The Mail THE REAL VICTOR

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The real victor in the disruption Friday evening, it seems to me, was the South Vietnamese government with its American apologists. Those who chanted and shouted down the speakers enabled a politically and morally bankrupt cause, a cause that something like three quarters of the American electorate has at last rejected, to wrap itself momentarily in the tattered cloak of intellectual freedom. In the present climate of opinion this kind of "radical" action becomes a repulsive form of bulling instead of a desperate attempt to be heard or to change the course of policy. It is ominous in other ways too. Just what degrees of difference in the interpretation of American foreign policy will this form of radicalism be able to tolerate in the future? And in what parts of the university? Such questions arise even when one holds that the radicals, among whom there is great variety, were in this instance responding to provocation and, in the larger context, to dangerous and evil trends.Lecturer on Sociology