Hartman's Appeal

Two years ago next month, Chester W. Hartman '57, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Design, was told that his contract would not be renewed the following year. Hartman, a staunch advocate of socially-oriented city planning who opposed Harvard's housing policies in Cambridge, had founded the Urban Field Service in 1968. In 1969, he worked with radical Harvard political groups during a Spring which culminated in the occupation of University Hall.

The following winter, Hartman was dismissed. He charged the administration with political chicanery. Throughout the Spring of 1970, he fought to have an appeal hearing before a non-partisan group of professors to decide whether in fact the non-renewal of his contract had been based on personal and political considerations. He didn't get very far. Today, nearly two years later, his appeal remains unheard.

In May of 1970, the GSD Faculty passed guidelines for hearing Hartman's appeal, introduced by Peter P. Rogers, associate professor of City Planning. But on December 31, 1970, Maurice D. Kilbridge, dean of the GSD, sent a memorandum to the faculty of the School saying that efforts to establish the five-man review committee called for in the Rogers Motion had proven futile because of the ambiguity of the guidelines. What he should have said was that the guidelines were worded so that any appeal carried out under them would be meaningless, and that responsible faculty members had refused to take part in such a proceeding.

For the next five months, Hartman's charges were shelved while the Dean and Rogers reworked the Rogers Motion into an ad hoc proceeding designed expressly for Hartman's appeal. Last May, they unveiled guidelines which denied Hartman's right to have at least one person on the review committee whom he considered objective, and which left it up to the Dean to decide what actions should come out of the hearing. The review committee was to report confidentially to the Dean, the same person who passed on Hartman's original dismissal. Unbelievably, the GSD Faculty accepted the ad hoc procedures, and charged Rogers with finding the five-man committee from a list of 24 professors outside the GSD.

That was six months ago. Still there is no review committee. Rogers has had to go beyond the original list to find even three members for the committee, and he and the Dean have maintained a policy of secrecy which extends to refusing to tell Hartman who has refused to serve. The result has been increasing wariness about the justness of proceedings.

The delay of Hartman's appeal has gone on long enough. Hartman deserves a hearing, a fair hearing, and yet Harvard seems reluctant to give him that. Perhaps the administration of the GSD is hoping that in a changing political climate, the Hartman case will diminish in importance until it is forgotten altogether. But it won't be, and to pretend it will can serve only to mar further the reputation of what is already Harvard's shoddiest graduate school.