Watson Says Radical Core Includes 'Two or Three Sons of Communists'

Dean Watson said this weekend that serious student disruption at Harvard is the work of "a very, very tiny group of people, including two or three sons of active communists."

Watson made the statement at a meeting of the Harvard College Fund. The remark was in answer to the question of an alumnus about student unrest at Harvard.

In an interview yesterday, Watson elaborated on his statement: "It appears to me that this small group of radicals has been carefully indoctrinated before coming to Harvard. Some of them are pretty sophisticated and start entering into radical activities right away."

He said that the "very, very tiny group" was "bent on stopping the university." At the same time, he characterized the majority of radicals and members of SDS as "fine, upstanding students with great integrity who believe that the Vietnam war is a horrible mistake."

The ultra-radical minority includes "not poor scholarship students but students from the upper-middle classes," he said at the meeting. Most of them attended large public high schools, he added.

Watson said in the interview that he had no "real proof" that the students were the sons of communists. He did not mention their names. He said his conclusions on the background of student radicals were based mainly on conversations with administrators of other universities.

Watson was concerned in yesterday's interview that persons might think he was convicting radical students of "guilt by association." The remarks of several members of the audience at the meeting seemed to indicate this, he said.

"The last thing in the world that I wanted to do was to hurt anyone's feelings or reputation," he said.

After the dean's statement at the meeting, an alumnus asked him why students who had known-communists as fathers were admitted to Harvard in the first place.

Chase N. Peterson '52, director of admissions, replied that the occupations or political associations of students' fathers had no bearing at all on admissions.

One recent alumnus then added, "One of the nicest things about Harvard is that there are all these people with way-out ideas running around."