Pusey's Report

President Pusey took the occasion of his annual report to the Board of Overseers to rail against undergraduate activists. His belligerence was intemperate and impolitic. It was also lamentable, because the President seems sadly out of touch with what is happening on his own campus, and he should at least be trying to make the effort to understand.

Pusey directed his venom at "a small group of overeager young in evidence on many campuses." They act, he said, on "the assumption, which they invariably call their 'analysis,' that Western society, and especially American society, is rotten through and through." These "Walter Mittys of the left," declared Pusey, "...fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down." He blamed the Dow sit-in at Harvard last October on "some few" students who "managed not only to move the demonstration inside the building, but also to maintain there something very like a state of siege for more than six hours..." Pusey's "analysis" does justice to neither his students nor the facts.

About three hundred students sat-in during the Dow demonstration; another 200 or so turned in their Bursar's cards to support them; 600 attended a mass meeting to demand leniency from the Faculty. To charge that any or all of these students were manipulated by "some few" is to denigrate their intelligence and insult their integrity.

Harvard is not being victimized by a tiny minority of misguided malcontents. Nor are the most ardent opponents of the war--so morally outraged that they have refused to comply with this country's draft laws--impelled by rosy dreams of revolution; they face several years in jail and difficulty getting a job afterwards.

There is not at Harvard "the small group"--as Pusey puts it--"bent on disruption." There are a great many students who share a sense of hurt that their country is waging a war for which they see no justification. Their frustration that it goes on is deepening. They have the greatest hope for what this country could do if it would, but many may instead be called to fight its war in Vietnam in less than a year. It should not surprise Pusey that they may occasionally act unwisely, and that even their unwise actions will draw the sympathy of many who do not participate.

Pusey notes that in virtually every area of the University professors are showing a growing concern for what is happening in the outside world. His own lame conclusion is that "One might deplore or commend it" (he does both). The University serves, as it always has, as a place where student and professor can deal in a variety of ways with problems that are very real to each. Even vociferous political demonstrations are not without precedent or usefulness. "Bringing students of this persuasion back to reality," may, as Pusey says, present a challenge to the Faculty, though some at least share the views of their students.

But Pusey's own inability to perceive what is happening on his campus may serve to indicate that the process of perceiving political "reality" is not so easy. It has not been aided by the President's report.