HOFFMANN ON SFAC

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

There is much strength in the arguments of Richard Gill against the resolution adopted by the Student-Faculty Advisory Council last Tuesday, which recommends the postponement of Dow Chemical's imminent visit. However, the Council had a definite, simple and limited objective: to avoid a new confrontation not only between the students and the company but also between the students and the University, so as to give to the Council's members a chance to work dispassionately toward the adoption of a common policy on recruiting (a subject on which there are at present very strongly opposed views, based on highly respectable principles) and so as to spare all the members of the Harvard community the drama and disruption of a new crisis.

It is true that Dow is not the only company involved in the war but Dow has become a symbol. It was equally arbitrary to make of the Bastille the symbol of absolutism (there were worse places and institutions) and it was equally arbitrary for public opinion to single out nuclear weapons as a target of moral outrage when ordinary bombs had killed many more people in Dresden than the atomic bomb killed at Hiroshima. The choice of a symbol happens to be a fact, and I am not even sure that we should deplore it.

For the Council to recommend the suspension of all recruitment at Harvard until it has reached an agreement on the subject would have constituted overkill. Not to have asked for a postponement of Dow's visit and to have, so to speak, left unattended the risk of a new crisis would have prejudged the issue even more; for if the crisis occurs, the "free and unprejudiced discussion of the full range of issues now before the Council" that Professor Gill, along with the Council's members, calls for will become quite impossible. Stanley Hoffmann   Professor of Government