POST-MORTEMS ON SFAC AND MARX

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

When I asked the Student Faculty Advisory Council yesterday why there were no Marxists on the Harvard Faculty I was not "pushing for more Marxists" as your reporter claims. My primary concern in asking the question was not the University's personnel policies. My intention was to ask a much more serious question. "How could members of the Council account for the absence at Harvard (and at most American universities) of serious intellectuals falling within the Marxist tradition?"

Professor Handlin's answer (which your writer reported with somewhat more accuracy than my question) that Marxist intellectual work is comparable to phlogiston chemistry was entirely predictable. To this it was pointed out that the Marxist intellectual tradition is very much alive and thriving, that contemporary Marxists have a great deal to contribute to the search for truth about society and history, and that one could find without looking too hard a great many fine Marxist thinkers who observed all of the traditional standards of scholarship in their work, and whose presence would do credit to any university in the world. Men of the calibre of Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, George Rude, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul, Maurice Dobb, Louis Althussen, and Herbert Marcuse, to mention only a few from a long list, were being referred to.

Professor Handlin's remarks to the effect that intellectual traditions had a way of developing over time, and that such developments at Harvard and in American universities had led in a distinctly non-Marxist (not to say anti-Marxist) direction were more to the point. For it was precisely a serious explanation of such developments in American intellectual life which I sought in my questioning. The Marxist approach stresses social conflict, the primacy of economic life and the role of the common man in the workings of society and in social change. What in American society and in the social position of American intellectuals can account for the short shrift which such an immensely valuable approach has received, especially in recent decades, from American thinkers? It does not follow automatically, at least to my mind, that the absence or weakness of the Marxist intellectual tradition in America means that the tradition and the questions it asks are without relevance. George Ross,   Teaching Fellow in Government,   Social Studies, and General Education