Fan Mail

To the Editors of The Crimson:

When I look around me and see the bold and shameless tactics which the Harvard administration uses to prevent its workers from unionizing, while students look on in detached amusement (one student even explained to me that she would work as a volunteer scab in case of a dining hall workers' stroke because, "I'm a liberal economist, I don't believe in strikes."); when I see a Medical School professor make a veiled plea for a return to the quite recent days when the number of black doctors graduating from the nation's medical schools every year could be counted on the fingers of one hand; when I see that another Harvard professor who has publicly referred to the present tensions between the Third World and the United States as a struggle between Barbarism and Civilization, is almost certain to become a United States Senator; when I see that $50,000 of Harvard's money which could be spent on providing adequate scholarships for me and the rest of that 5% or so of Harvard students who represent the bottom 60% of the income range of the U.S. population, is instead going to pay for property taxes on a plot of land which, courtesy of that same Harvard, is a private garden where some 20 or 30 of the sons of alumni who made large donations (let them donate their own goddamn garden!), can drink martinis while they decide whether the Panama Canal will be safer under Ford or Reagan; when I see that all of this occurs with the approval of a majority of Harvard students who are either stupid enough to be misled or unprincipled enough to be apathetic about these and similar issues, I am glad that at least The Crimson continues to present a lone voice in favor of sanity and humanity.

Those who attack The Crimson for its principled stand on these issues, in the name of some abstract, foggy and even self-contradictory concept called "objective journalism," are as absurd and disgusting as that woman who said she would cooperate in an effort to undermine the livelihood, the daily bread, of people who have fed her at her convenience for the last four years, simply because she is a "liberal economist." The anti-Crimson mood, and its representatives like Peter Keyes '78, reminds me of Spiro Agnew's diatribes against the left-wing bias of the "Eastern Establishment" press a couple of years ago. I hope the Crimson's commitment to critical reporting continues after the departure of this year's Editorial Board. Keep up the good work! Jon Jacobs '76