DISC and Mass Hall

The sit-in at Mass Hall held last Friday by 16 students from the DuBois Institute Student Coalition serves to demonstrate the intransigence of President Bok and Andrew F. Brimmer, chairman of the DuBois Advisory Board. For almost three months, ever since it first presented its proposals in February to Brimmer, the Advisory board and Bok. DISC has never been able to sit down and discuss its demands. DISC's restraint was remarkable, and the sit-in as justified both because of the administration's unwillingness to discuss the issues, and because DISC's demands should be implemented.

These demands in no way compromise what Brimmer says is the DuBots Institute's function to "fill a void in quality research." From the very beginning. DISC has stated that "the primary interest of those in the institute must be research." Brimmer has distorted DISC's demands for forums, colloquia and non-credit seminars as threats to pure research in an apparent attempt to discredit its goal--student participation in the formation and operation of the DuBois Institute. In dismissing the DISC demands. Brimmer said. "There are hundreds and thousands of action groups." But open discussion and criticism of research conducted at the DuBois Institute by members of the black community hardly constitutes an action group. And these open forums and colloquia--given, according to the DISC proposals, only if researchers desire them--will mean that research could be under some kind of public scrutiny and that it could be considered on the basis of the "quality" of its content as well as the "quality" of its methodology. If, as Brimmer seems to think, there is a "void" in Afro-American research, there should be no reason why it can't be filled in part with research related to issues of black history and culture important to contemporary black experience. The DISC proposals, asking for student participation both in the formation of the institute and on a permanent Faculty-student advisory committee, and institute ties with the Afro-American Studies Department--provisions called for in every study on the institute until the 1973 Report of the Committee to Establish the W.E.B. DuBois Institute--are legitimate demands and they should be implemented.

Bok's refusal to meet with the students occupying Mass Hall reception room last Friday is simply the culmination of a deliberate policy of recalcitrance towards DISC. If Bok had met and talked with the students--instead of walking out and avoiding the kind of crisis situation he is supposed to handle to well--he probably could have avoided the ensuing tension and the now even wider gap between DISC and the administration and the advisory board. When it takes a demonstration for Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, to say that he will tell Bok his "personal impression" is that the students' demand to meet with Bok is a "sincere one," then clearly something is wrong. And until Bok changes his apparent policy of ignoring students' demands until they occupy University buildings to prove that they are serious, then the students who briefly occupied the Mass Hall reception room last Friday cannot come under any kind of disciplinary action.