TARRING THE PEACE CORPS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The broadside levelled by Paul Cowan and the other ex-Volunteers from Educator ("The Peace Corps: An Indictment," CRIMSON, Jan. 17) makes a few valid points, but it strays far from the mark in its categorization of the Peace Corps as "arrogant" and "colonialist."

Though the Peace Corps does have the final say on how many Volunteers will be sent and for what purpose, this hardly constitutes "total administrative power," for the simple reason that most Volunteers work under the supervision, direct or indirect, of a host country national.

The Ecuador Volunteers miss the point when they contend that the presence of Peace Corps staff arouses local resentment. Resentment is there, all right, but its target is not so much the staff as the Volunteers. No matter who supervised them, the presence of large numbers of Americans as teachers, CD workers, etc. would serve to remind Latins--and Africans and Asians--that they still lack enough trained people of their own for certain jobs.

The hostility is compounded, however, by the Peace Corps' own failing in program planning, a weakness correctly noted by Cowan et al. Too often the organization has sponsored projects that were neither needed nor desired by foreign governments, and it continues to rely on an amateurish approach to the analysis of local needs, program planning and resource allocation. These are faults which the Peace Corps shares with many host governments, and remedies must come from both parties.

The Ecuador Volunteers cite the view that Peace Corps policy is motivated by the U.S. "world wide struggle against communism, not by a genuine desire to help poor nations" but they offer no evidence for the charge. This indictment amounts to a new claim of guilt by association. For all its faults the Peace Corps is the best thing that this nation is doing abroad, and to tar it with the brush of "arrogance" and "colonialism" merely because it is an agency of the U.S. government strikes me as both unsophisticated and dishonest. Efrem Sigel '64   Associate Managing Editor, 1964; Peace Corps Volunteer, the Ivory Coast, 1964-66.