EXCLUSION

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I wish to register my concurrence with professor Orlando Patterson's expression of outrage in today's CRIMSON (Jan 22nd) at attempts by extremist elements among Negro students in this University to exclude white students and faculty from public meetings. Indeed, this behavior, which cuts at the very roots of the University, is so intellectually vulgar and so morally reprehensible that it must be brought to a halt. here and now.

I. therefore, implore all members of the Harvard community to do their part in this matter. I want particularly to implore those black students of this University who understand and accept the intellectual and moral principles upon which this great University rests to inform that section of blacks who violate these principles to cease and desist from this outrageous behavior.

Let me register, if I may, a couple of additional thoughts on this problem, for I think a more extended comment is required. I find it baffling why the politically extremist elements among Negro students-and some Negro faculty as well-in white colleges do not have the character and courage to follow to its limits the logic of their extremist black racist ideology. Those Negro students (and faculty) who require an obsessive interplay with their blackness have, if they are persons of integrity and solid human stuff. only one alternative-namely, to leave white colleges (where nearly 70 per cent of Negroes in colleges are being educated) and to establish and pay for their own private institutions where they would be free to indulge their ethnicity or blackness to satisfaction.

American society has. for better or worse, allowed those persons who require intensive immersion in their own ethnicity to do so. But, and rightly, they can do so only to the extent they are willing to pay for the institutions necessary for this particular life style. Some Catholic. Jewish, and Protestant Americans, obsessed like some Negroes are today with their ethnicity, have satisfied this craving for their Catholicness, Jewishness, and Protestantness by founding and supporting their own insular educational institutions. But it is clearly not the purpose of public higher educational institutions, nor of the great American private institutions like Harvard which accept the principle of non-sectarian recruitment, to satisfy this need.

One final reaction. The Harvard University Faculty is, I think, indirectly responsible for the intellectually vulgar attacks that are emanating from some extremist persons associated with the Department of Afro-American Studies. I was a member, the only black, of the original Faculty committee-the so-called Rosovsky Committee-which reported to the Harvard Faculty in February 1969 a plan for organizing a degree-granting curriculum in Afro-American Studies. Our report, a section of which I drafted, followed in every detail the scholarly and intellectual precepts that must be followed in the establishment and execution of academic affairs in this and any other serious university.

The Faculty adopted our report, as it should have. But, alas, when confronted with violent threats from demented persons among the extremist wing of the Harvard African and Afro-American Students Association during the Student Strike of April 1969, the Faculty reversed itself. It adopted instead alternative proposals. These proposals, emanating largely from militant black students, were utterly bizarre, from an intellectual and scholarly standpoint. Intellectual and scholarly precepts were thrown to the wind: Negro students were given an authoritative voice in the committees empowered to set up the Afro-American Studies curriculum and in the governance of the department that was ultimately formed in September 1969.

One needs little familiarity with a university to know that students, with rare exceptions indeed, have no capacity to exercise scholarly authority. If they had, they would not be students: It is as simple as that. But they can turn a curriculum and the agency administering that curriculum into a political affair.

From the beginning, the governing role permitted students in the Afro-American Studies Department has led to the politicization of that Department's organization and activity, and the outrageous events alleged to have occurred at the Sanders Theatre lecture by Shirley Graham DuBois are part of this pattern. The Harvard Faculty must in all honesty admit its contribution to this situation, and act accordingly.