ABSENT MINDED PROFESSORS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

There is always a chance that humor, good or dubious, will work some unexpected hurt. I would be the last to wish that this might be so. In a collection of ironical essays commented on recently in the CRIMSON and with which I am sufficiently identified, mention is made of a absent minded professor of comparative literature at Harvard. I am reminded that this might conceivably be taken as a reference to either a very great scholar recently dead or to one of my very great friends, Actually, of course, a generic academic type and no particular person was intended. I do not know why this department was selected. It is a mark of the inadvertence that in the earliest published version of the piece, the reference was to another department. John Kenneth Galbraith   Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics