never healed. N. Dawidoff, Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World (New York 2002), 300, 314-­‐8, 324; L. E. Eichel, et al., The Harvard Strike (New York 1970), 168. 52
‘Progress report of the Committee of Fifteen’ February 20, 1970, in ‘Student strike, general file’, Harvard Archives. 24 but all of these sentences were suspended, only to be made effective if misconduct reoccurred, 99 were given warnings. The committee also invented a new kind of punishment, ‘separation’, which unlike suspension would permit students to remain registered and keep their draft deferments.53 The ‘liberal caucus’ of the Faculty that formed after the occupation and strike, also got its way on governance reform. Before the winter of 1969, Galbraith had courted controversy by suggesting that more power should be entrusted to the Faculty over the Corporation, this became the banner of the liberal faction.54 The ‘conservative view,’ expressed on the pages of the New York Times by Gottfried Haberler, was that a ‘faculty of several hundred simply cannot govern the University, even less so when joined by students representatives.’ Haberler believed that such a prospect would require the emergence of ‘professional politicians’ but one could not be a scholar, a teacher and a politician too. The politicians would overwhelm the scholars.55 This opposition to greater involvement was somewhat contradictory given Harvard conservatives’ admiration for Chicago’s resolution of its sit-­‐in crisis and for Levi’s ‘leadership’. It was clear that the result there had been a joint effort of president and faculty. The professors had been brought into conversation with Levi, they together agreed ‘on a course of action and this was the course of action that was followed,’ explained Dean Johnson 53
See ‘The petition against severance’ signed by 2514 Harvard and Radcliffe students, in ‘Student strike, general file’, Harvard Archives. The sanction was applied to two students involved in the protest against the Center for International Affairs, ‘Report of Disciplinary Action’ by Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, May 20, 1970. 54
R. Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (Boston 2005), 474. 55
Letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Gottfried Haberler, dated April 21, 1969. The Alexander Gershenkron papers, at Pusey Library, Harvard University, Box 11. 25 in a letter to Gershenkron.56 These were not the scenes at Harvard where the President and the academics were estranged. The reform that Harvard got from the crisis, with a variety of student consulting arrangements, matched some of the substantive demands of the activists, a new social contract imagining a University open to social change was in draft. Equally important the junior radical faculty that had supported the strike and its demands was protected from sanction. For the members of the ‘conservative caucus’ ‘Soc Rel 148/9 played a crucial role in preparing for the confrontation by indoctrinating a large number of wavering liberal-­‐radical types and especially presenting them with a sense of the strength and invincibility of the New Left steamroller.’ They denounced the radical courses as a ‘disgrace to scholarship’.57 A committee led by Paul Freund investigated the involvement of fourteen teaching fellows in the University Hall occupation, the majority of which were teachers at Social Relations 149. Eleven were about to leave Harvard, so only three were heard by the committee. One declared he would no longer teach, another was a graduate student in Mathematics about to conclude his degree and leave Harvard, the only case deserving attention was that of Stauer, the course leader of Social Relations 149. The Freund Committee was not friendly with Stauer giving him a terminal extension of one year on his contract. Soon after, four other teaching fellows were being subject to scrutiny, Arthur MacEwan and Herbert Gintis from Economics, and Alan Gilbert and Jonathan Wiener from Government were SDS members and leaders in the strike committee. The Corporation had ordered that their salaries be withheld and their 56
Letter by Gale Johnson to Gershenkron in November 19, 1969, The Alexander Gershenkron papers, at Pusey Library, Harvard University. 57
B.D. Nossiter, ‘Radicalism Course Splits Harvard’ The Washington Post, (1969), A8. D. Caute, Sixty-­‐eight: the year of the barricades (London 1988). S. Kelman, Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest (Boston 1970), 248. Letter from Walter Rostow, U. Texas -­‐ Austin, April 29, 1969, and Letter by Walter Galenson, May 22, 1969. The Alexander Gershenkron papers, at Pusey Library, Harvard University; HUG (FP) 45.16, Box 11. 26 names withdrawn from the course catalogue, but the Executive Committee of their departments came to their defense and nothing came of it.58 *** Setting side by side the experience of student protest at Michigan, Chicago and Harvard we can trace the upsurge in campus protest and its resolution. The threat of the draft was the first cause that brought students in direct confrontation with University officials. As a result of that struggle students gained an investment in University governance. In the campaigns of 1966-­‐70, ‘student power’ was understood to be the key to steer the University towards the realization of its civic ideal by taking on a ‘responsibility to teach’ the ills of American society and to strive for social justice and social change. Whilst the efforts of the students were unified across the campuses, thanks in large part by the channels of communication and fellow travelling of SDS, the outcomes of the campaigns were diverse. As the comparative cases of Michigan, Chicago and Harvard show, decisive factors in the resolution of these challenges were the values and the calculations of the professoriate. At Michigan the faculty both supported and restrained the students demands. Refusing to challenge the central administration they sponsored moderate student empowermnet at the level of departments’ teaching and hiring. The University of Chicago offers the clearest case of refusal of student demands. Volunteering as disciplinarians, professors emphatically purged the campus of radicals, both within the faculty and in the student body. To record real change in governance we must turn to Harvard. The faculty, with the exception of a few exemplary expulsions, protected the radicals and sought to fulfill their demands at the same time that it wrestled control of University affairs from the Harvard Corporation. Although everywhere ‘the faculty’ was a divided body, against and for, enabling 58
J.K. Glassman, 1969. No Title. Sunday Herald Traveller in ‘Student strike, general file’, Harvard Archives. M. Keller and P. Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University, (Oxford 2001), 322-­‐3. 27 and obstructive, we can see it everywhere as a crucial arbiter in bringing student unrest to any resolution. The student protesters posed as champions of academic freedom, the ideal of a community of free thought and critical challenge they had learned in the classrooms. But unlike the students and the young professors that graduated from their ranks, the professors that had taught this ideal knew better. They had living memory of the 1950s ‘loyalty oath’ controversies and believed that University self-­‐government lacked powers of self-­‐defense. They knew from their experience with the political economy of research, with its federal and corporate patrons and affluent and conservative overseers, that a critical and autonomous University was set on a perilous course. Examining the record of ‘student power’ and its demand of ‘responsibility to teach’ we discover a crisis in the beliefs of the professoriate. This cohort of scholars were caught between idealism and cynicism, wavering between the two. 28