Victims of Obfuscation?

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In the Sanders Theatre affair President Pusey urges us not to be "victimized by obfusacation" but to await quietly the results of corrective actions set in motion by officers of the University. He speaks too late. We have already been victimized by the obfuscation of those who have defined this affair as a stand-or-fall test of the principle of academic freedom and have begun to file criminal charges against persons present.

We may agree with the President, however, that the matter as it now stands "puts the whole community on trial."

Let us be clear about the facts.

The meeting Friday night was a political rally organized by a partisan political group to make the case for the war policy in Indochina. The sponsors of the rally called it a "teach-in." That was their privilege. It could also have been called a prayer meeting, a seance, a community happening, what you will. The fact remains that it was a political rally. If representatives of the Hanoi government or the FLN had been invited to speak and permitted to enter the country and attend, it might then be considered an event coming under the protection of this University's code on academic rights and responsibilities (as does, for example, the physics department's sponsorship of Dr. Land's lecture). But merely to speak of that alternative arrangement is to draw attention to its political impossibility. And for this University to throw a mantle of academic privilege and right over that rally as it was organized is to endorse political policies that have defined the Hanoi government as in some way a non-government and the North Vietnamese people and the people of the FLN-dominated countryside as non-people; that have made it possible for this country to wage war ten years without thinking it necessary to declare war. It was this effective complicity on the part of the University, in the person of its troubleshooter, as well as the savagery of the war itself that, I would suppose, was being protested Friday night.

Mr. Teodoru was quoted in the CRIMSON as saying that the disrupters had come simply to say that President Nixon is a liar. This falls short of their full intention, but as far as it goes it seems exactly the case. Like those on the platform those in the audience came to say something. They said it. In the circumstances of a political rally, wherever it happens to be staged, the right to shout down speakers is embraced by the same principle of freedom of speech and expression as protects the speakers in their effort to make themselves heard. The bad judgment or (Barrington Moore's word) "repulsiveness" of behavior among those exercising this right in no way forfeits or imperils the right itself.