SEADAG

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Miss Nancy Hodes' account (CRIMSON, April 23rd) of the intrusion into and disruption of the meeting of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group on March 29th at the Statler Hilon is incomplete and inaccurate in several important respects.

(1) The meeting was strictly a private meeting of two SEADAG discussion groups with attendance by invitation only. It was held concurrently with but was not a part of the meetings of the Association of Asian Studies that Weekend.

(2) The subject of the meeting was not "Political Succession in Southeast Asia" but rather political competition in South Vietnam when the fighting ceases and the implications of such competition for U.S. policy.

(3) The intruders marched into this private meeting, interrupted the chairman as he called it to order, and announced that they would continue to interject their views if the meeting continued.

(4) Professor Sacks introduced a resolution requesting the intruders to leave, which was passed by a three-to-one margin. The intruders rejected this request. They also rejected a proposal, that they leave temporarily so that the SEADAG meeting could continue and return later in the afternoon to participate with the SEADAG scholars in an open forum on U.S. policy in Vietnam.

(5) Professor Sacks also introduced a resolution requesting the hotel management to call the police to remove the intruders. After considerable discussion, the meeting voted to table this motion and then to adjourn.

Miss Hodes quotes Professor Sacks' reference to the intruders as "barbarians." This may have been rather loose use of the term. On the other hand, the chairman of the meeting, Professor Pool, was precisely in point when, as he adjourned the meeting, he recalled the disruption of German universities in the 1930s and labeled the intruders "stormtroopers." Undoubtedly, as Miss Hodes says, the bulk of the intruders were students somewhere. A few, I know, were Harvard students. That they presumably had some intelligence makes all the more inexcusable their blatant violation of the right of others to meet together peacefully and privately. Samuel P. Huntington   Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government