Friday Night

( This piece represents the opinion of a majority of the CRIMSON staff. Tomorrow's editorial page will carry a collection of dissenting minority views. )

LAST FRIDAY NIGHT, the war came home to Harvard again. A group-at times numbering 500, or half of the audience-chanted, clapped and threw paper during the abortive "Counter Teach-In" sponsored by the Students for a Just Peace until the meeting was halted by Archibald Cox. University administrators have denounced the disruption as an intolerable abridgement of the right of free speech and promised thoroughgoing punishment of all those-students and Faculty alike -who participated in the disruption of the meeting.

We believe in the right of free speech; clearly, any just society must allow every person to speak freely. And we must regretfully say that what happened Friday night in Sanders Theatre was neither just nor wise.

We recognize that the right of free speech is not an absolute one. Just as some forms of action must be prohibited if society is to maintain itself free of murder and fear, so must some uses of speech be prevented for the same reasons.

It can be argued that one such misuse of speech is the use of public platforms by high officials of the current national administration to drum up support for their policies of aggressive war. But even if this argument is accepted, last Friday's teach-in was not such an occasion. For Dolph Droge and the Administration's Asian proteges were clearly not of the policy-making order, and their appearance at Harvard would have done little to advance U.S. policy in Vietnam. Those who totally disrupted the meeting were attacking the right to speak without insuring that the evil they were preventing was greater than the injustice they were committing.

We say this regretfully because we share and understand the deep rage that filled the auditorium at the sight of Droge complacently striding onto the Sanders platform with "Standard Bricfing Map 4" clutched under his arm. In this context, it is worth nothing that the disruption was not solely the work of a small, disciplined group of demonstrators who came to the auditorium convinced that they would not hear what the speakers wanted to say. Many went to the meeting with no intention of disrupting-planning, rather, to make their disgust felt in other ways-but found them-selves unable to contain their hatred for officials of the U.S. government and its Asian puppets.

This rage is clearly justified; it is, and should remain, the fueling force of the antiwar movement. And while we disagree with the means in which it was expressed-believing rather that heckling, pointed questioning, intermittent booing, and mass walkouts would have been wiser and more effective as means of protest-we must again say that we feel this rage to be justified and, indeed, the most humane response to an inhuman occasion.

THE UNIVERSITY seems to be determined to make this a confrontation on the issue of free speech and to use the disruption as grounds for mass expulsions from the University and a witch hunt among its Faculty. It would be grossly unfair and dishonest for the University to bill this solely as a confrontation between those who believe in free speech and those who do not. The issue is much deeper and much more equivocal than that.

The only teach-in speaker who managed to speak, for example, evinced little interest in bringing the disruption to an end. In Friday night's emotional scenario, there was a chance that most of the disrupters would have left or stopped disrupting if events had been less provocative. Dan Teodoru obviously did not desire this; indeed, he baited the crowd and dared them to continue-and used more obscenities and insults than any of the disrupters. Had he begun making his prepared speech and tried to make himself heard, the crowd might have responded better than it did to being called "motherfuckers," "punks," and "animals." And it is also worth considering that Cox's stated reason for stopping the meeting was that the situation outside-not inside-the building was too dangerous to let it continue.

But the main dishonesty in the proposed purge is that it ignores that the main disruptive force at Harvard-as everywhere in America-is the war. All civil liberties-freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of thought-have been disrupted by domestic effects of America's aggression in Asia. The national administration has been the most vigorous force attacking all these rights. All of us have suffered in one way or another from censored news, tapped telephones, opened mail, and police infiltrators in radical and liberal organizations. On none of these issues has Harvard taken a stand.

Mass punishments for Friday's disruption would be unjust, inhumane, and unwise. The University cannot, no matter how repressive it is willing to become, protect itself from the damage which the war is doing to American society. If the University is truly concerned with free speech, it should rather abandon its posture of moral neutrality, rid itself of complicity in the war effort, and devote its energies to ending a war that will destroy it as surely as it destroyed last Friday's teach-in.