HARVARD AND THE WAR

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The interview form is not a means of expression ideally suited to academics--at least not this one. In the first instance, it elevates a non-event into a weighty occurance. This is particularly noxious since the community is exposed only to that curious cross-section of opinion which happens to be home when the CRIMSON phones. Moreover, one finds (or at least I find) that hesitant and tentative formulation appear in print without the shades of doubt in which they were initially shrouded. And even when questions of misquotation do not arise, matters of context and meaning to do. Since my views on the fall-out from the Dow demonstration took up many inches of your space on Saturday, and somewhat misleadingly at that, I hope you will allow me to correct or alter some impressions now.

... The most fortunate consequence of the recent controversy is that almost everyone seems to understand that the issues raised by it are vexing ones, and cannot be resolved by glib critical formulae or reassertions of established practices. It is for this reason that I tried to avoid the concept of the university's complicity in the war. If indeed I did not succeed, it shows how easy it is to fall into rhetorical grooves even when one does not want to. But while the demonstration was conceived of and acted out as a protest against the war, it has,--and in no small measure because of the response of many Faculty and administration--now been turned into a dispute about Harvard's relationship with the outside world. This, however, is a far cry from complicity with the government's wretched Vietnam adventure.

Distressing as the realization may be, according to the precepts of liberal politics by which we have organized our communal lives for more than two centuries, we are all complicitous unless we actively withdraw our consent from society, or deny ourselves its protections--of which the 2S deferment is the first to come to mind. Regrettably or not, very few of us have done that; this exposes as a gross version of cowardice (and as untoward naivete) our arrogant projection of dissident heroism onto the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Nor are fishing expeditions into University investments or sources of funds likely to hed much light on the matter.

I do not, however, believe that this disposes of the troubling problem of the academy's political neutrality. Conor Cruise O'Brien points out somewhere that in the developing world here are "their neutrals" and "our neutrals." The analogy is not perfect, but for most American universities, their "neutrality" or their "political" character has always been tipped to the established order. It is feigned innocence to pretend that any other situation could adhere. As Harvard has eschewed the worst features of this imbalance, it is rightly a matter of some pride. Yet a can-did confrontation with its own normative principles cannot help but be both refreshing and supportive of Harvard's essential purposes. This might well mean a diminution or even elimination of some facets of its activities. But essential purposes or not, no university exists sub specie aeternitatis, and a morally divisive war is not an inopportune time to realize this. Mowever unhappily, matters of academic policy have been raised in a political context; to decide them in one way is in no sense more or less political than deciding them in another. Certainly, then, the status quo ante would be as politically connotative as would any change, no matter how radical.

All of this leads to the point that the issues must be seen on their intrinsic merits. This surely will not mean a total retreat from the world, that enchanting idyll of no known past. But here and there disengagements from some present undertakings should not a priori be foreclosed. On the other hand, reconsiderations may issue in more strenuous efforts at openness, particularly in the policy sciences and their research centers. Conscious receptivity to destructive criticism of conventionally accepted limits n policy can after all well be defended on both intellectual and pragmatic grounds.

On this score, one conclusion seems inescapable. If recruitment privileges are not to be abridged, then the more important right of free speech and access to divergent ideas must be procedurally safeguarded. Now, I was quoted as saying that the American Friends' Service Committee would not under present circumstances be allowed to recruit for conscientious objectors on the campus. Though to my knowledge the Friends have never tried to do this, I in fact assume (and the Career Plans Office confirms) that such recruitment would be sanctioned just as the Marines' or Dows' or Colgate's would be. But while the secondary privilege of recruiting is thus guaranteed, were the AFSC to seek a platform for the presentation of ideas here it would need the protecting cover of a student group's sponsorship to be welcomed. Indeed, with a group of our own Faculty, sought last year to co-sponsor with the Quakers a conference at Harvard on Conscription, university facilities were denied them because of their political position. Assuredly this restriction would be applied across the board. Yet when so much is being made of issues of liberty, and particularly of the freedom for ideas, such a discrepancy calls for corrective attention.

Having said all this, I would want to add that the object of struggle against this terrible war is elsewhere than Harvard. To focus obsessively, as some have shown signs of doing, on this community and its local problems is a solipsistic and fundamentally irrelevant diversion from the political arena, where even now one may yet strike blows for peace. Martin Peretz   Instructor in Social Studies