An Unreasonable Punishment

The Faculty voted last night to place 71 students on probation until June for their involvement in the Dow demonstration. Three students will be on probation until February 1; 171 will be admonished; and one will receive no punitive action.

The extraordinarily arbitrary nature of this decision is obvious. Students were singled out with only the most casual regard to the degree of their involvement in the sit-in. While strongly defending what they called Leavitt's freedom of movement, the University has ignored a basic axiom of civil liberties: that the law be applied equally.

The Faculty wisely avoided severing anybody for his connection with the demonstration. Perhaps they realized the degree of angry reaction from many students that such a move would have provoked. But the punishment they meted out was still vastly out of proportion with the protestors' actions. Students sat in at Mallinckrodt in a dramatic display of their moral revulsion at the presence on campus of recruiters from a napalm manufacturer. They made their point in a way that no petition or rally on the steps of Memorial Church could have. They initiated an intensity of discussion that no milder from of protest could have. They did not hold Dr. Leavitt all night--only seven hours in the afternoon. They did not assault him. They did nothing to require the use of outside police force. To impose upon a randomly selected group of these protestors the hardship of probation for the rest of the academic year can only be characterized as an overreaction.

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President Pusey's statement after today's Faculty vote was unwise and insensitive. "There have been a number of attempts to misrepresent the issue here as being concerned with the use of Napalm or the war in Vietnam," he said. "... Objections arise only when [students] become so carried away by their conviction about the rightness of their cause and so impatient with civilized procedures that they seek to restrain the freedom of expression or movement of others who may not agree with them."

It may be true that a small handful of Wednesday's demonstrators sought a Berkeley-like confrontation with the bogey men they are convinced run Harvard. But does President Pusey really confuse this group with the vast majority of the demonstrators who were expressing their personal anguish and frustration over the Vietnam War? To assert that students are misrepresenting the issues of the Mallinckrodt demonstration is to ignore the depth of their concern about the war's incursions on campus. It is Harvard's business-as-usual approach to the war which is at issue here. The Administration has refused to face this issue.

There is nothing new about a refusal to face issues which are of deep moral concern to its students. We are approaching the first anniversay of the Faculty's refusal to consider a proposal condemning student deferments--a decision still remembered with bitterness by many students. Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government, has proposed that the University set up a student-Faculty-Administration committee to consider the issues of campus recruitment, the University's relation to the Vietnam war, and agreed-upon forms of dissent. This proposal, which will be taken up at the next Faculty meeting, could provide a refreshing first step toward the kind of dialogue over vital issues the University says it cherishes.

(The view of a minority of the Editorial Board will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON)