Pusey Blasts SDS's Tactics In Sermon

Unprecedentedly small numbers of seniors turned out for this year's first Commencement Week ceremonies yesterday.

Roughly half those eligible attended Phi Beta Kappa ceremonies in the morning; and less than seventy members of the Harvard senior class attended Baccalaureate Service in the afternoon, where President Pusey attacked the tactics of "extremist splinter groups of the New Left" as reminiscent of McCarthy and Hitler.

Eighty-two seniors were initiated into the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the national college honors society. Thirty-six seniors had been initiated earlier. Of the 118 eligible, only about 60 turned up for the ceremony at 11 a.m. in Sanders Theatre-about half without caps and gowns.

(A complete list of new PBK members, as well as six men awarded honorary membership yesterday, will be published in tomorrow's CRIMSON.)

This year for the first time, the Radcliffe PBK chapter participated in the Harvard exercises. The Poet was Janies Dickey, poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. The Orator was Loren Eiseley, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Eiseley read a selection from a forthcoming book in which he describes walking through a winternight and musing about man's origin and future.

At a business meeting before the ceremony, the Harvard PBK chapter adopted a resolution condemning American involvement in indochina and urging immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia.

Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government, delivered the Address at the Radcliffe Baccalaureate service at 2 p.m. in Memorial Church. Walzer spoke about the advantages of limited government and the dangers of presidential war-making, giving the current situation as an example. Less than 100 Cliffies attended.

The Harvard Baccalaureate Service began at 4:15 p.m. About 70 seniors attended-some in caps and gowns, some in T-shirts and tennis shoes. Last year, 315 seniors attended the service.

President Pusey delivered the sermon. His topic was the "declination in the quality of our life here which I find disturbing" and the "similarity between the present situation of Harvard and that which obtained when I returned to Cambridge seventeen years ago" during the height of Sen. Joseph W. McCarthy's terrorism.

Pusey recalled how he and some academic friends in Wisconsin had campaigned against McCarthy's re-election to the Senate in 1952, but failed. "I offer this confession as a warning to those of you who may imagine influencing elections is an easy matter," he said.

Pusey condemned students and faculty members who "would like to see our colleges and universities denigrated, maligned, and even shut down," who go about this by "sowing doubt and suspicious" and "using the old means of distortion, accusation, guilt imputed by association."

He discussed Mein Kamf, in which Adolph Hitler explained his use of "the big lie" as the secret of political success. He said SDS had begun propagating their "big lie" during this senior class's freshman year.

"The big lie let loose amongst us began then to take shape." Pusey said. "That is, that the University is a hopelessly bigoted, reactionary force in our society which serves the interests of a hide-ous military-industrial complex by doing its chores and by intellectually emasculating the young entrusted to its care so as in time to turn them over as docile slaves to a contemptible Establishment.' "

Pusey said radical groups have lately attempted to suppress dissent within their own ranks. "A threat to freedom, motivated by a desire to impose conformity, grows among us," he said.

"How have we come to such a pass? ...Many of us must share the blame: Those of us in positions to have moved more rapidly than we have to correct obvious abuses and shortcomings which have festered too long among us. Those responsible for instruction too long reluctant to re-examine traditional offerings and teaching methods."

He also struck a hopeful note. "Neither unreasoning zealotry nor despair is an acceptable attitude for Harvard men...There is a world of reason, modesty, charity and trust in the midst of, and opposed to, the oppressive and contentious world of deceit, anger, vilification and self-righteousness now made so manifest all about us again, as twenty years ago, by would-be exploiters....

"As Harvard men," he told six per cent of the Class of 1970, "you are called to serve that world."