ROTC UPHELD

(Letters to the editors should be of reasonable length--preferably no longer than 350 words. No unsigned letter will receive consideration, although the author's name will be withheld if he so wishes. We hope that our readers will continue to make full use of this column.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Of all the letters that have appeared in the CRIMSON for the past three years. I find none more disturbing or scurrilous in nature than that written by Mr. Franklin Kameny concerning the ROTC at Harvard.

Mr. Kameny apparently considers himself a liberal: he says that ROTC has no place in a "university such as Harvard," and that it is not in keeping with what the university is trying to teach. Such are the views held by Mr. Kameny, but I wonder if his professed liberalism is of a pseudo type, for it is my belief that a liberal university should teach all subjects, military science and Sanskrit alike.

Mr. Kameny goes even further in his attack: he says that there is no place for the military on any college campus. In fact he says it is an "abomination." Does Mr. Kameny not realize that an army must have officers? Where does he propose to recruit these men, in high schools? Or perhaps he more simply advocates abolishment of the United States Army as a whole.

When forty percent of the freshman class elects to pursue the subject of Military Science, then that fact in itself is proof enough that Military Science can find a place here at Harvard. Mr. Kameny also says it is correct to look with contempt upon the ROTC (a statement which is completely biased and seems in extremely poor taste for a supposedly educated graduate student), but I can safely inform him that most of the members of the ROTC are extremely proud of the fact that they are serving their country, whether in peace or war.

Mr. Kameny was not pressured to become a member of the ROTC, nor has the Department of Military Science and Tactics encroached upon his freedom in any way, but yet he chooses to make an extremely bitter attack upon the personnel who are training to defend their country and the dignity of all Americans. It is the practice of the Communist Party in this country today to knock the military profession as much as possible, and it is also the great joy of pseudo-liberals to do likewise. I do not infer that Mr. Kameny is either of these, for it may just possibly be that he does not understand the purposes of ROTC, or it may even be that he is simply incapable of understanding.

In conclusion I wish to set Mr. Kameny straight on one point, and that is that the U.S. Army is not at a peacetime level; only a person of extremely vivid imagination, or no imagination at all, could possibly construe the present-day situation as falling into the category of "peacetime." Richard A. Burr