SFAC and ROTC

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Wednesday, November 20 CRIMSON article on Tuesday's meeting was in our view most unfortunate.

First, the misleading headline: although SFAC did vote down the radical resolution presented to it, it did not vote to retain ROTC. There are two resolutions on ROTC still on the floor, and others may well be introduced.

Second, the inaccurate and distorted body of the article: it erroneously reported that the opening of the floor to discussion by spectators was intended to be a precedent, which it explicitly was not, although many members of SFAC would like future meetings to include discussion by members of the Harvard community of all points of view. Furthermore, it summarized an hour and a half of debate in the phrase "heated discussion," devoting the rest of the article to a painfully short summary of the various positions expressed, and to five minutes of the meeting that contained one argument against the resolution, and the vote.

The long discussion in SFAC Tuesday was one of the few times that a radical point of view on an issue of concern to the Harvard community was presented and defended in an open forum. We feel that the readers of the CRIMSON were entitled to coverage of the not widely reported arguments about the nature of the involvement of the University--and of ROTC in particular--with American foreign and domestic policies, as well as to a review of the more familiar arguments in defense of ROTC, and of the final vote.

The CRIMSON should have made it clear that the discussion turned on the question of whether or not ROTC's presence at Harvard reveals a political stand by the University, whether or not joining ROTC is simply expressing freedom of association, whether the problem with ROTC is its academic standards or its political effects, and what the political effects of retaining or not retaining ROTC might be. The CRIMSON should have presented the arguments on each side of all these questions. For example, it should have included arguments opposed to the reported view that joining ROTC is a right; it was argued that so long as the initiative for setting up ROTC comes not from students but from the government, and so long as ROTC is explicitly designed to provided men to defend the government's (not their) political plans--plans which many find to be highly immoral--joining ROTC is not a right but a privilege that ought to be dispensed with.

If the article on SFAC was an attempt at objectivity, it failed. It succeeded only in preventing what happened at the SFAC meeting from reaching the great majority of the Harvard community.

We hope that this kind of irresponsible reportage of SFAC meetings--which has occurred repeatedly in the past--will not occur again.

The undersigned students and faculty include members of SFAC who argued and voted against the radical resolution as well as members who supported it. Erik H. Erikson   Stanley Hoffmann   Kathy Kaufer   Alex Keyssar   Kay Kreiss   Ron Lare   Charles Maier   Barrington Moore, Jr.   Connie Park   Robert Post   George Ross   Tim Rush   James C. Thomson, Jr. SFAC members

(The CRIMSON regrets that the headline in question ("SFAC Votes to Retain ROTC") may have been misleading. We feel, however, that the other charges in the SFAC letter are unfounded.

Last week's SFAC meeting was, in fact, the first time that spectators had been invited to participate in discussions. Nowhere in the official minutes of the meeting was there a claim that this "explicitly was not" intended to be a precedent. Moreover, the complaints about what the CRIMSON "should have" reported are both pragmatically and ideologically incorrect. The CRIMSON has a limited amount of space to devote to any given story; we neither can nor should provide exhaustive transcripts of every meeting we cover. Even so, we have devoted more space to the ROTC debate than to any other single topic this Fall. Since early October, we have had 15 news stories, an editorial, a news analysis, and a feature on ROTC. Each of the arguments raised at last week's SFAC meeting has been raised somewhere before, and each has been reported at least once in the CRIMSON.--ed.)