A Murder

THE MURDER and attempted rape of a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute in Longfellow Park last week evoked predictable advice for the future from Harvard administrators. Women should use the shuttle bus more, President Horner said, and try to walk in groups. President Bok's faculty committee on violent crime swung into action. Federal district judge Charles E. Wyzanski '27 urged students to set up patrols of their own. David S. Landes, professor of History, said faculty members should devote some time to studying possible solutions to violence in the area, and James Vorenberg '48, professor of Law and director of the Center for Criminal Justice, assigned three members of his staff to start such a study. Vice president for Administration Stephen S.J. Hall announced that he was letting his secretaries who walk home leave early enough to get home by dark, and urged other administrators and professors to do the same.

Most of these steps--and others, such as strict gun control laws--have some value, and they all bespeak commendable concern. But none of them would have prevented the murder of Ethel Higonnet a block from her home at 5:45 on a Saturday afternoon.

Last week's murder should strengthen people's determination to build a society in which social and sexual equality are complete and taken for granted, in which rape and the fear of rape are things of the past, in which all people--men and women alike--are inviolable.

Such a society would not bring Ethel Higonnet to life, or comfort those people who knew her. But it would make similar murders in the future less likely.