Faculty Choice

IT WOULD BE to assume, because the Faculty has no intention of joining the picket lines, that its meeting this afternoon can not have any fruitful consequences. Most students continue to believe they share large areas of common concern with their teachers, and the Faculty's general posture at its Tuesday meeting served to reinforce this belief. Those students who see the Faculty as Harvard's one potentially responsive body ought to be encouraged by its explicit refusal to use last week's disruptions as an excuse for burying substantive issues. By actually coming to grips with some of those issues, the Faculty can now make students yet more aware of the interests that blind them and their teachers together.

There are no grounds for the Faculty to stand pat at this juncture. The argument that to act now would be to act under duress, to condone unconscionable tactics, is a false one on two counts. It rests, first, on the assumption that the forcible expulsion of several deans from University Hall was engaged in or endorsed by a large group; and, second, on the idea that all stages of the present crisis are irrevocably bound together as one, under no circumstances to be treated separately. A student who takes seriously the question raised by this strike, as most do (including many who for various reasons are not themselves striking), is entitled to some displeasure at being told that the real and overriding issue is the rifling of University filing cabinets, alongside which his seriousness simply does not rate.

Many Faculty members undoubtedly consider intransigence backed by moral repugnance to be a tempting position. But that is precisely the attitude that has predominated at university after university, and always with the same result--emotions fly while everything else stands still. Harvard should be in a position to learn from this unfailing pattern and, incidentally, to help design a new one. Only be dealing concretely with all the issues raised can the natural impulse of both student and Faculty to solve internal problems and enlist their energies against the vastly more confounding problems of the outside world be restored and built upon.

THE DEMANDS now before the Faculty are neither extreme nor, by their very wording, nonnegotiable. Clarification and negotiation will come hand in hand. Since all the demands deal with questions which the Faculty has debated and researched, it is not being asked to take any hasty steps, but merely to give powerful voice to an increasingly wide consensus and to represent that consensus before the Corporation.

Only in the case of ROTC does the dispute edge beyond the realm of compromise. Military training is no more appropriately classed among extracurricular organizations than it was part of the Course Catalogue; if anything, indoctrination has less place in the new category being proposed for it, since undergraduate organizations are theoretically run by undergraduates.

In contrast, the housing and expansion plank, as approved Monday at Soldiers' Field, is simply too vague to constitute an undue constraint as the Faculty finally proceeds to overturn Harvard's long-established policy of non-concern in such matters. The University restructuring plank is divided into two levels of objectives, but it again comes down to a single, wholly defensible proposition (one far more important than the number of students or Faculty on a reconstituted Corporation), mainly that ultimate authority over this University not be vested in a secretive and unrepresentative organization. The final substantive demand, that relating to Afro-American Studies, is likely to be answered at today's meeting anyway, inasmuch as it relates to guidelines the Faculty has already endorsed.

In short, since most students are at the moment preoccupied with a set of loose and limited goals, and regard the Faculty as an instrument of resolution rather than reaction, today's meeting can easily do positive good. Riding out the present insurgency, however, will have no lasting meaning if the University then sits back thinking the job well done. Far more profound questions lurk behind those raised by the strike, and they will have to be tackled in earnest if Harvard wants to avoid an endless cycle of embitterment and stagnation.