The Mail DEBATE WITH CFIA?

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In the past, when SDS fought Harvard's complicity in racism and imperialism- for example, when SDS campaigned against ROTC, or against the Cambridge Project, or against racist pay differentials among campus workers- administration spokesman parroted old saws about the need for "rational discussion" (while, in fact, they never discussed and had no way of dealing with the real issues except to resort to suspensions and expulsions). However, when SDS and UAG now challenge the CFIA to defend its existence in a public debate, we are told that we are incapable of "serious and rational discussion." If the CFIA were confident that SDS and UAG would really debate in an "irrational" manner in front of hundreds of people, they would be clamoring for this debate. What they fear is that the CFIA will be exposed before a large audience as a supporter of repressive dictatorships, as an agent for the penetration of U.S. capital and of the resulting perpetuation of underdevelopment and exploitation in the third world, as a collection of allies of and intellectual apologists for the murderers of hundreds of thousands of insurgent peasants (as in Vietnam and Indonesia), and as a comfortable haven for research by war criminals like Huntington and Kissinger. Whether the CFIA debates us or not, we think that thousands of students, faculty, and campus workers will see the CFIA for what it is, and join us in demanding its abolition. We maintain our challenge to the CFIA to send representatives to the forum, 8 p.m. Thursday night at Lowell Lecture Hall.

[In a letter to SDS and UAG Nov. 25, CFIA director Robert R. Bowie declined the invitation to debate, saying, "In view of past experience, there is no reason to expect that an SDS forum would be conducted in a manner conducive to serious and rational discussion."-