A Travesty

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In the last few weeks, upon witnessing the events surrounding the visit of the South African Vice-consul Mr. Duke Kent-Brown to this campus, I felt it was time we laid out a few facts before we witness a rerun of that fiasco.

The first point, albeit a technical one, is that there is no provision under U.S. law that guarantess Mr. Brown uninterrupted free speech. Indeed, foreigners (such as Carlos Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Mme. Allende) have been denied entry into the U.S. on the grounds that what they (will!) say is prejudicial to state interests. Hence Mr. Brown's privilege to air his views from a Harvard podium is hardly a "right", and it is a mistake to regard it as an axiom.

So, putting this in the context of Harvard University, does he enjoy rights to free speech on the grounds that he is a guest of the campus community? He most certainly was not a guest of the community. Whatever plot the Conservative Club and Dean Epps hatch by mutual consent and unleash on the rest of us does not qualify as an invitation on our collective behalf.

Maybe, then, his right to free speech stems from the fact that a campus is supposed to be a democratic place, and every view should be given a fair hearing. This would hold water if the University were a disinterested party and functioned democratically. As it stands, Harvard has a vested interest (to the tune of over $200 million) in doing some favorable propaganda for the South African government. It also is not a democratic institution, since policy decisions are unilaterally made by the Corporation, with negligible input from the rest of the community (and zero input from the student body). Indeed, in the last Board of Overseers' election, there was an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the election, and President Bok himself initiated this subversion of a democratic process. So the university's authority in setting the correct norms for further debate on the South Africa issue is questionable.

Finally, why are these periodic charades involving contras and apartheid apologists staged in the first place? It would be a crimson naivete to believe that these events are organized for the intellectual edification of the campus community. The constitution of the audience alone will testify to the fact that they are nothing more than wrestling matches between protesters on the one hand and the Conservative Club (backed up by the University's disciplinary and law-enforcement machinery) on the other. The events are always conducted in an atmosphere of siege, complete with police, security men, video cameras, and crude intimidation by rattling the RRR [Resolution on Rights and Responsibilites] sabre. Needless to say, this flexing of administrative muscle never works, and when a predictable "disruption" occurs, Dean Epps swings into action as the Conservative Club's prosecuting attorney. The end benefit, apart from the gagging of student dissent by grounding a nucleus of student activists with disciplinary probation, is invisible to the naked eye.

In conclusion, a complete travesty of campus democracy occurs within a flimsy mantle of tired old cliches (like freedom of speech and movements, democratic etiquette, etc.). This is no revelation to the Conservative Club, since it consistently and cynically exploits to the hilt the larger community's confusion of these deliberately orchestrated excercises in activist-baiting with excercises in campus democracy. Vishwambhar Pati   Assistant Professor of Mathematics