Unbalanced Expos Series Shows Arrogance

What an unbalanced three part series you ran about the Harvard Expository Writing department! I do not have the space to adequately respond to it so I will confine myself to the following observations: I taught in the department for the last three years; your reporter interviewed me at some length for the article, but you did not see fit to report any of my remarks.

Let me just recapitulate some of them. I stressed to your reporter the usefulness and rigor of the program. I have taught in other introductory writing programs and Harvard's is one of the few that actually helps students improve their writing. The program works.

But the effectiveness of the program was only your putative agenda--a fact I sensed after speaking to your reporter for a little while. You were just out to get Richard and Nancy. Despite hints from your reporter such as "we've had a lot of reports that Richard is abusive" I stressed that Richard Marius and Nancy Sommers always treated me with consummate courtesy. Nor had I been witness to any such abuse.

In my conversations with other preceptors since that interview I found my views echoed--all of them had said much the same thing. None of their remarks were reported, either.

It is true that Richard feels--rightly in my opinion--that politics has no place in a classroom; he has no patience with teachers who use their classroom as a pulpit. If you think, as the articles suggest, that this restricts "alternative" agendas in the classroom, you are probably correct. But your editorial goes much further. In effect you call Richard Marius a racist. Your report implies it--your editorial virtually comes out and says it. Richard makes "no serious effort to recruit teachers of color." This is just not true.

The Crimson is accountable to no one, and its arrogance has always made me think of it more as the left's answer to a final club than as a serious and responsible newspaper. I suppose you are free to practice your brand of journalism and your position at Harvard guarantees, unfortunately, that you will be taken seriously. The pity of it is that in presenting such a distorted picture of the Expository Writing program for reasons that remain obscure to me, the real truth about Expos, namely its success in encouraging the development of clear, logical, and honest prose, gets lost. Robert D. Alpert '66