Schlesinger Raps Harvard For Letter on Dow Affair

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 has charged that the Harvard Administration displayed "insufferable insensitivity" in the letters sent to students "admonished" for participating in the Dow sit-in and their parents.

In a letter to Robert W. Haney, Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Adams House, Schlesinger said that "any reasonably intelligent or humane man . . . (would have recognized) the stringent moral and emotional predicament created for young men today by the war in Vietnam."

The letter was written in answer to a letter signed by Haney. Schlesinger said yesterday he did not know that the letter was a form letter. The historian and special assistant to President Kennedy apologized for any personal allusions in his reply to Haney. But he continued that "the fact that the letters were not the effusions of an over-zealous senior tutor, but rather carefully considered demarches from University Hall makes their pomposity and inhumanity of tone all the more disturbing."

Schlesinger received the letter after his son Andrew B. Schlesinger '70 handed in his bursar's card during the Dow sit-in. Schlesinger's son did not participate in the sit-in.

While indicating his opposition to the war, the younger Schlesinger said that he would not have handed his card in if he had known that a recruiter was being held captive. "There was a lack of factual knowledge about what was going on at the time," he said.

Haney said Schlesinger's letter was the only reply he had received in this vein. "I'm sorry he wrote the letter," Haney commented.

Haney said that Schlesinger might have had a point if the letter had been the Administration's only response to to the sit-in. "In the light of all the other things the Administration did it is a very intemperate and basically silly document. I must say it's typical of Arthur to do this," Haney added.