Letters to the Editors

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

CRIMSON's prolonged campaign to off the DAS is developing, step by step, as a textbook case in political action. Like so many textbook cases, however, it lacks a critical ingredient to make it fly. In this case, the ingredient that is missing is substance.

My guess is that CRIMSON's strategy won't work. It won't work because it requires CRIMSON's readers to buy the myth that the DAS is managed by a willful group of pretaped pre-programmed agents of the status quo, committed to extending the hegemony of the United States to the four corners of the earth. It won't work because it uses the guil?by-association technique-Sukarno-Mason-Suharto-Papanek-PKI-Vernon-Widjojo-in a community that is largely immune to that shabby approach. It won't work, most of all, because there isn't anything mysterious about the DAS. The DAS is doing exactly what it says it is doing. It is advising governments, as best it can, on how to improve their economic development policies.

CRIMSON is thoroughly right, however, on one fundamental point. Advising governments on development policies is an activity that frequently entails influence and invites controversy. No adviser's job is free of values and judgments. Any one of these values or judgments can provide the basis for bitter controversy. If an adviser urges higher taxes, he may be charged with oppressing the poor; if he advises lower taxes, with favoring the rflich; if he advises no change, with maintaining the status quo.

A critical question for the university community to consider is under what circumstances the University should take on a service function, and how such functions should be monitored. That issue applies not only to the DAS, but also to the administration of rental housing, the maintenance of city clinics, the support of Roxbury enterprises, the conduct of Cambridge experimental schools, the support and assistance of protesting urban groups, and so on. I do not believe that service functions such as these are managed by sinister agents of a Maoist revolution any more than I believe that the DAS is managed by the running dogs of an imperialist power. My view is that most service functions of the University are run by men who believe that the function is making a real social contribution. But how is the University as a collectivity to decide which of these activities to wrap within its mantle?

This is a serious question worth a serious discussion. Meanwhile, perhaps there should be a moratorium in the CRIMSON on the lopsided contest of quoting half-sentences from purloined documents to a largely mystified readership. Or if we must look forward to a continuation of that game, perhaps there should be a levelling up of the odds. With a drawerful of innocent CRIMSON correspondence, randomly selected, and an allotment of space equal to your reporters, I feel sure I could string together a group of quotations that would make the CRIMSON operation appear like one of life's darker conspiracies. But I'd rather not try.