'DEAR COLLEAGUE'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Since your tract-society-one can hardly call your publication a newspaper-has seen fit to publish the Kissinger letter composed by Professors Kelman and Mendelsohn and doubtless subscribed to by many of the worthy names of the Brave New Harvard I am sending, for your information, a copy of the response that I have just transmitted to the letter's authors. Dear-

The arrival of your Kissinger letter of March 16, enthusiastically addressed "Dear Colleague." occasioned a good deal of amusement, since, for the past nine months. I have been congratulating myself for precisely the fact that I am no longer your colleague. The contents of your letter vividly remind me of the reasons for taking pleasure in no longer being associated with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

If the Harvard Department of Philosophy were competent to deal with any issue dispassionately, your colleagues there would be quick to point out the logical peculiarities of your plea. I hope-but do not expect-that some other department may contain an instructor in whom logic is conjoined with courage sufficient to demonstrate that the irony of your argument is comparable to that of the Eleatic Zeno, except for the fact that Zeno knew what he was doing.

If it is not so much a matter of logic as of dogma. I assume that I may be excused for failing to appreciate how you can argue that you are merely communicating "deeply held views" about the war in Southeast Asia, when you end your letter by telling poor old Henry that he has been "caught up in and locked into a set of policies that negate everything he is trying to achieve"-policies of which he is "one of the key architects and administrators." If such is indeed your argument, then either Mr. Kissinger should be barred from Harvard for reasons of stupidity, or welcomed back into the brotherhood of men in whose vocabulary the word "outrage" has been replaced by "self-interest." I assume you neither believe the former nor admit to the latter.

"We do not regard you as an immoral man." What a stunningly pompous example of preposterous presumption ! Yet it is so very much an expression of the Harvard mind-at its worst. Your letter, like the faculty meetings that I had the misfortune to attend during my last two years, exhibits unmistakably the symptoms of Brave New Harvard's disease: the replacement of social Brahminism by moral Brahminism-a somewhat more democratic substitution, to be sure, but having about it the acrid odor of political inquisition with which I grew famiilar in Adams House after 1968.

Let me at least congratulate you for mailing your letter at your own expense and without the prestige-and the cost-of a departmental letterhead. In this instance, you showed more intelligence than the managerial minds in University Hall who last spring authorized the use of House stationery for partisan political purposes. It is unfortunate that your intelligence was not sufficiently durable to consign the material on withholding one's telephone tax to a convenient incinerator. The argument of that material may be appropriate for Harvard undergraduates-and, alas, far too many graduate students-but from college teachers, it seems to bespeak a retarded adolescence. There is something pathetically jejune about your encouraging a policy that is doomed to fail and that will cost the Internal Revenue Service-ultimately the taxpayer-"up to $400 per case." Perhaps not every word that comes from the months of babes is to be thought worthy of inclusion in Holy Writ.