Thoughtcrime

THE COMMITTEE on Rights and Responsibilities will soon announce its decision in the case of Allen S. Weinrub, a graduate student in Physics who has been accused of conspiring to prevent a speech by Edwin H. Land, president of the Polaroid Corporation, at Harvard last month. Given the facts of the case, the CRR's task is clear: a prompt acquittal of Weinrub, coupled with an unequivocal refutation of the very nature of the charge.

Not surprisingly, a large number of University officials have already reached the opposite conclusion. Three days after the aborted Counter Teach-In, the Faculty Council described the Land affair as one "in which threats led to the cancellation of a scheduled lecture by a well-known scientist." And soon afterward, a statement by President-elect Bok again alluded to Land by saying that "for the second time this year, visitors at Harvard have been prevented from speaking by the obstructive acts of others."

Each of these statements concurs in an identical fallacy: that those who had gathered on March 8 to question Land about his company's business activity in South Africa had actually planned to stop his speech. But what is even more ironic is that those who are determined to "save free speech" by punishing Weinrub are the only ones who now pose a truly meaningful threat to free exchange.

Edwin Land's speech was not obstructed, nor was it threatened; it was cancelled by a group of Physics professors who wished to spare Land a verbal confrontation on Polaroid in South Africa. About 60 protesters had gathered at an impromptu meeting which Weinrub chaired, and they had voted to approach Land before his scheduled talk on colorvision. At an earlier meeting of scientists in New York, Land had been publicly questioned for the first time on his company's business activity in South Africa, and he had been badly upset by the experience. The professors-several of them his close associates and friends-obviously sought to prevent a recurrence of the episode.

It seems odd that Weinrub-not the Physics Department-was charged with having prevented the speech. But Weinrub's accusers, lacking any direct evidence to support their claims, drew up a list of charges which would make most conspiracy trials look like open and shut cases by comparison. As chairman of the protesters' meeting. Weinrub was alleged to have violated the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities by not having overruled all discussion which advocated a violation of the resolution. In addition, he was said to have "prepare [d] signs of the sort normally used at political demonstrations." In response, several witnesses testified that, as chairman of the protesters' meeting, Weinrub had put forward no opinion whatever on how Land should be questioned-and as a result, his accusers, with the active participation of CRR members, launched into an inquiry of Weinrub's political views. One CRR member brought the questioning to a crescendo by asking Weinrub to confess that he would have helped prevent Land's speech if the South Africa issue went unresolved.

The implication of the charges against Weinrub-and of the interrogation used to uphold them-is clear enough. If Weinrub is so much as admonished by the CRR, it will henceforth be impossible for anyone in the University to advocate and organize political protest without fear of being prosecuted for a "violation" which may never occur. Several observers have recently expressed concern that the charges against Weinrub may have already had a chilling effect on student protest.

But there is another aspect of the Weinrub case which threatens to be even more pernicious. At the committee hearing, CRR chairman Donald Anderson suggested that a central issue in the case would be the appropriateness of political discussion at what was intended to be a scientific meeting. There are doubtless some people who find this dichotomy appealing, but to impose it as a code of conduct is an even more concerted attack on the idea of free exchange than are all the charges of conspiracy. There are many who believe that Land's theories of colorvision and Polaroid's activity in the service of a racist regime are not separable but are rather fused as a single reality. And to deny anyone the right to perceive that relationship would be to make a travesty of intellectual freedom.

We have maintained in the past that the CRR's authority is illegitimate and that all of its past disciplinary actions should be overturned. The committee's shameful interrogation of Weinrub-possibly contrary even to its own ground rules-has further reinforced that illegitimacy. A conviction in this case will establish the CRR not only as an outmoded disciplinary body but as the greatest enemy of free speech at Harvard as well.