The Shame of Faculty Silence

Shaken by the mushrooming opposition to his policy in Vietnam, President Johnson now finds some value in inviting intellectuals to the White House and privately pleading his case with them.

No one--except the participants and some discreet Johnson cronies--knows exactly what goes on at these affairs, since the academics and writers involved refuse to report even the sketchiest impressions of the briefings they receive.

On the other hand, the White House usually lets the press know that these meetings occur, that the confrontations were thoroughly amicable. This one-sided leak, a time-honored political maneuver, is meant to convince Americans with intellectual pretensions that any President who spends so much time soft-soaping their brethren can't be that misguided after all.

Last Tuesday, 15 faculty members--including Dean Ford, Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting, and Nobel Prize-winner Edward Purcell--got the Johnson treatment. Critics in varying degrees of the Administration's war, they were invited to a private briefing by the President after sending the White House a letter of concern several weeks earlier. It is quite evident that they were honored with two hours of Mr. Johnson's time only because they were thought to represent the anxiety prevalent in the Harvard community.

Yet even after it was clear that the White House tried to make political capital out of the meeting, none of the participants interviewed would give any indication whether their doubts over the war had been softened.

Dean Ford, for example, would only say, "I was in Washington on Tuesday." Another participant explained, "We agreed among ourselves before the meeting not to talk about it. There is no reason now to break this agreement."

Quite to the contrary, there is every reason for the group--or its individual members--to give some brief indication whether the President's personal sales pitch made sense.

For the White House simply refuses to offer any reasonable explanation for the steps it has taken to increase U.S. involvement in the war and tempt the Communist Chinese to intervene openly on the side of Hanoi. The latest escalation of the bombing, in fact, suggests that the U.S. wants to play brinkmanship games that John Foster Dulles only talked about.

Given the explosiveness of the current situation, it is chastening to recall that intellectuals from Harvard and elsewhere have criticized the President for his secretiveness and obfuscation as vehemently as they have condemned his actual war policies.

In order to gain access to the President's inner thoughts, however, the Faculty members have decided to pay the price of giving their community the silent treatment. Their unfortunate decision to emulate Mr. Johnson's notorious behavior suggests that their objections to the war are hardly as serious or sincere as they would have us believe.

students to share their quarters with females (even for a few hours) it gave de facto approval to any consequences. The demand for extended parietals is therefore ludicrous and degrading when considered in this light. If the students persist in making their demands within the parietal framework they are admitting that the university has the right to regulate the rate and number of sexual encounters.

This is a philosophy which belongs in a Swedish prison or a stud farm but not at a university. The heart of the matter was decided long ago when the masters initiated parietals and when Mrs. Bunting allowed Radcliffe girls to sign out overnight. That fact signified that the university, although concerned, did not see fit to interfere in the private affairs of its students. The whole problem of parietals is a distasteful and vulgar tug-of-war which challenges the university in an area where the greatest possible concession has already been made. The university is wrong to limit parietals for reasons made explicit above. The student body is wrong to operate under a control which is permissive ... but just so much!

A more dignified and elegant solution would be to eliminate all restrictions on parietals or conversely eliminate parietals entirely. In this way the masters are relieved from compounding various hypocrises and the students are spared the necessity of proving their vitality by adopting extreme tactics. The untenability of restricting parietal hours can only make the masters seem insipid when they are interviewed by CRIMSON reporters. The proposed mass "sleep-in" would pervert the delicacy of sexual freedom by turning Harvard into a huge bawdy house. Surely we can expect the university to avoid both calamities.