Group Forms To Preserve Campus Rights

"We believe essentially in a hierarchical system of university governance," said Arthur N. Waldron '71, president of a new Harvard organization dedicated to protecting academic freedom.

Started after the Columbia University uprising in 1968, University Centers for Rational Alternatives is the brainchild of Sidney Hook, noted spokesman on university issues.

Hook's recent article blaming college administrators for allowing campus disorders was mailed in September to over 900 college presidents and trustees by President Nixon.

"When universities are politicized an agenda of study becomes an agenda of action, and therewith converts the university into a political organization agitating for the adoption of partisan political goals," Hook's article stated.

Harvard U.C.R.A., which consists entirely of students, "is not so much concerned with increasing its membership as with enunciating these principles clearly," Waldron said.

"We are a one-issue organization, committed to the free exchange ofideas on campus and opposed to the use of violence, coercion, or intimidation," Waldron added.

If the first person to harass McNamara had been thrown out of Harvard, the C.F.I.A. would not have been bombed," he said, referring to Robert S. McNamara's visit to Harvard while Secretary of Defense in 1967.

Throw Them Out

Waldron said the answer to campus unrest is not to give students a greater part in university decision-making but "to throw out the students who have demonstrated by their actions that they do not share the ethics of the academic community."

That segment of the academic community best represented in the national U.C.R.A. is Faculty, who make up most of the group's several thousand members.

In his article, Hook, professor of philosophy at New York University, blamed student rebels who try to intimidate faculty and other students and administrators who allow them to do so.

Nixon called the article "one of the most cogent and compelling documents I have read on the question of campus violence"