Word: levins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...severe lapses in communication between faculty and administrators. "Harvard as a corporation was undermanned--many of the people who managed it were old graduates who stayed around and weren't qualified to run it. There was a general feeling there were not adequate channels of communication to the top," Levin notes. Thomson agrees, and says the testimony provided example after example of "horrendous communication." "What we learned in testimony was that Franklin Ford as dean of the faculty had no access to the Corporation and had to put any action of the Faculty in writing to Pusey. Pusey alone appeared...
Although the Fainsod Committee was not charged with responsibility for changing University governing methods, Levin says his service on the committee convinced him of defects in the structure of the Corporation at that time. "The Corporation was a very small group of people--mostly lawyers--who were not in touch with what was going on, but who had complete autonomy," he says. Thomson notes that now the Corporation hears testimony from many different sources--in part because it was forced to confront a different vision of the University, one it hadn't known existed. "There was a very strong feeling...
...Faculty largely accepted the recommendations, but imposed a change in the method proposed to select the Council's members. The report had suggested the traditional method of allowing the dean of the Faculty choose the members, with competing slates if Faculty members desired. Thomson and Levin say they tried to insejt a clause in the report that would mandate the election of Faculy Council members. They were overruled by the committee, only to be upheld by the Faculty after furious canvassing by both the liberal and conservative caucuses...
...committee recomendations on student decision-making would have been viewed, only a few months before the strike, as unacceptably radical. "I strongly believed the Faculty and students should have more directly to say about the way the University runs," Levin says now, and the report echoed his, and other committee members' convictions. "We are persuaded that present arrangements for exchange of ideas between students and faculty on matters of common educational concern leave much to be desired," it read, and it goes on to envision a set of student-faculty committees as forums for open discussion of issues affecting student...
Despite these structural inadequacies, Levin says he believes the report and the turbulence of 1969 accomplished a great deal. "The lesson was learned. The tight little groups that controlled the University, without knowing much about it, learned the lesson of consultation," he asserts. Whether students of 1979 share his conviction is another matter. For it is clear that the Faculty, not the students, benefitted the most from the April uprising, not by Machiavellian planning, but simply through increased access to power. With the Faculty Council, a reorganized bureaucratic structure, a new president who maintains a considerably warmer rapport with Faculty...