'Mosaic'

It is unfortunate this issue of Mosaic is so late. Many students have left Cambridge and will miss the latest offering of one of the most talented and consistently interesting editorial boards in the community.

The centerpiece of this issue is clearly Noam Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," adapted from a talk he gave to the Hillel Foundation here in March. It is fruitless to attempt a sentence-two precis of Chomsky's 15-page argument. I will say only that the world-reknowned linguist has constructed the most coherent and moving defense I have read of the "moral" perspective in politics.

Most professors don't talk the way Chomsky does; to get this involved in and excited by moral issues seems rather obscene to many academics and, not surprisingly, to many students trained by these academics. Again, it is too bad this speech could not reach print earlier. Harvard could use a long and loud debate of Professor Chomsky's position.

The whole magazine is provocative. And--no small thing--it is exceedingly well edited. The selection of book reviewers is particularly fortuitous. Robert Horowitz, for example, brings his experience as an editor of the Columbia Spectator to the task of assessing Daniel Bell's new book on general education. The review, in very pleasing and economic language, does a fine job of giving this important book its due--and no more.

This issue has little poetry in it, but Deborah Eibel's two offerings make up for that with quality. Both exhibit a capacity for tightly restrained eloquence that is unique among the poems printed in student publications this year.