POLITE AW AKENING

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

We have read in Saturday's CRIMSON (26 April) your editorial entitled Rude Awakening and we were rudely awakened by the attitude the CRIMSON seems to take that the group of earnest young men who were among us last week-end (18-20 April) should have their wrists slapped and be censured for their "impoliteness." It may be true that some of their door-knocking aroused from slumber a few apathetic Harvard men. We should like to point out however, that their methods of inviting people to come to their meetings, which you refer to as shock tactics, were ever so much more polite than the tactics your reporters sometimes use to wangle a story from students who, you say, have the traditional Harvard right to be left alone. More than one student has been awakened by the rude ringing of his telephone in the middle of the night to be badgered by your reporters. Are we to suppose that this is the inherent right of a newspaper under some such slogan as Freedom of the Press...

You say that you think it would be all right if these earnest young men spread their ideas by personal contact based on voluntary introductions. Might we ask how these men are to communicate to others who might want to meet them that they are in town? Printed posters are costly and are rarely effective for a program of this nature. A solution might have ben an article in your esteemed newspaper on Friday morning, 18 April, telling the college community of the arrival of these young men and what their purpose was. Then they could have sat behind closed doors at their meeting places without sullying bedroom doors with their own hands and waited for their audience to arrive. We might venture the opinion, however, that there probably would not be a Christian Church today if Jesus and his disciples had sat in the desert and waited for people to come to them for instruction.

This doesn't mean that we advocate that people who have something to say should yank unwilling students out of bed and force them into captive audience as you imply these men did last week. However, we do defend the right of such visitors to knock on our doors and cordially invite us to hear what they have to say. As the occupants of the room in Eliot House where one of these meetings was held, we should like to reassure any of your readers who may have been alarmed by your remarks that we could not detect the least bit of impoliteness on the part of these young men, and, beyond a spoken invitation to attend their meeting, no pressure was placed upon us to do so. As a matter of fact neither of us attended, but we were happy to make our rooms available. D. H. Morris, III '51   D. R. Purdy '52