RADICAL COHORTS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In The Crimson of Feb.16,1973, Mr.Samuel Bowles is reported as saying, in explaining the decision of the Harvard Economics department not to give him tenure: "Our difference with the Economics Department is clearly political-what's useful to us in overthrowing the system is clearly not useful to them in administering it."

By that logic, does one suppose that if Mr.Bowles is given tenure by the Economics department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, that the U.of Mass. is interested in "overthrowing the system"? And since the U.of Mass. is a state-supported institution, does that mean that taxpayers also would endorse the "overthrow of the system"?

In the same news story. Theda Skocpol is reported as saying that "despite its large number of radicals, the Department of Sociology at Harvard is one of the least responsive to radical demands." One assumes that Ms. Skocpol means radical students. But is she then demanding "representation"? And what if the next cohort of students is conservative, would we then fire the radical teachers hired to "represent" the previous cohort and find conservative teachers to reflect the new cohort?

My namesake must be turing in his grave, corkscrew fashion, with that logic. Alice Lewis Carroll