SCHOOL WITHOUT STUDENTS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

A student-less university. It's a sad contradiction in terms, but that's exactly what Harvard may be creating. In a recent Crimson article, Associate Dean Richard G. Leahy, chairman of the commission to study the proposed Reza Shah Kabir University in Iran, stated that the institution may begin as a research institute, without students. Typically Harvard--education takes a back seat to research. But what kind of research will be conducted, and who will conduct it? Given the Iranian Shah's fanatic interest in military equipment, his university could end up as a Harvard-staffed weapons development lab. After all, Reza Shah did purchase $5 billion worth of armaments from the U.S. this past year (U.S. arms sales for 1974 totalled $8.5 billion). He's planning to purchase the Grumman F-14 and YF-17 fighter bombers, to make his air force possibly the third most powerful in the world (he'd originally considered buying the Grumman coporation itself, but U.S. law prohibited that).

Dean Leahy cited attracting educated Iranians back to their country as a major goal of the project. But in view of the situation there, this seems futile. Iran is a police state. Agents of SAVAK--the secret police--sit in virtually every university classroom. Frances Fitzgerald, well-known investigative journalist, reports in Harper's Magazine how "professors are fired or arrested for expressing independent views, and students are arrested or shot for demonstrating." Foreign professors complain that Iranian University degrees are comparable to high school diplomas in developed countries. The existing Teheran affiliate of the Harvard Business School gets its share of the bad marks, too. Part of the funds for it were raised at Iranian "charity functions," where members of the royal family lined up the wealthiest guests and stared at them till they contributed.

The Shah himself calls degrees awarded by his country's universities "degrees of ignorance." Perhaps they are, considering the number of books banned in Iran today.

I've been told that Harvard acts on financial, rather than moral values. So, instead of editorializing that Harvard shouldn't support a repressive, corrupt, power-thirsty dictatorship like Iran's, I'll just say this: it seems to me that Harvard would do better to address itself to events right here in Cambridge, rather than to pour money, teaching time, and professor's lives into a high-risk investment like the Reza Shah Kabir University. Carol Petsonk