Chapter 4 Harvard University–Radcliffe College Educating for Action

Learning Politics

When Bob Moses traveled South to become a full-time organizer with SNCC, his work in the back roads of Mississippi seemed to be a far cry from his graduate study in philosophy at Harvard. But Moses did not see his field of study as separate from his political work. He understood his political commitment as but an extension of his intellectual pursuits. Reflecting on his study of existentialism, Moses explained, “[Camus] comes out with something which I think is relevant to this struggle [for racial equality]. It’s not a question that you just subjugate yourself to the conditions that are and don’t try to change them.” The problem and the challenge, he continued, “is to go on from there, into something which is active.”3 The formation of SNCC provided Moses with the chance to become active and translate his study of philosophy to a political commitment in the world.

In the context of SNCC, Moses also drew on his graduate study of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose analytical philosophy focused on the nature of representation through language. Moses interpreted Wittgenstein’s philosophy through the lens of community organizing. One of the central goals was working through different perspectives and experiences or multiple representations of reality. As Moses explained to SNCC staff when describing the work of an organizer, his view of the world was only one part of the truth. The conclusions that he came to were “no more or less valid than yours,” and he told his peers to “consider what I see and what you see and from it all we can ultimately find Truth.”4 Moses believed that one of the key tasks of an organizer—like the analytic philosopher—was to clarify and develop a shared language that all parties agreed represented a political or social reality.

Moses thus did not see his academic field of study and his activism as competing positions. Rather, he synthesized his study of existentialism and analytic philosophy with the political work of an organizer. This intellectual synthesis was at the core of Moses’s educational worldview. He deeply believed that the experience of activism enabled the development of new political knowledge, especially for young people who engaged in conversations with adults and elders in the Black community of Mississippi. As he explained, students who engaged in the work of SNCC, even older students like himself, “found that we are learning and becoming ‘qualified’ by acting out these things in which we deeply believe.” By serving the community, he continued, students discovered “in the process that they are serving themselves in a more complete way than they could have were they to spend four straight years in school.”5 However, he maintained that academic knowledge and formal education, like his graduate study in philosophy, were also vital to the pursuit of truth and justice. Over the course of the 1960s, Moses worried about a central problem within SNCC, which he described as the “conflicts between the college and the movement, the problems of a continuing student leadership and student leaders continuing their education.”6 When debates emerged in SNCC about the need for further education—the same debates that shaped some of the efforts of students at Howard University—Moses also advocated for increasing opportunities for students to take time out of action to engage with formal study.

Moses maintained a connection with the Harvard-Radcliffe campus even as he committed to the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Early in his efforts in the South, he wrote letters to the Harvard Crimson describing the draconian nature of Mississippi’s response to SNCC’s efforts in the state. He also made several visits to campus.7 The letters and campus visits served three important purposes. First, Moses hoped that sharing his political experiences in the South would inspire the Harvard-Radcliffe student body to also engage in the movement. Second, he maintained a connection with Harvard because he believed that the institution could provide vital intellectual and academic resources for SNCC’s educational programming. Third, Moses recognized that the Harvard-Radcliffe campus could be used as a political resource that put pressure on states in the South. With a predominantly White, elite student body with families who came from positions of power in both finance and government, Harvard was a bastion of power. Likewise, with prominent scholars like Arthur Schlesinger, who had the ear of the Kennedy administration, the Harvard faculty could provide political support for the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Moses helped shape a new political culture on campus that linked education to the civil rights struggle. Inspired by the firsthand experiences of Moses and other young Black students in the South, students at Harvard-Radcliffe organized the Boston Friends of SNCC. Started and expanded by Dorothy Zellner, a White student who worked full-time in SNCC’s Cambridge office, the Boston chapter developed the philosophy and fundraising model for other Friends of SNCC chapters across the country. A central approach to fundraising was bringing SNCC field-workers on campus to build awareness about the civil rights struggle in the South. In promoting those campus visits to Harvard-Radcliffe, students underscored that the key leaders of SNCC were also students. “A social revolution is being led by students,” the Boston group explained in its program outline for Friends chapters, “and we hope that you, as students, will join us in trying to make democracy a realit[y] in the South.”8

Like Moses, the Boston Friends chapter also synthesized the political and educational. The organization used fundraising for SNCC as a means for developing a model of political education that would bring about the “formation of a concerned, informed, and active student public, willing to commit itself to continued support of the struggle.”9 The chapters linked fundraising and food drives to the community organizing tradition that emphasized political education and civic participation. “We in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee look on Northern Support as more than fundraising: we want to find a way for concerned individuals and groups outside the South to play a role in creating racial justice in the South,” SNCC staff explained to Northern supporters. Zellner underscored that “each fund raising drive should be seen as an educational effort also, for change in the South depends on a climate of opinion all over the country which will cause people to support the movement in the South and demand action from the Federal government.”10

As Moses envisioned, the Boston chapter also proved essential to providing academic resources to the movement. In 1964, when SNCC expanded its voter registration drives, they turned to the Boston chapter to provide books and other academic resources for “crash education programs” that helped local Black residents pass the literacy test to vote.11 The book drive was part of SNCC’s national recruitment effort for the 1964 Freedom Summer. As SNCC began recruiting volunteers, Moses also sent a letter to the academic community that captured the broader educational vision for the summer. “This letter is being sent to hundreds of faculty members across the country,” he explained, “in an effort to involve the intellectual community in America’s most serious social problem—racial discrimination.” Moses envisioned faculty members providing staff seminars in American history, economics, sociology, and political science for project volunteers while also assisting research volunteers in understanding the ways the tax structure, education system, and welfare programs perpetuated racial inequality. In this way, the Freedom Summer project attempted to redirect the intellectual resources of elite institutions like Harvard-Radcliffe in service to the civil rights struggle while also encouraging faculty to learn directly through the experience. As Moses explained, the project hoped to involve university faculty members, “for we think it is important for the best minds in the country to know first hand what is happening in Mississippi.”12

Faculty members at Harvard responded to Moses’s call by developing an SNCC faculty fund. Prominent members of Harvard’s faculty, including Schlesinger, Thomas Pettigrew, and James D. Watson, supported students’ engagement in the civil rights struggle, seeing their commitments as part of their intellectual pursuits at Harvard and Radcliffe. Indeed, the goal of the SNCC faculty fund was to not only raise funds for student efforts in the South but also to build collections of resources that they believed would help supplement students’ political experiences there. The faculty interpreted their efforts as part of their civic obligations as members of an intellectual community and the core learning goals of the general education curriculum. “As members of the academic community,” they wrote, “we have a special concern with realizing in practice, in our country, the philosophical ideals of liberty and democracy that are embodied in the Constitution of the United States.”13

The Boston Friends of SNCC chapter, the SNCC faculty fund, and the 1964 Freedom Summer encapsulated Moses’s vision of utilizing Harvard-Radcliffe to build political awareness among liberal Whites in the North while also drawing upon the educational and intellectual resources of the elite institution. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, fifty-two students from Harvard and Radcliffe volunteered in Mississippi, representing one of the largest collegiate cohorts during the summer. Over the course of the summer, students wrote to their families and published reflections on their experiences in local newspapers and the campus circular. But the impact of SNCC’s connection to Harvard-Radcliffe went beyond utilizing local and campus newspapers to build political support in liberal circles in the Northeast. The combination also influenced some students at Harvard-Radcliffe to reconsider the what and how of their education there through their experiences in the South.

Some students who volunteered for the Freedom Summer expressed a similar sentiment to that of Moses about the relationship between formal education and activism. Radcliffe junior Gail Falk volunteered as a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi. Although she served as a teacher, the experience made her skeptical of formal education. Working with Black community leaders and local students, Falk concluded, “I am far from believing that education is a universal panacea, and I have tried to show the kids in my classes that formal education isn’t everything. They can do a lot that I can’t do.” In coming to this conclusion, Falk still maintained the value of formal educational pursuits. Indeed, what she came to realize was that political participation in the civil rights movement and intellectual pursuits at Radcliffe were reciprocal commitments in her development as a citizen. In a letter home, Falk linked the summer’s experiences to education, democracy, and citizenship. “Working in Mississippi has given me a clarity about what I want to be learning in college that three years of studying in Widener Library could not give,” she explained. “Now that I have helped people understand what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, I know things that I still have to understand. Now that I have worked with people to change the society in which they live, I know what I want to learn about societies and how other people have changed theirs.” The Freedom Summer engaged Falk in a model of participatory civics that called into question certain aspects of her formal education at Radcliffe College. Yet, she maintained, Radcliffe College still offered an intellectual and educational resource to help her make sense of her political experiences in Mississippi.14

Falk was not alone in seeing civil rights activism and intellectual pursuits at Radcliffe as complementary. Ellen Lake, a fellow student at Radcliffe College, justified to her parents that the reason why she wanted to stay in the South after the summer was to continue her education. She explained in a letter home that she had spent most of her nineteen years “shuttled between Westchester, Martha’s Vineyard, the Virgin Islands, summer camp, and Radcliffe,” but she had gained a new perspective from Mississippi. Her experiences taught her that education “comes not so much from an evening at Radcliffe library” but rather from talking with a local Mississippian who details the “degradation of having to go to the other side of the bus station to buy a ticket.”15 Reflecting on the political goals of the summer, she argued further, “I have learned more about politics here from running my own precinct meetings than I could have from any Government professor.” At the same time, Lake maintained that her academic education was valuable, as she saw the experiences she was having and the formal education at Radcliffe as complementary. “I’m sure that I will appreciate more the academic education which I will resume after the practical one I get here,” she concluded in her letter home.16

While both Falk and Lake understood their activism in the South as complementary to their academic education, other students saw the two as being at odds. Harvard student Paul Cowan joined the civil rights struggle in 1963, when he worked with a SNCC project in Maryland. Working with the Black community in Chestertown, where he learned about local Black history and its relation to the struggle, Cowan concluded, “That summer I had found the American history I’d been looking for in my college courses.”17 When he returned to the classroom after working in Maryland, “the problems that were so immediate and compelling in Maryland suddenly became abstractions.”18 Cowan further built on this nascent critique of his education at Harvard when he joined the 1964 Freedom Summer. “The abstract questions that had haunted me [at Harvard],” he reflected, “seemed in the midst of the poverty, the energy, the concentrated intelligence that surrounded me now, sheer self-indulgence.” In Cowan’s view, the problem was that formal education treated political problems as abstract concepts for discussion rather than issues to act upon—an approach that created what he defined as a “lifeless education.”19

But Cowan clarified his critique. His criticisms, he explained, “were more technical than moral.” The role of Schlesinger and others as “scholar-activists in the Kennedy administration” put them in circles of power—a position that Cowan did not necessarily question. Indeed, he believed the connection between intellectual and political life was not itself the problem; rather, the predilection to connect intellectual life to elite political life left faculty disconnected from the people most affected by federal policy. Cowan argued that this was the product of how knowledge was produced within the institution. The political theories developed by scholars like Schlesinger and Hartz were “developed in libraries at Harvard” and were “not [based] on anything they had ever experienced.” He thus sought an education rooted in “living with its least privileged people” so that he would develop a political sensibility more attuned to those marginalized communities. Even so, Cowan’s key words are important to understanding his critique. He believed that such experiences would enable him “to govern them sensibly”—a view that reflected the ways that Cowan critiqued his formal education even as he maintained its design as a particular form of education for elite White students like himself.20

Other students likewise critiqued formal education, but unlike Cowan, they sought to challenge the elite class character of formal education at Harvard-Radcliffe. In the early 1960s, Bill Strickland, a Black student at Harvard, took on a prominent role in the civil rights struggle, both in the North and South. He not only joined the Freedom Summer but also played a key role in expanding the Northern Student Movement, an affiliated organization with SNCC. As the project director, Strickland expanded the group’s tutorial projects to also include organizing rent strikes and encouraging voter registration. Strickland believed that the organization’s narrow focus on academic tutoring assumed that the goal was to merely prepare a student for accessing middle-class life. But, in linking the tutorial to political organizing, he sought to teach both middle-class students who served as tutors and the tutees that notions of failure were just “as often from the inadequacies of the American economic and political system as from personal deficiencies.”21

Indeed, Strickland aimed to develop a new political model of community education. The goal of the tutoring sessions was to use the question “Why do we need a tutorial?” as a way to discuss social problems within the community. Strickland believed this question enabled the tutees to be the firsthand reporters and the “experts” within the relationship, where the tutees’ knowledge exceeded that of the tutors. By framing the sessions as reciprocal, Strickland flipped the student-teacher relationship. He envisioned these micro discussions of community problems as a means to develop new strategies to confront urban poverty and racial discrimination.22 Rather than promote an education for individual or middle-class benefit, NSM sought to “bend education to the ‘other America.’”23

The engagement of Harvard-Radcliffe students in the civil rights struggle extended beyond the relationship between formal education and the political experience of activism. It also raised questions about the political role of the institution. Harvard student John Perdew traveled South to support the civil rights struggle there. Participating in a sidewalk demonstration in Americus, Georgia, Perdew was arrested with four other SNCC students. Perdew was charged with a capital offense for what local Mississippi officials deemed an attempt to incite insurrection. The case raised the issue of what Harvard as an institution should do. Students argued that the college had a moral obligation to make a political statement. But Dean John Munro refused to issue a statement on Perdew’s case. His reasoning reflected a common institutional logic employed by other academic leaders in the 1960s: he distinguished between the institution and the individual as political actors. Munro argued, “You have to make the distinction between Harvard as an institution and as a group of individuals.”24

Similar to the argument made by John Hannah at Michigan State, the problem with Munro’s stance was that it hid the institution’s financial relationship to the structure of Jim Crow in the South. On the heels of the Freedom Summer, Moses sent a letter to the Harvard-Radcliffe community titled “Harvard’s Responsibility to Mississippi.” In the letter, Moses highlighted the university’s holdings in Southern utilities and banks. Harvard was the largest stockholder in Middle South Utilities, which owned the Mississippi Power and Light Company. Through its financial support of these companies, Moses argued, Harvard was also connected to the Mississippi Democratic Party, the White Citizens’ Council, and other dominant institutions that reinforced segregation and inequality in Mississippi. Moses believed that Harvard could not “disclaim responsibility for the ‘goings on down there’” and hoped that the university would use its economic, social, and political roots in the state to change Mississippi. “But Mississippi is a profitable business enterprise,” Moses admitted. “We wonder whether education is only incidental to the Board of Trustees of Harvard University.”25

Munro’s response to the Perdew case fragmented the original vision of Moses’s efforts on the Harvard-Radcliffe campus. While drawing a distinction between Harvard-Radcliffe as a political institution and one of individuals, Munro did believe that the student body of Harvard and Radcliffe could support Perdew’s case by raising funds. “The main thing to do now is to exercise his legal rights and get him out of jail,” he explained. “I think this is a great cause for the Harvard student body to get behind in one way or another.” Munro, in other words, deflected the political role of the institution while directing students to fundraise as an appropriate response. Indeed, he saw the Friends of SNCC as the appropriate place for student activism: in the extracurriculum.26 Munro’s reasoning shaped the institutional logic of disciplining democracy at Harvard-Radcliffe. Administrators and faculty affirmatively encouraged and supported students’ participation in the civil rights struggle by developing a new E4A program while deflecting criticisms of the institution’s role in American political life.

Interning for Citizenship

Radcliffe preisdent Mary Bunting never met Moses. But she was influenced by the atmosphere he helped shape at Harvard-Radcliffe in the 1960s. Bunting interpreted students’ experiences in the civil rights movement as “an important dimension of liberal education.” Indeed, Falk, Lake, and the cohort of volunteers from Harvard-Radcliffe who participated in the Freedom Summer inspired Bunting to establish E4A. Bunting framed the new program as being akin to the Freedom Summer in the way that the summer project and the civil rights struggle more broadly impacted students, faculty, and administrators. As she noted in her proposal, the program would have an “important influence on other students in their colleges and on faculty and administration as well as on their families and other friends as have so many of our young civil rights workers.”27

Dennis Huckabay was excited when he learned about E4A. He saw similar elements of his varied political experiences in the E4A program. He organized projects with the American Friends Service Committee that involved students in migrant labor camps, worked with the World University Service, and volunteered as a Freedom Summer teacher in Mississippi. “Universities,” he explained to Bunting, “have a way of closing students off from the outside problems. Education for Action is a door to the outside.” While he recognized that the E4A program had potential for independent study and enabled students to define service on their terms, he also believed it held political possibilities. “My impression too is that the Education for Action Board is free to offer support to students who might wish to involve themselves in projects which might prove unpopular in some quarters—e.g. providing draft counselling service for ghetto youths (or at least letting them know that there are other ways to get job training besides joining the army), or helping to harvest sugar cane in Cuba—or in Haiti,” he wrote to Bunting.28 To Huckabay, the E4A idea offered an independent educational and activist outlet for students and held the potential to transform an elite institution like Harvard-Radcliffe similar to what Moses envisioned when linking the elite institution to the Freedom Summer.

Huckabay wrote to Bunting in hopes of becoming the director of the program, but he was not hired. This was partly due to the fact that Bunting defined the program differently than Huckabay did. Bunting described the program as a “citizenship internship,” but the internship experience of “citizenship” was much more narrowly defined than what Huckabay imagined for E4A. Even as Bunting was inspired by the experiences of students in the civil rights movement, she interpreted the experiences not as a form of political activism but as an expression of volunteerism. What Bunting did in her proposal was make a political choice. She prioritized the type of learning expressed by students like Falk and Lake over the forms of political education envisioned by Cowan and Strickland. Indeed, the focus was on experiential learning over the political critiques of formal education and the institution that emerged out of student experiences in the civil rights struggle. This choice reflected Bunting’s particular position—one that was critiqued by students like Cowan—in which she drew on the key ideas from her network within federal policy circles.

Indeed, Bunting’s original idea for the E4A first took shape within the Peace Corps–higher education partnership. In the same year that Bunting developed the E4A program, she attended the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Conference in Washington, DC, a gathering that brought together close to a thousand volunteers with representatives from higher education, business, and the public sector. She also attended a more intimate gathering of select volunteers and university administrators at the Brookings Institution that same year. At both conferences, a primary topic was the relationship between higher education and the Peace Corps. The theme of the Brookings Institution gathering, “The Peace Corps in an Educating Society,” focused on three ideas—that “the Peace Corps should see itself as an educational institution”; that “colleges and universities should become more like the Peace Corps”; and that the “relationship between the Peace Corps and American higher education should move from a flirtation or collision to a marriage.”29 Bunting was inspired by the conference, so much so that she embraced the third component—a “marriage” between the Peace Corps and other volunteer programs with Harvard-Radcliffe. Roger Landrum, the Peace Corps volunteer who was trained at Michigan State University and expressed early ideas of service learning, wrote to Bunting about the E4A program. After learning about the effort from his colleagues in the Peace Corps, Landrum wrote, “It is good to see that some of the Brookings and conference of Returnees’ thoughts led into this.”30 Susan Bartholomew, a former Peace Corps volunteer who served as part of the first cohort in Ghana, was hired as the director of the E4A program.

Like other university presidents and administrators, Bunting prioritized the way the volunteer experience enhanced students’ technical and professional skills. As a trained microbiologist, she interpreted the volunteer experience as being similar to the science laboratory. “As a scientist quite used to giving credit for laboratory,” Bunting explained, “credit for the Peace Corps seems to be analogous.”31 Her parallel to the laboratory was significant to her pedagogical and educational worldview. Indeed, Bunting emphasized that it was not just a training program for future volunteer work; rather, it would further enhance academic training. “They [the students] eagerly take advantage of the opportunity to deepen their volunteer experience with relevant academic preparation,” Bunting explained, “at the same time making their academic preparation more immediately relevant and exciting.” Her idea of E4A promoted experiential learning without the political commitment and broader political goals that initially inspired students at Harvard-Radcliffe. “The hope,” Bunting further explained, was “that through summer service many students would discover problems and interests that would resolve their career decisions.”32

Although operating in conjunction with the Phillips Brooks House (PBH), which had a long history of promoting volunteerism, the E4A program differed from PBH in the view of both Bartholomew and Bunting in terms of academic possibilities. Established in the first part of the twentieth century, the PBH focused on community service; it placed students at settlement houses, financed missionaries to serve in Asia in the first part of the twentieth century, and organized clothing and book drives. The PBH largely operated as an extracurricular program with very little relation to the general curriculum of Harvard and Radcliffe. In contrast, the E4A program was envisioned as an integrated component within the regular curriculum. “E4A offers a unique educational opportunity for students and faculty: they can bring their field experiences—confusing and chaotic as they often are—into the classroom for analysis under seminar conditions,” Bunting wrote, “and then take their ‘findings’ back into the field for testing. The academic and field experiences revitalize each other in an on-going process.”33

Integrated into the regular undergraduate curriculum, the E4A program represented one of the more radical pedagogical experiments in the Peace Corps–higher education partnership. Bartholomew and Bunting worked with deans and faculty from the School of Public Health and College of Education to identify courses that would supplement the service experience. Dean Theodore Sizer, from the Harvard School of Education, offered academic credit to students involved in community work with E4A. The two-year program consisted of three elements. The first year was a summer of service in VISTA or a related domestic program. After completing their service, students then took a range of seminars related to their service work. In their senior year, the students then did a second summer of service with the Peace Corps. In 1966 and 1967, the program sent students to work with Peace Corps volunteers in Togo, Ethiopia, Venezuela, and the Philippines.34 E4A also acted as a granting agency. Students could develop their own proposal for some type of social service work in or outside the United States and receive funding from the E4A board made up of students and faculty members.

On paper, the E4A program maintained the political vision of the college articulated by Moses when turning to Harvard-Radcliffe to support the civil rights struggle as well as the tutorial projects promoted by Strickland. One E4A seminar was taught by Tom Wilson, a professor of education. The seminar’s topic, “Teaching in Urban Areas,” examined how the resources of the university could be used by students working in the community and how faculty could better connect their theories and research to problems in the world. But even as the seminar addressed ways to expand the intellectual resources, the primary focus was on how students learned from the experience over the political goal of such involvement. Indeed, students who participated in E4A opportunities framed their involvement through academic or personal-professional goals, including intellectual exploration, academic interests, and experiences to get into graduate school. After his summer in Togo, Harvard student Alex Hurder noted how he learned more about Africa and the many problems inherent in development work. His experiences also helped him better formulate his senior thesis on African cultures. “What I know of Africa from being there and what I know of it from reading in anthropology, government, French, African, and English African literature,” he wrote in his final report, “are different realms of knowledge.” He concluded, “Reading can certainly not replace being there.” Hurder’s report reflected the type of supplemental learning that Bunting envisioned in starting the program.35

Indeed, students were encouraged to see the political limitations or constraints of the program, especially in terms of addressing social problems and inequalities, as an element of learning. “At a time when students have been seeking a constructive means to real social change,” Bunting explained, “E4A has provided a channel to learn about what is involved in this endeavor.” Adopting this view, Maria Montamat, a Radcliffe student and Peace Corps intern in Tunisia, underscored the way she learned over the impact of her work. Since the Peace Corps operated in partnership with the Tunisian government, Montamat was unable to participate in any sort of social action or political work while there. Montamat’s work was limited to academic tutoring as defined by the bilateral agreement. Although frustrated by these constraints, she wrote to Bunting that she was “learning a tremendous amount about Tunisia and the problems of a very poor developing country—and most specifically, about the education system, which is a major part of the national effort to modernize.”36

Even as students adopted the academic learning goals of the program, the political potential of experiential learning was maintained within E4A. Indeed, some students critiqued the underlying assumptions of E4A and their roles in overseas work. In 1969, Kay Kreiss, a student at Radcliffe, worked in Guatemala as part of the San Francisco Miramac, a voluntary medical program. As soon as Kreiss landed in Guatemala, she was immediately troubled. Her service site was a military base. “In the following six weeks spent working in villages and on huge coffee plantations,” she wrote, “it became increasingly evident that this organization was being used by the army to do grass-roots public relations and to redirect local farmers away from potential guerilla sympathies.” She also noted that the organization was used “by local priests who manipulated some groups of volunteers in an attempt to extend church influence” and by “absentee landlords” who “took credit for the U.S. drug company–donated medicine and volunteer services of doctors and dentists.” She linked her experiences to the other work being done through E4A, including tutoring programs and VISTA. Too often, she argued, education and literacy work, whether in the United States or around the world, were “assumed to be a good end in itself. But education is not a neutral force: it is education towards an end, towards certain values and skills.”37

Kreiss’s criticisms provoked a broader discussion among students and supporters about the form and nature of action in the program. Norm Diamond, a graduate student in government at Harvard and program participant, argued that the partnership with the Peace Corps meant that E4A also adopted the agency’s political goals, which in his view was nothing but a “liberal form of control that directs change in underdeveloped countries which will not upset the social structure that is favorable to American business interests.” Majid Tehransian, an international student from Iran studying at Harvard, disagreed with Diamond’s interpretation. He approved of the “idealism of Peace Corps volunteers, of the transfer of technological aid and the educational component of volunteers’ experience.” Tehransian was more concerned about its affiliation with the US government, arguing, like other former volunteers, for an international version of the Peace Corps. Even as he defended the agency, Tehransian argued that if the goal was social change, one needed to engage in political organizing outside of the Peace Corps. The discussion revealed to students the limitations of only focusing on learning in the context of volunteerism without considering the politics of their engagement.38

The discussion and Kreiss’s reflections pivoted on two ideas of neutrality associated with Harvard-Radcliffe that students increasingly challenged in the late 1960s. The first was whether a volunteer doing work in the community could ever be a neutral action. Kreiss noted that focusing only on the volunteer work narrowed the type of education into “an interesting personal experience.” But she believed that the goal of the program should be an education in social and political activism. The problem, she concluded, was that “the Peace Corps does not seem to represent social service in the sense of social change.” She said the student needed to acknowledge the very political salience of their volunteer work. “Social work,” she concluded, “is not neutral or apolitical in either its means or effects.”39

Kreiss’s conclusion applied to more than just individual roles in volunteer or community work. It also included one’s institutional affiliation. The second critique of neutrality centered on the institutional level. The primary criticism was of the Peace Corps’ bilateral agreements and how those agreements shaped the boundaries of a volunteer’s role overseas. Kreiss argued that the façade of neutrality of Bilateral agreements also applied to Harvard-Radcliffe. When discussing the relationship between the individual student and the college, she argued that “by being at Harvard, we are perpetuating apartheid in South Africa, and cheap labor in Mississippi where Harvard has extensive investments.”40 The reference to the financial role of Harvard-Radcliffe was important to the broader politics on campus, where students continued to challenge the college for its political role. Harvard-Radcliffe garnered national attention for both its anti-war activism and its efforts to combat the expansion of the campus into communities of color.41 Kreiss’s discussion of the political role of the volunteer thus concerned not only the type of action that Harvard-Radcliffe would support in its curriculum but also the action of elite colleges in American and global politics.

Reorganizing Student Activities

Kreiss’s critique of the program’s definition of action highlighted the productive tension within E4A. Kreiss at once criticized the narrow emphasis on volunteerism, even as the experience itself helped her experiment and evolve her political ideas in the world. The context of the program also provided further grounds for experimentation to evolve its primary mode of action beyond national and international volunteerism. But Kreiss confronted new institutional realities in the early 1970s. Indeed, as student leaders like Kreiss began to challenge the program’s narrow emphasis on social service work, the initial Ford Foundation grant ended. Administrators at both Harvard and Radcliffe had to decide if and how the institution would continue to fund and support the program.

When the status of E4A as an institutional program was first raised, the main issue from the perspective of administrators was program redundancy. Charles P. Whitlock, the dean of Harvard College, interpreted the program as just another PBH. Both involved students in similar volunteer and social service programs, so to him, it made financial sense to consolidate the staff into one center that promoted volunteer service for students at both Harvard and Radcliffe. This view was also reflective of the hierarchy between Harvard and Radcliffe. Harvard deans had more financial and institutional power over programming than their counterparts at Radcliffe. In the context of E4A, where discussions critiqued social service efforts like those in PBH and connected social activism to formal education, student leaders worried that the program mission would be lost in the consolidation. Terry Rockefeller, a student at Radcliffe and member of the E4A board, argued that consolidating the two “would cause not only a loss of identity and individuality to E4A as a program, but also threaten its existence completely.”42

In response to a student meeting where E4A students raised their concerns about the effort to consolidate, Harvard and Radcliffe administrators evolved their reasoning. Whitlock still maintained that the program could not be institutionally supported due to financial constraints. Whitlock’s reasoning adopted the structure of the institution. Because the E4A program did not fit under a broader umbrella within the colleges, he argued that the program was not a traditional discipline that could be supported by the institutions. At the same time, he believed that the program was not a traditional student activity either. Whitlock and John Thomas Dunlop, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, prioritized funding for what they defined as traditional student activities, including athletics, debate team, music, and drama. This was part of renaming the student center, where E4A was located, the Student Activities Center. In Dunlop’s view, the issue was that E4A’s philosophy of education—which combined formal education with volunteerism—did not fit within the institutional schema that maintained a sharp division between the curriculum and extracurriculum. Within this context, Dunlop encouraged students to embrace financial separation from Harvard-Radcliffe as a practical solution. While he recognized that, philosophically, it would have less of an impact on the core curriculum scheme as it was initially envisioned, he believed it would provide more programmatic and practical flexibility.

Indeed, at the core of efforts to consolidate the E4A program was a deeper division about the direction of elite education at Harvard-Radcliffe. Students interpreted the funding cuts and renaming as narrowing the meaning of student action—and, by extension, one’s education. As E4A board member Laurie Oliver noted, “while the name Student Center maintians [sic] an open-endedness of possibilities for use of facilities and program, of ideology and meaning, the word activities connotes to me something on the order of fun and games, busy work of the sort that concerned our high school student councils, something very safe and restricted.”43 For students like Oliver, social action was more than a safe extracurricular activity. Rather, she argued, the various efforts of E4A were a fundamental part of education and the development of political awareness. In contrast, Whitlock and Dunlop interpreted such activities as supplemental experiences that were part of personal growth. Both had adopted the view of Derek Bok, the new president of Harvard in 1971. Professor David Riesman, a supporter of the Peace Corps and E4A, met with Bok in hopes that Harvard-Radcliffe would join the University Year of Action, but, as Riesman concluded, “Bok expressed reluctance to give academic credit [to community service], feeling although it may be valid for low income students, it certainly wasn’t necessary for Harvard students.”44 Although supportive of community involvement and service among students, Bok believed such activities had very little relation to academic coursework or the perceived intellectual rigor of the Harvard curriculum. He believed it was only a concern for a select group of students rather than the student body as a whole.

Given the limited choice and support from the institution, E4A lived on but became an independent organization in the 1970s that was associated with Harvard-Radcliffe in name only. The change had a twofold effect on programming.45 The shift disconnected the E4A program from the regular curriculum of the university. In the 1970s, students saw the program as a resource for finding opportunities and engaging with nonprofit and related organizations. As Connie Kreiss believed, E4A had a “dual front,” serving “as a clearinghouse for ideas, projects, and people concerned with social change, and it served as a source of grants for students who need money in order to carry out projects.”46 At the same time that the program was marginalized to student affairs, it began focusing on more activist-oriented work in the community, as envisioned by earlier students. In 1971, the members of the E4A board expanded the mission of program. As board members explained in the new interpretation of the program and its history, “Begun originally as a social service program, the students increasingly defined our function in terms of social action. Our concern with social imbalances and injustices has led us to try to get at the structural roots of problems rather than merely provide temporary and superficial solutions to comprehensive problems.”47

The program’s activist mission reflected the backgrounds of those students who participated in the programs. In the 1970s, women and minority students oversaw the grant-making process of the program and the rear­ticulation of its mission, and many saw the program as an extension of the Feminist Movement and the Welfare Rights Movement, respectively.48 While maintaining that students learned from community work, the new mission shifted the learning away from academic goals to what students believed was the more important process of “political development.”49 As Rockefeller explained, the center allowed students to build “a loose network of people engaged in various aspects of social change” and provided a space “through which people can share experiences, knowledge, and information.”50 Indeed, Shepherd Bliss, the new director of the program in the 1970s, was a staunch supporter of the dual mission as articulated by students. A trained minister, Bliss was actively involved in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, believing deeply that community work must be linked to broader efforts of social and political activism that challenged policy and institutional structures. At the same time, Bliss understood his task was to help guide the students into appropriate avenues for effective forms of social activism. Bliss believed the program provided “an ideal structure for many individuals—particularly women, minority students and others concerned with the shortcomings of our society—to work through and share ideas about these questions in a disciplined way and discover appropriate expressions and channels for their concerns.”51 In the 1970s, E4A efforts focused more on issue-based activism, including union organizing for waitresses in Boston, community organizing in Arkansas, organizing for tenants in Cambridge, and welfare advocacy.

A dichotomy reemerged between formal education and action that Bunting had hoped to reconcile when she started the program in the mid-1960s. Indeed, student participants in the 1970s contrasted the work and philosophy of the program with the regular curriculum. The program provided a resource and outlet missing in formal education, even if the opportunity was not integrated into coursework. As Dewey Hickman, an African American student at Harvard, explained, “A great many people here have had to take time off from school to satisfy their social consciences, when they shouldn’t have had to.” Indeed, Hickman recycled a view first expressed by Freedom Summer volunteers. “Sometimes you just can’t stay in school and work on something you believe in,” he argued. In the E4A, “we are trying to help those people keep from breaking up their education.”52 Hickman also believed E4A represented an important resource on campus that engaged students, as Bliss believed, in more disciplined forms of social activism. “We have been ready to help those that are ready to be helped, but we’ve never tried to force people,” he explained. Through seminars, workshops, and reporting on their work in the community, E4A was more effective in raising political awareness, Hickman argued, noting, “we shouldn’t have to take over some building before people stop and learn about a travesty.”53

Fellow E4A member Rob Gips likewise interpreted the program as separate from the college’s education. In 1974, E4A members implemented the East Boston’s People’s Rights Group, a project that not only demonstrated the program’s issue-based form of activism but also further reflected the divergence of political action from the regular curriculum. The group’s goal was to develop a recipient-run welfare advocacy project. The students worked with local citizens and others in the community organizing ethos of the Welfare Rights Movement, focusing on problems related to unemployment, medical care, housing, and schooling. By 1975, the center was run and directed by local residents and was financially independent. The university administration highlighted the effort, interpreting the project as a reflection of the ways the institution enabled students to learn through political involvement in the world. Gips was not impressed with the report and the institution’s statement of support. In an editorial for the Harvard Crimson, he clarified the project’s purpose and the role of the students. “While we did want to ‘balance our Harvard view with reality,’” he wrote, “the main reason most of us became involved in welfare rights is our commitment to working toward a more just and egalitarian society.”54

While appreciating such efforts, Eddie Quiñonez, another student board member, interpreted E4A’s place on campus in the 1970s differently than both Hickman and Gips. He felt “alienated” by his “education” because it was disconnected from the concerns of his community. Quiñonez also believed his academic education taught the wrong lesson. “We find ourselves in an individual environment with little group experience, a great deal of competition and little community,” he explained.55 Working in the program allowed him to integrate his education with experience and community and political commitment. But he was also skeptical of its place in relation to Harvard-Radcliffe. Drawing on the history of activism in the 1960s, Quiñonez rightly noted that “E4A was created in ’66 at a particular point in history when there was a large mass movement” and that “E4A was the result of this uprising.” While acknowledging how E4A represented a legitimate institutional response to the movements of the 1960s, he wondered, especially as a student activist in the late 1970s, whether it was used more as a way to pacify student activists and direct their activism away from institutional involvement, education, and scholarly practices.56

Programs like E4A had a two-tiered effect on student activism. At Harvard and Radcliffe, the E4A program became an important resource for students interested in political and social action throughout the 1970s. In the E4A, students developed models of activism that, for Bliss and university administrators, were disciplined and focused and, for students, balanced their own political education with community empowerment. However, the efforts of E4A were largely marginalized to student affairs and disconnected from the regular curriculum, institutional funding, and student life more generally. The result was an activist clearinghouse that allowed students to get involved and take political stances in the world, but those activities had no relation to either the general patterns of the education or what Moses highlighted on the heels of the Freedom Summer.

The evolution of E4A and its position at Radcliffe and Harvard made clear that political activism as a moral commitment was an extracurricular activity that fell outside the institutions’ intellectual pursuits and could not challenge the financial priorities of the board of trustees. The reasoning used by administrators provided political flexibility for the program, enabling students to engage more freely—and independently—in political action. But the flexibility rested upon a logic that reflected the pedagogical ideology of Harvard-Radcliffe. In light of the commitment to neutrality and disinterested judgment, administrators recategorized the program as an extracurricular activity unrelated to the regular curriculum and disconnected from the institutional mission.

Legacy

In her report to the Ford Foundation, Bunting expressed enthusiasm for E4A’s potential. The concept of E4A, she explained, “has been useful and educational within Radcliffe and Harvard, and also beyond Cambridge.” Indeed, she further noted, the E4A program garnered academic and political interest beyond Harvard-Radcliffe. Academic leaders increasingly reached out about the program after it was highlighted in the 1966 International Education Act and Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest in 1970. In the Nixon report, the committee members noted that the E4A program represented “a model of student-community involvement” that could be replicated across American higher education.57

But as a model for other institutions, E4A as an integrated program in the curriculum was short-lived. Between 1966 and 1970, administrators like Bunting developed an experimental action program embedded within the regular curriculum that allowed students to take a course of study tied to international and domestic volunteer experiences. Even as students critiqued the limitations of the program’s primary mode of action, they embraced its core mission to expand and reconstruct elite formal education at Harvard-Radcliffe. By the early 1970s, that program was not only disconnected from the curriculum, it was disassociated from the university as a financially sponsored program. On paper, the decision to do so was strictly financial. In the early 1970s, Harvard-Radcliffe administrators like Dunlop interpreted the program as a redundant opportunity with the presence of the Phillips Brooks House. Administrators deemed other, more traditional student activities to be those deserving of financial support.

The financial justification entailed more than just practical considerations; it also reflected a set of value judgments that were embedded in the program’s founding and early history. When Bunting turned to volunteerism over other modes of political activism, she embraced an implicit—but strong—pedagogical belief that the university, like the curriculum, should be politically neutral. As students pointed out in the late 1960s, international and domestic volunteerism was no less politically neutral than other modes of political activism. Indeed, the critique of the program’s primary mode of action echoed early criticisms of institutional neutrality: Harvard-Radcliffe was taking a political side in the civil rights struggle through its financial holdings. Disconnecting E4A from the regular curriculum revealed a particular pedagogical view about the relationship between action and education at Harvard-Radcliffe. A program of action could be a part of the curriculum if the primary focus was volunteerism or social service. If students wanted a mode of action that was political, the program could neither be integrated into the curriculum nor financially funded by the institution. The conditions of the program’s transformation reflected the ways Harvard-Radcliffe promoted action insofar that it did not reveal the underlying politics of the institution. The process of disciplining democracy at Harvard-Radcliffe thus took the form of a financial decision that masked the institutions’ own politics and values.