The Mail

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

My distinguished colleague Talcott Parsons, with whom I agree on most matters, has charged the Harvard President and Corporation with suppression of academic freedom in vetoing the decision of the Syndics of the Harvard University Press to publish The Double Helix by James Watson. I believe this is unjust and I rise in a limited way to their defense.

The reason for this action was not, I suggest, indifference to academic freedom. Had the book defended, always with appropriate scholarship, some socially unpalatable subject--neoBolshevism, sodomy, the therapeutic use of hashish, hard-core pornography--the Corporation would have recognized that a question of principle was involved. They would not have interfered. But Mr. Watson's book dealt with an arcane problem of science, a still more difficult problem of the scientific personality, a highly subjective question of libel, and an even more inassessable threat of legal action. On sidestepping a professional squabble or avoiding a lawsuit, one may assume, the Corporation saw no question of principle. To be sure they also failed to see that these were questions on which an occasional gathering of excellent but inexperienced laymen would inevitably be uninformed. They did seek advice from their lawyers. But they did not recognize that this was to reinforce innocence with innocence. From some experience I can attest there are few matters on which, odd accidents of individual personality and aptitude apart, the successful lawyer is so hopelessly at a loss and so little aware of that fact, as in the delicate jungle of literary controversy, law and publishing procedure generally.

So the issue was not suppression. It was the consequence ultimately of the progressive divorce of the Corporation under an ancient charter relevant to a small and simple college from the complex realities of the modern academic world. It is wrong, accordingly, to attribute to repression what, in all fairness, must be blamed on ill-advised interference and the resulting ineptitude. On the assumption that God prefers the latter to wicked intent one is right to ask for charitable judgment. John Kenneth Galbraith   Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics