It's More Complicated Than Just Breaking a Law

In "Punishment Is Justified," the staff ignores Law School Dean Robert C. Clark's real motives. He is using threats to punish the protesters just as he is using photographs from last week's protests--as a muzzle to discourage all future protests.

The technique is not new. Ruling regimes often use seemingly justified, rational laws to prevent needed change. Taken out of context, such laws--like those against disrupting the administration of the Law School--should not be broken. Clearly civil disobedience is against the law, and those who practice such acts may face punishment. But in calling for such measures the staff reduces the political and emotional force of student protests to merely "criminal acts," as if criminal acts are without context of time, place and purpose.

In this case, as with protests led by Martin Luther King Jr., criminal acts are being committed by those who find the entire system illegitimate. To suggest that King wanted the laws of the South to be obeyed just because they were the standard laws of the land is ludicrous.

In the past, The Crimson has made every effort to recognize that these protests are important in that they high light efforts to increase minority and women representation among the University's faculty ranks. But now, the staff takes the hard-line position that the protesters should not only be punished for breaking laws which protect the dean from dissent, but should be threatened before protests even occur. Such threats, as Dean Clark hopes, can only serve to destroy all protest.

The South African government warns Black residents of the "personal sacrifices" they must make when they decide to protest apartheid. The staff seems worried that in the case of the Law School, protests not enough of these sacrifices are being made. For the staff, the protests are simply "slumber parties" until police start cracking skulls. Only then, the staff feels, would the illegal sit-ins be justified. Only then do the protesters really show their unquestioned commitment to diversity, the majority believes.

Despite the staff's blustering, the issue is not simply that protesters should be responsible for the illegal acts they commit. Like the protesters, we should all look to a higher authority than Clark's rules for what is truly right. --John A. Cloud, Jacques E.C. Hymans and Rebecca L. Walkowitz