The Mail CFIA DISRUPTION

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

On Thursday, April 9, going to a lunch meeting with members of the Visiting Committee of the Center for International Affairs, I became a witness to the disruptive tactics of a small number of students who had entered the seminar room on the second floor of the Center building.

I saw a group of older men, Committee members and Harvard Faculty, sitting silently around the table Behind them, standing along the walls, students were shouting at them, rhythmically and at the top of their voices: "Bull-Shit! Bull-Shit! Bull-Shit!"

I asked a girl student among the demonstrators outside the room: "What do you know about the Center?" She answered: "We know enough." "How do you know?" I asked. "We read plenty," was her answer. "We know that the Center created the Vietnam War."

If students will believe such misinformation, they may well believe anything. The intention of some of the students may have been peaceful, while others were shouting for victory-but of the other side. "Ho, Ho, Ho-Chi Minh, Southeast Asia's gonna win! Ho, Ho, Ho-Chi-Minh, South Asia's gonna win!" All of them seemed to have despaired of discussion and persuasion, and to prefer shouting and coercion. What they were practicing was not freedom of speech, but its organized denial.

I happen to think that the Vietnam War is wrong-wrong in terms of our national interest as well as of intellectual morality. Like many of my colleagues, I have said so, publicly, since 1965. But these coercive minority tactics will not stop it. They are counter-productive. They injure the University, the country, the students, and whatever cause of peace they claim to serve. They deepen the cleavage between an extremist minority, on the one side, and the great majority of both faculty and students on the other.

At a time when we need unity to stop the Vietnam War, these methods lead to splits. They do not draw attention to political issues but away from them. As I experienced the organized shouting and disruption I could see what Marshall McLuhan had asserted: the medium becomes the message.

If our highest priority is to unite all Americans of good will to demand a change in government policy so as to end the Vietnam War, then these blind and coercive tactics must be rejected by the Harvard faculty, the students, and the student press.

If our priorities are less political, and if we mainly aim at preserving the university as a place for the freedom of thought, education and research (including research for peace, which should be strengthened)-then we must resist these attempts to destroy it.

None of the research at the Center for International Affairs is secret. All questions relating to it can and should be discussed with concerned students. But they must not be the subject of organized disruption and coercion.

We owe the American people more than political indignation and blind zeal. We owe them thought, competence and knowledge. If we permit the destruction of the university, we would betray our own direct responsibility.