PUBLISH AND PERISH

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Since the feature review of the New York Times Book Review last Sunday was of Professor J. D. Watson's book, The Double Helix, it is perhaps not too late to comment on the action of the President and Fellows of Harvard College in forbidding the Harvard University Press to publish the book. It is my feeling that this action was unwarranted and constituted a serious infringement of academic freedom. I am not a biologist, nor am I in detail acquainted with the technical issues of the controversy: I base this judgment on general grounds.

If I am correct, the stated ground of the decision was that publication by the Press would put the University in a position of "taking sides in a scientific controversy." This seems to me to be unsound. The publication of particular books by the University Press does not constitute an act of corporate University policy, but rather a decision of subgroups within the University acting within their own range of academic freedom. The problem links directly with the status of the Faculty because the ultimate responsibility for publication decisions rests with the Board of Syndics of the Press who are members of the University Faculty. I think their academe freedom is infringed by this action, and in a slightly more remote sense also that of Professor Watson. This is so because Watson was denied his presumed first choice for publication on grounds other than the Press's judgment of the quality of his manuscript. It is true, of course, that this did not result in the complete suppression of the manuscript.

The principle involved here is essentially the same as that involved in faculty appointments: the use by members of the faculty of their positions, through their teaching, publication, and other professional activities, to promote the advancement and transmission of knowledge in their own way and on their own responsibility. The Corporation's decision is, therefore, perilously close to a decision to deny appointment to a candidate on the ground that his appointment would constitute taking sides in a scientific controversy, if his views in scientific matters happen to be in opposition to incumbent members of the faculty. The established criteria for appointment are scientific competence and basic integrity, rather than which side of a scientific controversy a candidate happens to be on. The danger of the Corporation's decision, therefore, promulgates a doctrine of noncontroversy within the sphere which has been firmly established as that of faculty prerogative, a sphere which is most generally characterized as that of academic freedom. Talcott Parsons   Professor of Sociology