HARVARD'S LOSS, NATIONS LOSS?

In the Editors of The Crimson:

This is a letter of congratulations which I have sent to Dean Dunlop and which I would like to share with my fellow Harvardians:

Dear Dean Dunlop

We have never met, but I have fond memories of hearing you speak during my freshman orientation week and of the joke you told about being tried of sin. I hope you remember the one I mean. It was about a church with a sign in front of it that read. "Tired of sin? Come in!" Then you told us that some sneaky Harvard faculty member painted the following line baneath it. "If not, go to work for the Nixon administration." I'll never be as good a story-teller as you, but I hope I didn't week up your joke too much.

In any case, I thought that it would be a nice gesture if I extended my heartiest congratulations to you upon your appointment by President Nixon to head the Cost of Living Council. All of Harvard is proud of your success and I am sure that many of my fellow students shared the pleasure that I felt when I heard that you were leaving Cambridge for Washington.

My interest in your new position in due to factors other than the Harvard ties which we hold in common: I am profoundly concerned with the cost of living as any student must be whose tuition has been raised every year since he began college. I know that you too are deeply concerned with rising tuitions and I am sure that now that you are finally in a position to deal with this problem you will do so.

Along with my interest in the cost of living I have an interest in the soaring cost of dying. I have just read in one of my Soc. Rel. books that it costs us 300,000 dollars for each Met Cong that we Idll. If this figure is anywhere near correct then it seems to me that we've not getting any bargains in Vietnam. I mean we could probably get a better return on our dollar if we made wiser investments; maybe you could suggest to the President that the United States take some money out of Vietnam so that it could be reinvested in a safer and more profitable venture, such as shares in the Golf Oil Company. Although I am not an economist I suspect that the private sector is still more efficient in colonial enterprise than the government is proving itself to be in Southeast Asia--but is your specialty, and so I will not be so bold as to make any more suggestions concerning economics.

Anyways, best of luck to you. If either Nixon or Kissingerstarts making fun of your bow ties, you know where you can tell them to go. Geoffrey D. Garin '75