Smithies, Walzer, and Peretz Discuss the Five R's: Recruitment, ROTC, Ranking, Research and Relationship

"WE shall discuss the issues you have raised here," Dean Glimp told the crowd of 300 students sitting-in against the Dow Chemical Company on October 25. With that promise, Dow job recruiter Frederick Leavitt returned home to a cold dinner, and Harvard turned to examine the hot issues that remained.

At last week's Faculty meeting, which placed 74 of the demonstrators on probation and admonished 171 others, Stanley H. Hoffmann, professor of Government, moved to establish a committee to discuss the issues of campus recruitment and the University's relation to the Vietnam war.

Although the committee, which is to be composed of students, Faculty members and administration officials, has not yet been created, three Faculty members concerned with the issues involved agreed to discuss their views in separate interviews.

The three Faculty members are Arthur Smithies, Nathanial Ropes professor of Political Economy, Michael L. Walzer, associate professor of Government, and Martin H. Peretz, instructor of Social Studies.

"There are two extreme positions on the issue of recruiting at Harvard," Smithies said. "One is to allow no recruiting on campus. The other is to allow any institution to recruit here."

Smithies said that until the Dow crisis, he "wouldn't have recommended any changes" in Harvard's current policy of recruitment, which he described as basically the latter extreme position. Now he tends to favor prohibiting all recruitment on campus.

"Recruiting is not vital to the University," Smithies said. "It is here solely for the convenience of students, so it is quite feasible to end it."

Would Harvard lose endowment money by banning business from campus? "If this were a blanket prohibition there would be no financial disadvantages," Smithies said. "The Dow crisis provides a disadvantage to the present policy. Besides, I'd be rather alarmed if someone would say, 'I'll give you one million dollars to allow me to recruit."

Peretz would not go so far as to favor prohibiting all recruitment from campus. "I don't find myself aesthetically opposed to recruiting," he said. "I don't think Dow should recruit here, but I have hesitations about singling them out. We must either get rational criteria or recruiting should be open to all.

"If recruiting is as free as people have been saying it is, it should be offered with equity. That means to such groups as the Friends Service [which recruits conscientious objectors] currently prohibited from recruiting here."

Walzer likewise has no basic objections to recruitment on campus, but thinks that the decision to permit it must lie in Faculty hands. "So long as members of the Faculty are outraged by recruiting," he said, "it should be excluded out of deference to them."

The problem of how to decide which recruiters to exclude from campus is not easily resolved. "You'd have to look at each case," Walzer said. Smithies countered that such a policy is so difficult as to be dangerous.

"The University would get in real trouble if it ended Dow recruiting because Dow manufacturers napalm," Smithies said, "and not General Motors recruiting because it makes only jeeps, or General Foods recruiting because it makes only K-rations.

"I'd apply the all-or-nothing rule, not only to business, but to government as well. It's an artificial distinction to say the State Department can come on campus, the CIA cannot. I like to think of the federal government as a whole.

"I also don't think there is a sharp distinction between war and peace in modern times. We should make long-range decisions, and not be influenced by the Vietnam war."

Smithies pointed out that cigarette manufacturers, which he thought the Faculty might conceivably not want recruiting on campus because of the health threat of smoking, would not be covered by criteria based on the current war.

Walzer agreed that it would be difficult to draw guidelines by which recruiters would be forbidden on campus. "One can make a better case for overt cooperation with the Selective Service than for covert cooperation with the CIA," he said. "It gets harder to draw the line if we include each agencies as the Peace Corps."

None of the three Faculty members felt that free speech is an issue in determining recruitment policy. As Walzer said, "It is ridiculous to talk about infringing upon the free speech of a Naval recruiter.

"If the Faculty raises the cry of 'free speech' or 'open campus,' it will make Harvard's present policy indefensible. The man who sells pretzels on the Square may want to sell them in the Yard--which is not only more profitable for him but also more convenient for students. Yet it is not difficult to defend the policy of keeping that man off campus--and it's not a question of natural, moral or political rights."

Peretz dismissed talk of free speech as "cynicism of the right,' but also found liberals guilty of a certain cynicism.

"Suddenly people have elevated the fight of the Dow man to recruit to first amendment rights," he said. "Actually it's about akin to the right of peddlers to knock on your door. I oppose this cynicism, but I also oppose the high-faluting pomp of those who say Oxford and Cambridge wouldn't allow recruiting on campus, yet who don't want to model Harvard after those institutions in any other way."

The issues of ROTC on campus was the only one that provoked vast disagreement among the three Faculty members. Walzer and Peretz attacked the military training program, while Smithies defended it.

"I've always thought that the University granting credit for ROTC is wrong," Walzer said. "Students have every right to associate with it--as long as it's extracurricular.

"If Harvard decided to set up a school of military science, the matter would be different--though I would vote against it. But the University hasn't--that's just the point. Students shouldn't be given credit for ROTC any more than they should for SDS."

Peretz agreed that "the kind of things they teach in ROTC do not merit the protective coloring and approving rhuberic of Harvard University."

Smithies, on the other hand, saw ROTC as "part of the University's program for training people for future occupations; and therefore justified. "Why is it okay to train people for the State Department and not the military?" Smithies asked. "ROTC has been with us 150 years, and I wouldn't want to eliminate it."

Walzer also took exception with Harvard's policy of ranking students for the Selective Service System. "I've always been against this policy," he said. "It's another example of something active being done to comply with the war effort." Peretz agreed that "to continue to accede to the Selective Service request is to take a political stand."

On the matter of classified government work, all three Faculty members opted for the freedom of their colleagues to do as they please.

"Harvard does not make classified research contracts," Smithies said. "I've always felt this is a good idea. Some classified research has to be done, however, and individual members of the Faculty are now free to do some moonlighting. I support this principle--classified research is not all that malevolent. I like doing it because so few people ever read it.

"If the best way to make myself influential in a government agency--let's say in the Defense Department--was to write a classified document, I would certainly want the right to do that. It would be unfortunate if the University had rules against it."

"What people do as individuals privately is their own affair," Peretz agreed. "Some people are unhappy with my stand for the peace movement, but the administration has never mentioned it. I believe members of the Faculty are free agents."

Peretz, who said he has read the draft of a Ramparts Magazine article that is rumored to expose secret government work at Harvard, called the story "a hill of beans."

"I don't think the magazine plans to print anything," Peretz said. It's a rehash--badly written and boring. I would be upset in one of these left-wing gumshoe operations. I don't want right-wingers to build a window into my soul, and I don't want to do it into theirs either."

Walzer acknowledged the rights of Faculty members to act freely in accepting classified research contracts, but added that "the danger is that the University may cease to be a community of detached, critical intellectuals.

"Students have a right to know if their lecturers are under the employment of the State Department. You could force the Faculty to declare their interests as members of Parliament do. Professors who work for radical political organizations should also declare their commitments. Anything a professor may do to compromise his integrity--shouldn't that be made public?

"Also, the maximum information should be made public on the relations of Harvard's various departments to the government. These connections call into question the integrity and independence of the University."

Walzer felt that the most important issue to be discussed is not one of the first four basic R's--recruitment, ROTC, ranking, or research--but a fifth R--for relationship--Harvard's relationship with the outside world.

"The major issue is the way in which the University has become connected with corporative and government interests," Walzer said. "We could have a faculty just of scholars, but in the contemporary world I'm not sure that would be the best faculty.

"Obviously the University is training people to function in the outside world. It wouldn't be good if it did not. But it is also providing a small piece of detached space where business and government is studied. It has to do both things--that's why it"s such a curious place."

Peretz also said that he considers Harvard's relationship with the outside world to be the issue raised by the Dow demonstration. "What I object to is the wide-spread assumption that Harvard is non-political," Peretz said. "That's simply not true.

"For instance, it's deeply involved in the area of Negro education. While I of course favor this, there are a lot of red-necks who don't think this is very non-political."

"I don't think it's possible to sever Harvard from the community. That concept of a University is a medieval dream. Even medieval universities were established to train people in the law.

"But Harvard is not self-conscious enough to realize its complicity with the war effort. It ignores the extent to which it is involved all the time.

"The greatest involvement lies with the honorific agencies of the University--lectureships such as the Godkin series and honorary degrees. Great dissenters and heretics have not been given a platform here at Harvard. The commencement address has been repeatedly used to advance the cold war.

"There is also involvement in those institutions that are policy-oriented. Because they are attached to the policy sciences, they have not been open to dissidence.

"If the University cannot be neutral, it can at least find ways of making itself more open to dissent, recognize the limits of neutrality, tire of its rhetoric and its high-sounding phrases. If we can get an honest discussion of these issues, people will be more reflective."

Smithies rejected the notion that Harvard had taken any but the straighet-and-neutral path toward the Vietnam war. "I certainly would say Harvard hasn't taken an active role in supporting the war," he said. "I don't think you can live in this world without some degree of complicity.