OR "A MILESTONE IN OBJECTIVE COVERAGE"

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your recent coverage of disorder at Columbia must rank as a milestone in objective coverage of an explosive issue. It seems to me that the syndicated coverage from Morningside Heights systematically and covertly presented an Establishment view or one which was benevolently indulgent of the insurgents. The result distorts or obliterates the real issues. What is involved, clearly, is neither haphazard hysteria nor pre-summer larks. Your reporting gives to the entire affair an ideology, a history, and what is more important, a subtle analytic respectability.

There is, however, another context for this incident which it would be foolish to let pass unheralded. From Warsaw, Paris, Rome, and New York, there is evidence of a general malaise and disgust with the tautologies of higher education, especially in the so-called humanities and social sciences. It is feared that in these areas the university has become a subsidized barrier separating the idealism of youth from the affluence of middle-class, middle-aged, virtue. Without striking too shrill a note, it might be accurate to say that there is an awareness and dissatisfaction with the methods of indoctrination which the speculative and historical sciences have imposed on college students. The university is no longer the ivory citadel of disinterest for which it has so long been rebuked. Would that it might again become so. Benito Rakower   Institute for Services to Education