The Mail: THE PEOPLE, HARVARD

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

This is my fifteenth reunion report. I promised a friend I would try to publish it where the student body could read it:

If it is true that the cells of the body regenerate every seven years, then I am two incarnations removed from the person I was who went to Harvard. The friendships of that time have pretty much dissolved, but still the institution, Harvard, remains, to ask me for an account of myself.

I can't answer the questionnaire. It doesn't have the right boxes for me to check. First of all, my church is within myself: I go there several times a day. Secondly, my net worth is not measured in terms of money-I am a human being, not a corporation. Generally, my opinion is asked on questions which presume a way of life and thinking that I don't share.

The questionnaire is like Harvard in a way-out of touch. Looking back on my formal education. I have become aware how little of it was fact, how much of it was theory, and how much of that theory was distorted. I have begun to see, too, the power of the human mind, and how much that mind is limited, inhibited, and retarded by submitting to the authority of our present academia.

My thoughts are turning now from the Class of 1956 to the Class of 1984. Very few of the young people I know now are in college. Most of them just don't know where to turn for an education. Harvard doesn't have the answers to their questions. Harvard has a long way to go, first to catch up to the kids of today, and then to keep one step ahead of the kids of tomorrow.

Students have gone berserk, and the Harvard community has reacted in diverse ways, but Harvard has not changed. A maze of committees has been formed, it seems, because nobody wants to take the responsibility to change what is ancient and hallowed and sacred.

My hope for this new year, 1971, is that the people, Harvard, will have the courage to change the institution, Harvard, into something that will answer the educational needs of our children in future years. Hopefully Harvard's next president will be a man ready to take the leadership in making radical changes. Hopefully the faculty and administration will be open to constructive ideas from the alumni, and closed, no matter what the bribe, to the destructive tirades of those few who are against children. And hopefully those tight little academic circles can be expanded to include the real world, and the whole mind, that many of us are aware of in this year, 1971.