Word: fords
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other half of the "wreckers" circle is said to be those who "call themselves Maoists." It is hard to know exactly who Dean Ford means by this phrase, but the most likely candidates are the members of Progressive Labor. Dean Ford's phrase, however, is worse than vague. For the term suggests a false analogy to Stalinist or Trotskyite (which Ford tries to disavow, though not explicitly). "Maoist" suggests someone under the domination of a rigid, foreign (un-American?) ideology. To call members of Progressive Labor Maoists, in ignorance of the content of their programs, is meaningless: worse...
Finally, the members of Progressive Labor are not, as Dean Ford implies, the only "politically doctrinaire revolutionaries" at Harvard. In fact, they are perhaps the least likely group within SDS to think it enough to destroy without rebuilding. For their position on this point (and so far as I understand it I agree with it) is precisely that you cannot destroy something unless you already have the potential to build in its place. (This, I take it, is something akin to what Marx means when he talks of the maturation of socialist forces of production within the womb of capitalism...
...leaders in SDS said (during the Dow demonstration) that "we are going to bring this university to an end, as you know it," liberals frequently ignored the qualifying phrase "as you know it." Our position will seem purely destructive, only if you feel that what Dean Ford calls the present "fundamental distribution of roles and responsibilities in the University" is sacrosanct. For it is true that if we had our way that distribution of roles and responsibilities (not to mention power) would be destroyed. We do desire (at least) a "fundamental alteration" -- as Ford puts it -- of the present situation...
THERE is a great deal of evidence in his article that Dean Ford does regard the present arrangements of power and authority as more or less inviolable. When he talks of "responding to sensible proposals for change," I am very much afraid he means to exclude not only any of our suggestions--that much I would have expected -- but also most proposals from those he calls "doctrinaire advocates of 'student power.'" Since very few people in SDS are interested in student power any more as a question of doctrine, I presume Dean Ford is referring to those liberals, particularly...
...Dean Ford really intends to draw the line against such liberals, my task as a radical will be clearer; the radical analysis of the university in terms of power and interest groups will then be fully true. Dean Ford's loyalty to the existing procedures of the Harvard community would, in that case, be a loyalty not to the university community as such, but merely a private loyalty to his own privileged conception of the university, supported not by reason but by power. His condition for allowing us to remain in the university would then be that radicals and dissident...