Local Professors Plan Meeting to Rebut Rusk

A newly formed faculty committee on Vietnam, which includes 15 Harvard faculty members, has called an open meeting on Friday to reply to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's "attack" on the academic community's discussion of the Vietnam war.

Edwin E. Moise, James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Mathematics and a member of the Committee, said yesterday that the meeting "will not only reassert our right to criticize the conduct of the Vietnamese war but also use this right to make substantive criticisms of the war itself."

During the meeting, to be held at 4:30 p.m. in Lowell Lecture Hall, statements will be given on the implications of Rusk's criticism and on the role of Boston professors in the continuing discussions and protest of the war. There will also be consideration of a reply to Rusk, now being drafted, to be placed as an advertisement in the New York Times.

Rusk criticized the academic discussion of Administration policy in Vietnam in a speech given last Friday to the American Society of International Law.

Henry D. Aiken, professor of Philosophy and a sponsor of the meeting, said yesterday that the aim of the meeting was not a "narrow partisan one."

"We hope," he said, "to enlist the sympathies of a broad spectrum of the faculties of universities and colleges in the greater Boston area." Aiken noted that the committee hoped to have a membership of several hundred soon.

Aiken said that he felt the meeting's purpose was threefold. "In addition to replying to Rusk," he continued, "I think that we want to express our sense of the immense moral responsibility which rests upon the American government and people in the present situation.

"We want to demand that the United continuing effort to obtain a negotiated peace, just to both sides, and that the government should not use its plea for 'unconditional discussions' as a shield for States government make an earnest and the continuation of the war."