Meeting Dow

IN TWO WEEKS the Dow Chemical Corporation will be recruiting at Harvard again, and not surprisingly, the ground rules of the new visit are in dispute. The Chemistry Department invited Dow this time, not the College's Officer of Graduate and Career Plans; and apparently, last year's faculty resolution on recruiting applied only to future guests of the OGCP. So far the Chemistry faculty has acted quietly and responsibly, encouraging and accepting student requests for a public meeting with the Dow representatives. The Department should complete its gesture of good will by leaving the meeting open to the whole University instead of limiting attendance to Chemistry students, as some students and faculty have suggested.

Advocates of a closed meeting see several problems with flinging the doors open to all comers. Chemistry students argue they can cross-examine the Dow spokesman more effectively than laymen, and don't want to see their attack diluted. Others have argued that regardless of their expertise, the students organizing the gathering deserve the bulk of the questioning time, something they're unlikely to get in an open confrontation.

It is hard, however, to see how knowledge of chemistry can make questioners any more effective in raising the ethical and political questions involved in Dow's manufacture of napalm. The central problem in the Dow controversy--an industry's responsibility for the nature and use of its product--is moral not chemical. It concerns the whole university equally, and it an issue in which no one is expert.

As for who does the talking, chemistry students could get their fill of questioning by asking for a second, private meeting with the Dow spokesman, or by using a panel discussion as a format for the open gathering. A group of panelists representing chemistry students, faculty and other student organizations around the university could talk with the Dow representative before throwing the meeting open to questions from the floor. The mechanism would satisfy chemists and structure the program simultaneously.

Limiting the attendance at the Dow meeting is unnatural and unnecessary. Dow is coming to Harvard, not just to Mallinckrodt, and the implications of its policies are of concern not only to the Chemistry Department, but to everyone.