Can Hip Harvard Hold That Line?

AFTER living together for 25 years, Harvard and Radcliffe have agreed to merge officially. No longer will Cliffies merely attend Harvard classes, earn Harvard degrees and acquire Harvard husbands. Last week the Harvard Corporation began work on unification plans that by 1970 will enable Radcliffe women to live in the same houses with Harvard men, take all their meals in the same dining halls and be governed by the same administration.

However inevitable, the merger symbolizes a new Harvard that old grads would barely recognize. Almost every U.S. campus is changing drastically these days. As usual, though, Harvard seems to be outdoing the rest--or trying awfully hard. The nation's oldest university has gone hip, and no one is yet sure where the limits may lie. Junior Bob Telson from Brooklyn barely exaggerates when he says: "Today the only thing you could possibly be booted for is something you'd get two years for in the outside world."

Grubby Guerrillas. In a recent bust, federal agents in Boston seized $450,000 worth of marijuana bound for "the Cambridge market," a central distribution point for which is Harvard Square. Officially, the university frowns on drugs, occasionally will nail a student dealer and expel him. But Dean Fred Glimp views marijuana smoking calmly: "The ones who smoke pot now are the ones who ten years ago would go on benders on Saturday night." Asked what he would do if he heard a wild party going on at 3:30 in the morning and found a group of stoned students, an Adams House tutor undoubtedly spoke for a large segment of the younger teaching fellows: "Well, if I wanted to sleep, I'd ask them to cool it. If not, I'd join them."

The sidewalks of Harvard Square rival those of Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue as a parade ground for grubby guerrilla fashion styles. The whole scene is summed up by a sign in the Harvard Coop that sternly warns people not to go barefoot on the escalator (it can be a painful way to pare the toenails). For many undergraduates, alienation is more than a matter of drugs, dirty clothes and long hair. Rather than live within the gilded confines of Harvard's residential houses along the Charles River, a few hundred students have moved into nearby slum tenements like the one on University Road where Jane Britton, a 23-year-old graduate anthropology student at Harvard, was murdered in January. The embarrassed slum landlord turned out to be none other than Harvard itself, and the episode only further embittered some citizens of Cambridge who were already resentful of the university's increasingly inflationary impact on real estate values.

None of this is to suggest that Harvard's academic standards are suffering. Admission has never been harder; fewer than one in five applicants make it. The number of entering freshmen who score in the 90th percentile or better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rises each year. With an unprecedented three out of four students planning on graduate work, even the gentleman's B is out. Some 70% of this year's senior class will graduate with honors.

Unnerving Self-Confidence. Harvard is less and less a place where the undergraduate explores generally, shunning commitment, reading broadly, flicking out, drinking beer and pondering the mysteries of the universe on long moonlit strolls along the Charles. Undergraduates are studying harder than ever; yet it is their estrangement from time-honored academic discipline that worries some teachers. Says John Womack, an assistant professor of history whose jeans and leather jacket are indistinguishable from those of his students and who himself graduated from Harvard in 1959: "Students just simply refuse to learn what they don't want to learn. They are less willing to do the necessary groundwork to form their opinions. They rely more upon insight and a sort of induction that I haven't figured out. In my day, the professor would beg the students, 'Don't just read the material; think about it.' Today the problem is almost the opposite."

Increasingly, students at Harvard are displaying an unnerving self-confidence in their own ability to do anything, an attitude that seems alien to the old academic virtue of modest contemplation at the foot of the savants. Celebrated professors like John Kenneth Galbraith and George Wald no longer command the ardent reverence once enjoyed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Perry Miller and Crane Brinton, the superstars of the '50s. Explains Mike Tompkins, a junior from Paris who is both a Presidential and a National Merit Scholar: "There are many admirable men at Harvard and they are appreciated. But we have very few heroes these days."

The watchword is freedom. "Nobody gives a good goddam what you read, think, eat, wear, smoke, drink or sleep with," says Erich Wise, a junior from Los Angeles, "just so long as you don't hurt anybody." Ten years ago, student liberals denounced the "final clubs," Harvard's version of fraternities, for excluding Jews, Negroes and political militants. Today the clubs are viewed with more tolerance, partly because they are no longer exclusive. Toby Campion, a junior on probation for participating in a recent anti-ROTC demonstration, is a member of Porcellian; Ernie Wilson, a black student leader from Washington, D.C., belongs to the Fly. "Nobody is interested in emphasizing the differences any more," says Rick Berne, a junior from Syracuse, N.Y., who plays tackle on the football team. "I mean you go have a smoke with some jock, or you date a black girl, or sit-in with a guy who was president of his class at St. Paul's, or get zonked with some guy in a band. So what? Everyone's the same."

Going Along. In one sense, Harvard is a very different place than it was even four years ago, but in another sense nothing has really changed. Harvard prizes academic freedom fiercely and it has long been a community in which reasoned dissent is tolerated easily. "The place has always been exciting," says Dean Glimp. "It's just exciting now in different ways." College authorities seldom try to direct the mores of the students nowadays, but that is not so much a sign of new permissiveness as it is a continuation of the old policy of treating undergraduates as responsible adults capable of thinking for themselves. As a result, bitter confrontations have been few.

Astutely co-opting radical student demands, the Harvard faculty recently voted to take academic credit away from ROTC and to create an Afro-American studies program. Three courses that are essentially radical in viewpoint are now being taught with the approval of the faculty, some by section leaders who are self-styled Marxists.

Only when student demands become arbitrary and unreasoning does Harvard pass judgment and reiterate the fundamental principles of academic freedom. The recent uproar over Planning 11-3B, subtitled "An End to Urban Violence" and offered by Visiting Professor Siegfried M. Breuning of M.I.T., is a good example. Contending that the course was designed simply to improve skills in repressing riots rather than to ameliorate the conditions that cause them, 85 black Harvard and Radcliffe students packed the classroom the first day the course met this semester and demanded its cancellation before it had even begun. Clearly intimidated, Breuning offered then and there to restructure the course. The black students went away placated, but faculty members devoted to the ancient principle of free inquiry were scandalized.

Threats from Within. An ad hoc faculty committee promptly took a half-page ad in the Crimson to remind the administration that "any intrusion upon the classroom or any effort to coerce the instructor is an infringement upon the academic rights both of the teacher and of the students who wish to take the course." The list of 108 senior Harvard professors who signed the petition read like a Who's Who of Cambridge intelligentsia, embracing figures from the political right, left and center, and including Samuel Beer, Paul Buck, Oscar Handlin, George Kistiakowsky and Seymour Lipset.

President Pusey, hitherto deliberately distant from campus squabbles, heeded their call the very same day. "The irony and tragedy of the present," wrote Pusey in a statement emphatically endorsing the professors' stand, "is that now the threats to academic liberty and integrity often come from within." Declared Pusey: "Harvard has the right to expect that members of its faculties and the great majority of its students will have sufficient understanding, historical sense, reason and self-control to insist that coercive methods have no place in this university community." Harvard has been able to count on such understanding in the past. Whether it can continue to do so, at a time when some students are increasingly intoxicated with their own power, is an open question.

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