President Pusey
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[edit] President Pusey
Nathan Pusey became the president of Harvard in 1953, 25 years after he got a degree there. He did several very interesting things in his 19 years as Harvard president. He raised more money than anyone else ever had; he was slightly more businessman than educator. Normally, he was quiet, as were his decisions. He made very few radical revisions. However, there were a few times when he was very loud. He vigorously opposed McCarthyism during the 50s, refusing to budge on almost any point. “When Pusey did take a stand, whether he was right or wrong, he left a giant Pusey-shaped hole in the issue (Ruopp).” One stand he took, in 1969, meant the end of his presidency. This was his decision to call the cops to bust a few hundred students out of university hall on April 9th.
The SDS had been planning an occupation for weeks. It was their big push at Harvard, and after throwing out the deans they made six demands of the Harvard administration. The most prominent were the abolishment of ROTC (reserve officer training corps), and an end to Harvard expansion into the poorer districts of Cambridge. This happened during a time of much political activism from students at many universities around the country. Harvard was expecting this to happen, which is why they had already made a plan to call the cops.
[edit] Why shouldn't he have called the cops?
There were several good reasons behind the decision, as well as for making it early. Since it was made beforehand, it was quick and decisive, clearly expressing that the university wasn’t going to take any nonsense from the students. Also, it restored order to the university quickly, without having to go through a long drawn out debate. If the act could have been kept quiet, or done without violence, then it might have worked. But the university was counting on several factors being in their favor that most definitely weren’t.
The first was that this was the sixties, and nobody liked the authorities butting in too much, which is exactly what Pusey was doing with the bust. Sending in an armed force to oust political demonstrators was not what anyone wanted to see. The second thing they were counting on was that everyone would stay asleep during the bust, it being at five in the morning. They needed it to not be a big deal; they were just restoring order by distributing consequences to some unruly students. But, again, this was the sixties, so everyone came out of their dorms and began jeering at the police, most of them in pajamas and bathrobes. When the university hall occupiers were being put on buses, some people in the crowd even began throwing hard objects. Even so, things might have turned out not so bad if it had been an act unanimously supported by the faculty and the deans. If they had been united in their decision, they could have salvaged it. That is why Pusey claimed that all the deans had been in favor of the police bust, a statement the students knew not to be true and used to their advantage.
It is possible, though it is debatable, that the strike wouldn’t have happened at all without the bust. The day before, the crowd had been jeering at the occupiers, not the police, because they saw as an unneeded interruption of their classes. If the students had stayed been allowed to stay, many of the ones who were just along for the ride would have left, and the heart would have gone out of the demonstration. The bust gave the SDS an enormous amount of attention, which is what they wanted. Instead of fizzling out, the occupation ended with a large explosion drew everyone’s attention to the issues that were presented there. So, if they had let the occupation run it’s course, there would have been no strike, and the university would have continued as normal.
[edit] What was Pusey like as a president?
But the bust did happen, and the university was now going to have to battle the newly strengthened SDS over all the issues (and more, the demands went from 6, to 8, to 10) that had been presented at the occupation. Pusey tried to put an end to the strike before it happened, with a response speech to the demands that were made. Unfortunately, not much of the speech was wholly true, and the students latched on to this and made a reply. Pusey was the perfect sort of man to make into a sixties villain. He was less an educator and more a businessman (Rosenblatt, Pg. 30). He, like the corporation, was somewhat detached from the university even while he was its president. He raised an enormous amount of money for it, among many other things. But if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a well known and friendly face. He made a very small amount of educational decisions in his presidency, preferring to make sure that the university ran well and peacefully, with a good amount of funding to keep things that way.
He was somewhat more active in the press than his predecessors, though they had had much less exposure to it. He had many interviews, sometimes brining along his entire family. This helped him in his fundraising, because the university seemed more public. Unfortunately, this still didn’t make him the most truthful speaker.
President Pusey attempted to respond to the six demands raised by the university hall occupation by saying “Can anyone believe that the Harvard SDS demands are made seriously?” he put forth a statement representing the administration's position on each of the six demands, and concluded by saying, “how can one respond to allegation which have no basis in fact?” In the end, however, it became clear that it was Pusey’s allegations which had no basis in fact. This was the beginning of the response made to Pusey’s arguments against the demands. The students had gotten hold of information that was not in any way supposed to be public. Pusey’s defensive remarks would have been believed if that information had remained confidential, but since it was disclosed during the takeover of university hall, his remarks became the subject of much skepticism.
[edit] How could he have dealt with the situation better?
There were several way’s that Pusey could have chosen to combat the SDS, none of them ideal. He wanted, as always, to keep the university flowing smoothly, though this was now out of the question with the occupation underway. With his image among the students also not ideal, with many popular members of the faculty opposing him, he didn’t really have anywhere to go for help. The best he could was the corporation, the distant board of directors that controlled Harvard.
They were, like him, businessmen. Many of them were even profiting financially from the war in Vietnam, one of the biggest things that the student were protesting. So not only was it not in their interests to close down the ROTC and stop the flow of officers from the university, but they too didn’t associate with the students. They hardly even ever visited the campus. Their one representative was Pusey, who didn’t do much better.
So they decided to appoint someone other than Pusey to handle the anger over the bust, to get him out of the picture, and pretend to take action on the students’ demands. The students didn’t like this at all. They saw the administration, after failing to solve the problem with force, trying lie their way out of the situation. Now, these demands weren’t actually all that bad. The only reason ROTC stayed was because of business interests, and the same with expansion. The other demand, restoring scholarships to demonstrators, shouldn’t have been that hard, but Pusey stuck up very solidly for tradition and wouldn’t budge. He thought that returning scholarships would be a sign of weakness, that it would encourage rather than discourage the strike. The occupiers won, eventually, on almost every other issue. ROTC did eventually go off campus, and though the university did expand, it funded the building of a large amount of low rent apartments elsewhere in the city.
Three years later, in ’72, it was discovered that not all of the deans had been behind the bust, and an investigation was brought about as to the events of the April, ‘69 (Rosenblatt). Many things were uncovered, and it’s not a coincidence that the main people in support of the bust all left the university that very year. The decision to bust was made too prematurely with very limited knowledge of what the circumstances were going to be. It was not entirely supported and backfired completely on the administration, putting them in a bad light and raising awareness about SDS. After the decision had been made, they had to lie to try to prevent the strike from happening, which further worsened their Image. In the end, they lost not only their president, but they acquiesced to almost all of the demands of the SDS, though that might not be a bad thing.
