Open Recruiting

WHEN representatives of business organizations and government agencies come on campus in hopes of recruiting Harvard students to work for them, they are not exercising the rights of speech and free expression guaranteed them by the Constitution and the general principles of the University. Such organizations have goals and interests. They seek not just to express those goals and interests, but to attract men and women who will help attain them.

The right of these organizations to recruit here does not exist as an absolute guarantee. There is no "right" involved, just a convenience which the University has granted to the organizations and, presumably, to students who want to hear what the organizations offer.

It follows that no established rights would be disturbed if Harvard abolished its Office for Graduate and Career Plans and similar posts within the Departments, and decreed that organizations have to fend for themselves without University resources in their search for manpower.

This, however, is not the issue which the Student-Faculty Advisory Council has raised in its latest sessions. The Advisory Council has decided that while it is permissible for the Career office and Department placement officers to invite in most prospective employers, there may be some employers whose activities are so repugnant that they offend the moral sense of a substantial portion of the University, and that to allow them in might in effect be seen as University condonement of what they do. The most obvious examples of such organizations would be Dow Chemical Corporation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

HAVING decided that a convenience freely offered some might not necessarily be offered to all, the Council is now wrestling with the problem of just who the "some" are. It is trying to come up with an acceptable mechanism for determining which organizations Harvard should decree not allowed to recruit here. One mechanism under discussion would have a petition signed by one-fifth the student body plus a two-thirds vote of the Advisory Council be sufficient to place Harvard off-limits to a potential recruiter.

It is impossible to think of any acceptable mechanism in support of the Advisory Council's "most recruiters--yes; some--no" policy. Just what percentage of students, Faculty, administrators, or even Student-Faculty Council members is sufficient to decree any organization so offensive to individual moral sense that it cannot enjoy the convenience Harvard will continue to offer other organizations? Will it come down, perhaps, to a case in which Dow is indeed decreed morally acceptable to Harvard in a narrow 343-342 vote? Or will the CIA lose out one year, only to make a strong electoral comeback with the entrance of a more conservative freshman class a year later?

The moral worth of businesses and government agencies can not be voted, or petitioned, or decreed, either by a minority, substantial or not, or by a majority. If recruiting is allowed on campus, it has to be open recruiting.

THE University should if anything encourage the more diverse, even the perhaps outrageous "recruiters." Certainly the American Friends Service Committee is not outrageous, and it and organizations like it--which clearly have something to say to students about their graduate and career plans--should be allowed the same use of University resources allowed to organizations offering salaried jobs.

It is important, however, that a policy of open recruitment on campus not lead to non-thinking on campus about what some recruiting organizations do indeed do in this world. The Advisory Council is also deliberating on a motion that would have some number of signatures require representatives of a recruiting organization to discuss organization policy in an open forum before being allowed to recruit here. Compulsory debate by petition again appears an attempt to judge for others; many organizations, it is possible, may feel they lack the qualified manpower or the time to defend themselves in public debate. They should still be allowed to recruit like other organizations.

But such open debate should be encouraged. Harvard should inform prospective recruiters that students are indeed interested in hearing what they have to say for themselves--even if it does not make their defenses compulsory.

FREE and voluntary debate is the essence of the University. Compulsory inquisition is not, and neither are mechanisms to determine which organizations fit under a certain moral umbrella that some number wants to prop up for all. A policy of open recruitment may seem to some a passive condonement of certain moral qualities. But can it be anything but worse to respond by specifically decreeing the moral qualities that must be observed here?