The Mail GALBRAITH RETURNS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I have been on leave this term and while the University seems to have survived this deprivation as so often before, there are three rather disparate matters on which I would like to comment. Let me put them very briefly:

(1) I have greatly welcomed the new instruments of University government that have come into existence in the last year. I've strongly believed that a university should be self-governing-that scholars should not and do not need businessmen, lawyers or professional academic trainers to run their affairs. But as this new government begins to function, and especially in the field of rule enforcement. I detect a tendency for those who do not like a particular result to attack, often with some indignation, the idea of government. I am sure this machinery is imperfect; being less than a year old, it could hardly be otherwise. But as all but a minority of philosophical anarchists will agree, we must have government. This means that we must have rules and they must be enforced. Let us change the rules if they are wrong and likewise those that enforce them. But let us meanwhile stand solidly behind the idea of government-or more precisely of self-government. No society, however radical, has yet found an alternative to life within rules.

(2) The oldest and most enduring of student grievances is, of course, the need for intellectual toil. And personally I have always found such toil a distressing thing. But again no successful social system provides an escape. And it is wrong, I think, to use the wrongs of this society as a way of escaping such labor. In the aftermath of the enlargement of the war this spring and of the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, it was no doubt necessary that regular university operations be modified or suspended. But this must not become a habit. I have a further thought. Few things, surely, could trouble Mr. Nixon less than the knowledge that Harvard (or universities in general) were inoperative.

(3) In recent times no action has been so purely symbolic as Project GM. Organizing GM stockholders against the Company is an enterprise comparable in practical effect with organizing the Mississippi Congressional delegation in support of the Black Panthers. Ralph Nader and the sponsors recognized this. And as all students who have rejoiced in my lectures are aware, not even the GM Board of Directors has any real power. The power lies with the corporate bureaucracy. But Project GM was a useful reminder that this bureaucracy has responsibilities, as students, faculty and even alumni thought. That the Treasurer and (I assume) a majority of the Corporation determined otherwise is a tribute to the intransigent smallness of the so-called financial mind. It proclaims a remarkably institutionalized obtuseness, an inspired tactlessness and a truly alarming divorce from the real world. It raises questions, more than incidentally, as to how well Harvard's finances are being managed, for that requires intelligence and a knowledge of the world as it is. In light of the recent financial collapse, an event that always illumin?es incompetence, we will need to reassure ourselves on this point.