REPLY TO DEAN MONRO

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Having read Dean Monro's reply to the CRIMSON's editorial on Dustin Burke, I wonder if he attacked the CRIMSON's motives because he could not answer its charges.

The CRIMSON argued that there are no effective restraints on HSA to protect the interests of the University. Neither the Dean's recitation of the board of directors (mostly, it seemed, local businessmen, past or present officers of HSA, or its founders), nor his charges of "lie" did much to allay my personal misgivings. As he is probably aware, the task of a board of directors is usually to promote rather than to restrain a corporation.

No one questions that HSA has increased the number of jobs available, but many question the ethics of its procedures. And, in spite of Dean Monro's emotional references to "needy students," it is not clear that these new jobs are going to students with need, or even that HSA bothers to ask whether students have need.

The Dean says of the Birthday Cake Agency, "It was his (Burke's) obligation to try... to hold and develop jobs for needy Harvard undergraduates." But the CRIMSON said that Mr. Burke had misrepresented decisions of the Committee on Solicitation, and I cannot think that that was part of his obligation.

Both Mr. Burke and Mr. Monro act as if Harvard students are a legitimate captive market, property of HSA. Mr. Monro refers to what I would call free competition by saying "students from another college have sought to cut in." This is appropriate language for a Director of HSA, who is supposed to respond by improving the quality of his service or his product. It seems inappropriate for the Dean of Harvard College. I resent Mr. Burke's even attempting to use the University's rules to prevent delivery of birthday cakes by a competitor; I resent Mr. Burke's success in using those rules to prevent competition with the HSA sampler.

The entertainment agency, as described by Mr. Monro, also seems to have unsavory aspects. There is, as usual, no question that the agency made more jobs available. But it did so, in part, by forcing students who had found jobs through Student Employment (no fee) to work through HSA instead (paying a fee). If I understand the Dean's argument, this change was justified because the non-profit Employment Office could not afford the staff to be as "aggressive" as HSA. But the economics implicit here would close the Employment Office instantly and transfer all its operations to HSA, thus saving the University the cost of the entire Employment Office. Furthermore, in directing inquires from the Employment Office to HSA, the Manager was responding to the difficulties of serving a non-profit organization and a profit-making corporation simultaneously--a situation that may reasonably be described as "conflict of interest".

I do not know much about the lawsuit to which Mr. Monro and the CRIMSON have referred, except that pre-trial depositions indicated HSA had employed a Yale student to write part of a travel guide that it published. This seems indiscreet, even if it was good business, and paradoxical in view of the Dean's comments about helping needy Harvard students. Stephen F. Jencks '62