A Three-Way Commmittee

Last week's Faculty meeting, after sanctioning serious disciplinary measures against 74 undergraduates, brefly considered a proposal of real merit: the creation of a student-Faculty-Administration committee to study questions raised by the Oct. 25 Dow sit-in.

Stanley H. Hoffmann, professor of Government, specified three areas the projected committee should explore: campus recruitment, agreed-upon forms of protest, and University complicity in the war effort. No vote was taken on the motion, however, because President Pusey wanted to discuss its wording with Hoffmann, and to bring it up again at the next Faculty meeting. Subsequent statements by Pusey and by Deans Ford and Glimp have established a commitment to such a committee; but its structure, and its scope, remain unclear.

The creation of any student-Faculty Administration committee at Harvard would be a landmark of some importance. It would be the first time that issues affecting the University as a whole have been tackled by a group representative of the whole. But it is equally important that the specific points raised by Hoffmann not be ignored. There are several suggestions of inconsistency in the University's policy toward campus recruitment; there is also disagreement here about what forms of protest should be accepted; and there are growing indications that, despite Harvard's ban on classified research, the University is more deeply involved both collectively and individually, in the war then we know.

To investigate this last question--University complicity in the war--poses serious problems of civil liberties and their protection. If a committee along the lines proposed by Hoffmann were given full rope, its sessions might assume a HUAC-like character, with Faculty members being compelled to testify in great detail about their own, and their colleagues', research.

But the perils in Hoffmann's plan are unlikely to materalize. No University committee could be empowered to make public requests for individual testimony. And if one fact has emerged clearly from the whole Dow debate, it is the continuing awareness at Harvard, and particularly among the Faculty, of the dangers of McCarthyism--from right or left. This awareness is the best possible protection against a witch-hunt in the University community.

A much graver danger growing out of the Dow debate is that discipline will be the University's first, last and only reaction. A genuinely democratic three-way committee-with its student contingent chosen by students--would be a small but meanigful complement to last week's harsh punishment.