Education: Universities: A New Balance of Power

WHO rules Harvard? According to the university charter, final authority is vested in the 32-man board of overseers, or trustees; in practice, most major policy decisions are handled by the Harvard Corporation, a seven-member council that includes President Nathan Pusey, Treasurer George Bennett and five alumni (who choose their own successors). But the six-day student strike, an event for which the administration was ill prepared, subtly changed the balance of power at Harvard. Each element in the academic community in turn asserted its right to speak for the university and to prescribe cures for the institution's ills. To foment the crisis, Students for a Democratic Society had raised two issues: ROTC and university expansion. These were the specific topics of debate. Underlying these themes, though, was the larger question of how the university should be governed—and who should govern it.

Athenian Democracy. The Harvard Corporation offered its prescription on Sunday, three days after the police "bust." Five moderate students were invited to present their views to the corporation at the Quincy Street residence of President Pusey. Then the corporation created a new, 68-member advisory board of students, professors and administrators to consult with the president in times of crisis. The corporation reiterated its support of last February's faculty decision to strip ROTC of academic credit and ordered a fresh report on the university expansion program, which is accused by many students of dispossessing poor blacks from their homes. Finally, the corporation suggested that it might close the university if there are further disorders. The man in the middle, Nathan Pusey, had already received strong support from alumni. Next day, he received a vote of confidence from the board of overseers. Though they endorsed Pusey's actions and sustained the corporation's positions on ROTC and expansion, the overseers promised to re-examine the proper role of students and professors in Harvard's decision-making process.

Initially the students were in an angry, anti-administration mood; 8,000 of them gathered in Soldiers Field for an extraordinary mass meeting. When a motion repudiating the right of the corporation to close down the university was introduced, the chairman ruled it out of order. The students demanded that it be presented anyway, then passed it with an overwhelming "Yes!" that bounced off the stadium walls like a football cheer on an autumn afternoon.

The Soldiers Field meeting, called by an ad hoc committee of moderate students, looked like a modernized version of Athenian democracy, set appropriately beneath the neo-Doric colonnade that rings the top of the stadium. Three microphones in the stands let the crowd reply to statements piped over loudspeakers from a moderator's table set up outside one end zone. Red-shirted tellers in the audience counted standing votes, then passed results to yellow-jerseyed section men who ran the totals to girls operating adding machines.