The Mail SPLIT DOOR PANELS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Remember how Harvard demolished several apartments on the Mather House site without making any provision for relocation of the residents? Remember how a graduate student was murdered two years ago because Harvard had neglected to install locks on the doors of the University Road apartments? Remember how Harvard stopped making repairs on its 182 units in Roxbury in anticipation of the Medical expansion?

Well, you may remember all that, but now you can forget it. Because we are witnessing the emergence of a NEW HARVARD-the Harvard that really cares about split door panels. No less than that creative genius himself, Dean John T. Dunlop, mastermind of the painters' helper category and similar cheap labor programs for Model Cities construction, has charged that two of us "deliberately destroyed the lower panels of the North East door of University Hall."

This charge is both an insult and a frame-up. An insult because there was laughably little damage done to the door, and this letter implies that we lacked both the ability to really destroy it and the good sense to bring crowbars. A frame-up because we are innocent, and are only being brought before the CRR because of the political context of the "crime." As members of the SDS Radical Arts Troupe, we were performing on the top step and kicking against the door to simulate a beat for our latest smash hit, "The Book of War." We noticed several minutes afterward that one panel in the door had cracked. In similar fashion, the cast of Marat/Sade managed one night to break a window pane in the Adams House Dining Hall; they were not charged by the CRR. Nor was the student who opened fire with a bee-bee gun on the Quincy House senior tutor's suite ever prosecuted: on the contrary, this willful ac?? of destruction was hushed up by the administrators.

These men are obviously not concerned about their petty rules and regulations; they are afraid of the ideas expressed in our skits and our songs. But the RAT will continue to sing about them while we fight we shall continue to sing about them while we fight against them.

THE FELLOWS AT THE CFIA

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Somewhere in the Yard I read a leaflet with a quotation from Albert Einstein, saying that if he could start all over again he would prefer to be a plumber or peddler. Then at least he would have had some degree of freedom and people would have interfered less with his life. As a Fellow of the Center for International Affairs I felt like a peddler enjoying maximum freedom in the nine months I have spent here. It therefore required a mental exercise to follow the reasoning of the members of NAC who, in their "mill-in" of last week, argued that we too are an arm of American imperialism. Did we, the 15 midcareer officials and ex-officials from various nationalities and professional backgrounds, unconsciously or conesiously serve an imperialist cause?

If one considers the Center itself as an expression of American imperalism-which I do not-one could argue that the mere presence of the Fellows, what ever the scope of the Program may be, contributed to this cause. I leave it to others better qualified than I am to defend the Center against these general criticisms. But to those who think that the Fellows Program itself has some disinetively obnoxious features, I would like to respond.

Let me first say something on the composition of the present group of Fellows. I think it shows some bias: all of us are officials or ex-officials. A few have teaching assignments in their home countries and one is working at the Ford Foundation. But none of us comes from East European countries or other "socialist" countries-although Fellows have in the past. Nobody could be qualified as "radical."

Personally, I find this regrettable. I believe the group of Fellows in the future, but past experience Center hopes to broaden the composition of the shows that this cannot easily be achieved. Most of the Fellows are paid by their governments during their leaves of absence, and there are not so many institutions interested in international affairs who have the wisdom of granting such opportunities to their people. Moreover, whatever the reputation of Harvard as a cradle of revolutionary unrest may be, radical people from other countries, who can take a year off, tend to prefer a visit to countries where radicalism is not demonstrated only by demonstrations.

A second argument I have heard about the Fellows Program is that the Center provides them with a program which shows the traces of its evil intention. This is simply not true: the Center permits us maximum freedom in the pursuit of our studies and research. Even if it ever wished to impose any limitations in our freedom, I don't think that a group of experienced officials, who out of free will come to the Center, would accept such "guidance."

All of us focus our activities on the seminars and classes other Harvard students attend and on a research paper, for which we, independent of the Center (and of our employers at home), chose the subject. For the rest there is about twice a week a minimum program of seminars or discussions for the Fellows in particular. The subjects of the seminars and the speakers have been chosen after consultation with the Fellows, and mostly by the Fellows themselves. If this year there has been a bias in the choice of the speakers, it was one in favor of professors who are critical of one or another aspect of U.S. foreign policy. In fact, I don't remember any seminar where the speaker was in accord with the Nixon Administration's policy on the subject.

I do remember that of all the people the Fellows invited to speak to them, only two refused. One was Mr. MacEwen, who apparently prefers to convey his opinions of the Center in an atmosphere of confrontation and turmoil. I think that Mr. MacEwen, one of the leaders at the recent demonstration and at the same time research associate at the Center, could have given the benefit of the doubt to a group of people who for him should at least h?? the merit of being financially independent of the Center's resources.

Finally, demonstrators have argued to me that we, officials in our early forties, are a lost generation in a future era of radical change and revolution. As was made clear to me: "a pig is a pig."

The argument seems to have some merit. For ten years or longer all of us have lived in a special context, our thinking has been conditioned by compromises and pragmatic considerations. It is difficult to keep in touch with radical thinking and it requires vitality to search for novelty and change, if the daily work is the art of achieving the possible. Each of us will take up again the type of work we had before and probably none of us will have turned into revolutionaries.

However, from a radical viewpoint-and it not from a radical viewpoint at least in my own view-there are also positive aspects to our being here. All of us have been exposed to a variety of ideas this year. Upon our return the results will be watched with caution by our employers at home; for them our stay here is also an experiment with unpredictable results. Some of us will have become radicalized in the view of our colleagues, although probably not as radical as NAC would wish us to be. Even if we could prove to be a lost generation-which I personally call in question-a few of us may sow the seeds of change in our environment.

The Center tries to select a type of Fellows who apart from some obvious qualifications, are still flexible enough to be responsive to new ideas. I would see it as a display of defeatism, if the liberal and radical students did not believe that at least some of their ideas found an echo with certain Fellows.

I hope that, whatever the reforms at the Center may be, the Program for the Fellows will be maintained. For officials it is a marvelous opportunity to refresh their minds and gain new insights. It is up to others to judge what value the presence of the Fellows at Harvard has for the academic community. I only venture to suggest to those who attribute part of today's evils to bureaucracies and bureaucrats that contact with some of the species offers an opportunity to test their thesis.

POETRY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In 1917 the Harvard Advocate printed an utterly standardized little poem of mine, which was just about what a typical mauve little boy of seventeen would predictably enough have written.

I left Harvard by request, without a degree, and have long since forgotten the poem. However, the anticlimatic approach of the Fiftieth Reunion weirdly disturbs the deep psychic ooze and bottom silt, and disinters many, many memories (not all of them fond!).

Ruminating over the Past at dawn this morning. I wrote the following ??onnet for 1970, which I dutifully communicate to you in the thought that, conceivably, it might be of some evanescent and residual interest to you and to Harvard of today.

Having exhausted standard metaphors.

The troubled poet gropes for the bizarre.

No longer fearing surge of feathered tar.

Nor slosh of slops before unopened doors:

But clad in final dignity he soars

On wings of wax to meet Apollo's car-

The ghostly fragrance of the nenuphar

Still blurring vision of transcendent Mors.

And yet the young are wiser: definition

Has not replaced the logic of the dream-

All that remains to us is vast contrition:

Too late to focus incoherent beam.

To close the books and bar the abandoned

gates:

It is not ??, but Time, that hesitates!

And need more be said, dear Crimson? It need not.

GM IS NOT HARVARD

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Reading the Corporation's statement as to why it will vote its General Motors shares for the existing management's proposals. I was amazed by the speciousness of much of the reasoning. It would take a long letter to go into the many fallacies in their statement, but one misconception seems behind much of their argument: they feel it improper for the stockholders of GM to be permitted to interfere with the operations of the Board and management.

Perhaps they have forgotten what a corporation is-in theory at least. It is an enterprise which is owned by its stockholders, and the purpose of a stockholders' meeting is precisely to vote on how the Board shall be constituted and what its policies shall be. Management is hired by the Board to carry out the wishes of the stockholders.

The Corporation has forgotten that it spells its own name with a capital "C" and that GM is not Harvard.

KELMAN AND COMMENCEMENT

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I read Wednesday's (May 27) CRIMSON with utter incredulity. Are we so morally, spiritually, and intellectually corrupt as to allow a small group of "radical students" to decide that Steven Kelman should not speak at this year's commencement because they happen not to like his views? Ubinam gentium sumus?

Last year, some 14.000 people sat and listened at Harvard's commencement to an SDS speaker whose views, to say the least, were not very popular. But he was allowed to air them.

I hope that all of us, and especially the class of 1970, will have sufficient courage to enforce Mr. Kelman's right to deliver his commencement part no matter what the thought-police in our midst may have to say about it.