Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...committee settled on the compromise of non-voting student advisers, and in its report effusively acknowledged their effectiveness. Thomson credits the presence of the students for what he calls the "radicalization" of the committee. "I began to watch professors who had only known students as barbarians in that throng below the podium, hearing words of wisdom out of the young, and they began to respect them," he recalls...
...election procedures and tally returns for the Committee of 15, set up to investigate the causes of the occupation and to discipline the protesters. Both liberals and conservatives put up slates, while the Faculty met to debate Afro-American Studies, the Fainsod Committee struggled to count the ballots--which, Thomson says, persisted in adding up wrong. The need to juggle Faculty interests and maintain credibility kept the committee so busy it had to ask for an extension for their report, originally scheduled to appear...
...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 before the Corporation...
...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 abroad in the land that everyone should be in on the business...
...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...