The Mail FACULTY PETITION

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I should like to offer the following response to the notice in the CRIMSON of October 7th endorsed by numerous Harvard faculty members, opposing the faculty's taking a stand on issues relating to the war in Vietnam. The statement in question includes four reasons for opposing the attempt to "bring political issues" before the faculty. I would like to consider each in turn.

1. "The Faculty claims the right to function as a center of learning without political objectives. While no such center can be wholly objective or neutral, it must strive, however imperfectly, toward that end. Society will not long allow us that freedom if it appears that, as an institution, we have joined the political fray."

One may first counter this position by arguing that the university does function politically, willingly or unwillingly, by virtue of the fact that it exists in the world and has effects on it. (This is not to speak of the relations between the university and the government which obtain at a variety of levels.) It is a one-sided conception of polities indeed that allows as political. say, only opponents of the Vietnam war, and reduces the silent and acquiescent to the status of a-political onlookers. One is thrust into a political role in taking part in the world: this has been repeated from Aristotle through twentieth-century existentialists. The question is thus not "am I or should I be political?" but " realizing that I am political by virtue of my very existence, what sort of politics must I engage in?"

There is another objection to this first point. For assuming, even, that the university is a-political, point one comes nowhere near meeting opposition to the war as a moral issue. Will the faculty claim the right to function 'without moral objectives,' a la Werner von Braun? By choosing to view opposition to the war as a strictly "political" issue the faculty simply defines things to make it easier for itself, and fails completely in meeting opposition whose roots are in moral outrage.

2. "If debates on political matters, however important, become customary in the Faculty, then politics will enter into the evaluation of candidates for appointment to the Faculty."

Doubtless objection will be made on the grounds that politics already do enter into faculty appointment (of the Jack Stauder case). But even if this objection is valid, which I believe it is, it is still insufficient. That evil is already being accomplished is no excuse for accomplishing more.

The faculty statement fails, rather, on different grounds. The crucial words in the statement are "however important." Stripped of pieties and apologies, this statement means that NOTHING is more important to the faculty members in question than the determination of who their potential colleagues will be. No issue or potential issue raised by the world in which we live, not one, has any precedence whatsoever over the evaluation of would-be faculty, when the two issues are linked.

This is an enormous concept, and cannot be taken lightly. With all due respect to the Harvard faculty and its integrity, and with all due compassion for the consequences of allowing into its midst a colleague who proves unsuited to his new role, one must clearly and simply dissent from the value hierarchy represented here (and again in the fourth point, below). Such reasoning manifests a series of traits one would hope it is the office of a Faculty of Arts and Sciences to destroy. If the matter were not so serious, this statement would stand as nothing more than a monument to the possibilities of men's pretensions.

(It is also the case that "debates on political matters" need not lead to the political evaluation of candidates for faculty appointments. This depends solely on the intelligence and fairness of the faculty members doing the appointing.)

3. "By joining the Faculty, all members signify their willingness to be bound by majority decisions with respect to those matters about which the Faculty is authorized and competent to act. But few if any members joined with the understanding that they were to accept the right or competence of any particular part of the Faculty to speak for them on matters of conscience and politics."

This argument sets up a straw man and knocks it down. No one has proposed "speaking for" anyone else. No one has claimed the right to "bind" any dissenting member of the Harvard community, faculty or otherwise (unless it be the Harvard Corporation, which has meted out what many consider political punishment for some of last year's events). Students, for example, have not been "bound" or "spoken for" by the numerous polls over the past few years on issues such as the war or the U.S. Presidency. There is, indeed, a widespread sense that the U.S. government itself or particular people therein, including its highest official, are not speaking for oneself. This role being vigorously denied to the elected leaders of the nation, how much more so will it, then, to gathered colleagues who are simply registering their opinions without the slightest pretensions of speaking for anyone else. (Note that President Cordier of Columbia, whose University Senate just passed such an anti-war resolution as is being pro posed to the Harvard faculty-at Columbia a student-faculty-administration Senate takes care of such matters-noted categorically that the resolution "does not speak for the University." NY Times, 7 Oct.)

4. "Although those who advocate a particular political cause may disavow any intention of setting a precedent, the precedent is nonetheless set. Since we will no longer be able to exclude political matters from the docket by appeal to rule and precedent, we will be obliged to discuss each and to act on each on its merits. The proper concerns of the Faculty cannot long survive continued and inevitably impassioned political debate."

Any number of observations may be made with reference to this last reason. One may question whether appealing to "rule and precedent" is on any count the best way of handling problems, especially in a period of rapid and unforeseen change such as our own. One may question the validity of the fear that the consequence of joining in a national effort to end the war in Vietnam will be to drown the Faculty in "continued and inevitably impassioned political debate." It is a great bother, and it takes a great deal of time, to engage in such debate. Most of those who do engage in it do so because they feel driven to do so, and would much prefer a world in which they did not feel so compelled.

The most important criticism, however, concerns the apparent fear that the faculty might have to discuss and act on a case on its merits. The first time I saw this line I thought I had misread it. What seems to be considered the desideratum is that the faculty never be presented with a case that must be dealt with on its merits. Since that is absurd, one notes that "political" cases are specified. Very well, but one man's "politics" are another's "academics" and a third's "ethics." Is the question of ROTC on campus a "political" or an "academic" issue? And how are issues presented as moral matters to be handled?

In fact, there is only one reasonable way of dealing with all these issues, and that is precisely taking each on its merits. If the worry is about losing time, experience shows that in these cases more time is wasted in attempts to decide whether discussion is legitimate, than is consumed in substantive discussion. Let the precedent be set, and let the faculty give itself fair and reasonable rules for dealing with all matters brought up for its consideration. (That condition will only be met, by the way, when the faculty agrees to share its deliberations and decision making powers with students.) A patently unreasonable motion, or a proposed topic for discussion that stands clearly outside the bounds of university concerns, will be able to be dismissed simply in being found unreasonable or illegitimate, and not because it has been "categorized" as such a priori. One can not be immobilized by the thought that somewhere on the distant horizon may loom a possibility that might prove hazardous. Edmund Burke-no revolutionary-wrote: "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing."