The Mail THE BANK ROBBERY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Two weeks ago, on September 24th, newspapers gave banner headlines to Boston Police Commissioner MeNamara's statement that the bank robbery and the killing of Boston patrolman Schroeder were committed by a "revolutionary student group." By continuing, day after day, to fan the idea that radical and even liberal college students are involved in terrorism, the press and the police are acting to generate a climate of fear to try to discredit the student movement in the eyes of the rest of the American people and to divert attention from growing problems at home.

In the Boston area, there have been student anti-war actions, e.g., against ROTC and war research at various universities, demonstrations against racist hiring practices, firings, and murders, and militantly pro-worker actions, e.g., refusal to allow G. E. recruiters on campuses during the strike. But throughout, the radical student movement has come out overwhelmingly against terrorist tactics.

Nothing has been proved so far against the people who are receiving a "trial by press," and contrary to the allegations made by Commissioner McNamara, none of the three ex-convicts on whose testimony all the stories are based has any revolutionary background. Bond, for example, who claims revolutionary leadership, was thrown out of SDS meetings at Brandeis by students who believed he was a police agent, because of the inconsistency of his racist and pro-war views with his posing as a revolutionary instigator.

In several of the handful of cases in which small groups of people have been arrested with dynamite, the leader of the group has turned out to be a policeman. For example, in the Statue of Liberty bombing plot, the person who bought the dynamite and organized the group was a New York policeman. A notorious case, reported recently in the New York Times, was that of "Tommy-the-Traveler," another policeman who posed as an "SDS regional traveler," and tried to get two students to buy dynamite. It is plausible that the present case is another example of police actions to instigate illegal acts in order to try to smear politically-oriented student groups.

The deep wrongs of our society-the war in Southeast Asia, the oppression of our non-white minority groups, low wages and bad working conditions of most workers (white as well as non-white): -these and other persistent (and indeed intrinsic) injustices are at the root of the agitation felt by students and other segments of the population. We should turn our attention to changing our society so as to eliminate the wrongs, and not be hoodwinked into attacking, hysterically, those who are agitated by their awareness of the injustices.

John Danziger Associate Professor of Astronomy Harvard University.

Jerome Lettvin Professor in Biology and Electrical Engineering, M.I.T.

Hilary Putnam Professor of Philosophy Harvard University.

George Salzman Professor of Physics University of Massachusetts.

William H. Pinson, Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, M. I. T.

Bertram Scharf Professor of Psychology Northeastern University.

Marx W. Wantafsky Chairman, Dept of Philosophy Boston University.

Philip Morrison Professor of Physics M. I. T.