Pusey Denies June Speech Reply to Veritas Charges

President Pusey has denied that pressure from the Veritas Foundation prompted him to defend the Economics Department before alumni and to ask graduates "to eschew hearsay and innuendo, take a fresh look, undate your image of Harvard, and try to see this University as it truly is."

Pusey made the plea last June at the annual meeting of the Alumni Association in the Yard, commencement Day. He said that he had heard generally favorable reaction the speech just after its delivery and has received no adverse comment about it.

"I felt for a long time that I wanted to say this to alumni," he said last week, "and was not motivated especially by the Veritas Foundation." He said that alumni charges of alleged one-sided teaching at Harvard has not increased appreciably in recent years.

"Fabian-Marxist-Communist" Front

The Foundation, a group of alumni organized in 1958, has said that the Economics Department is a "Fabian-Marxist-Communist front" and that it refuses "to give any hearing whatever to the conservative point of view." Keynesians at Harvard "infiltrate the faculty with their supporters and preach their socialist doetrine" and have "purged the Economics Department, at least, of all vestiges of free economic theories, advocates, and text books," the Veritas Foundation has said in a circular to Harvard alumni.

Members of the Department have not regarded the Veritas campaign very seriously; "the Department has been under fire since the turn of the century," said one senior member this fall.

Pusey told alumni in June, "The notion that any department at Harvard is a tight-knit little group trying to impose a point of view seems to me utterly fantastic. I am confident I know these departments as well as anyone outside them can."

"Over-Arching Keynesian Siant"

"Those who today try to imply an over-arching Keynesian (whatever they mean by that!) or even a Marxist slant to our teachings [in Economics] know neither Harvard nor the subject of economics in our time," said the President.

"He then listed the diversity of projects by University economists and concluded, "Can anyone seriously charge that these men and the others in their Department are subverting the American way of life? And can anyone seriously charge the same of the University as a whole, [considering, for example] its far-reaching effort in business, which is almost completely diercted toward making the private enterprise system continue to work effectively and beneficially in a very difficult world?"

Pusey ended by asking alumni to visit Cambridge often, to check the facts before creating an image of their University, and "to join in the endless task to get her mission understood."