Thernstrom Replies to Complaints

To The Editors of The Crimson:

Today's Crimson includes a story about the alleged "racial insensitivity" I displayed in my lectures in Historical Studies A-25, "The Peopling of America," last term. The remarks by Ms. Grantham and Rutter quoted in the piece are gross distortions and misrepresentations of what I actually said in the course. These are issues far too complicated to sort out in the pages of the Crimson. I have always been open to questions from the floor in lecture and to discussions after class, and spend most of my office time with the door open to any student who wants to speak with me. I find it astonishing and saddening that the students with complaints did not raise their voices in one of these forums, and instead chose to make public charges I consider slanderous. I have full confidence that any fair-minded person who heard me out on any of these issues would not find me "racially insensitive." The real source of the charges, I am convinced, is that I failed to hew to a line that the disgruntled students took to be Gospel.

I had innocently thought that only hard core right-wingers like Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Academia were policing the classrooms in search of heretics to denounce in public. I fervently hope my colleagues at this great bastion of academic freedom will not conclude from this incident that they should duck controversial issues to avoid being smeared in this fashion. Only a few days ago you reported a remark by a Tufts student who disrupted a speech by a Contra representative: "No free speech for Fascists." What we have here is a milder version of the that did serious damage to America's colleges and universities in the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy. A new McCarthyism of the left will have the same chilling effect upon freedom of expression, and hence upon the quality of instruction in Harvard-Radcliffe College, as the old McCarthyism.

My quarrel is not with the Crimson's coverage. Your story is balanced and objective. My quarrel is with the students who launched a witch hunt instead of attempting to engage in rational discussion about difficult intellectual issues. Stephan Thernstrom   Winthrop Professor of History