Avoiding Debate

AS THEY WORK on plans for the proposed W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, members of the DuBois Advisory Board should remain flexible and open to the suggestions of many groups at Harvard and in the community. Instead, Andrew F. Brimmer, chairman of the board, has issued a hastily written, ill-conceived reply to proposals submitted by the DuBois Institute Student Coalition. Brimmer's letter is a vain attempt to shield the board from debate and potential controversy.

One of the students' major proposals is that the DuBois Institute should have ties to the black community, both through seminars and colloquia open to the public and through socially relevant, research projects. In flatly rejecting this concept. Brimmer and the advisory board are accepting an outmoded Harvard ideal of the isolated academic, studying the world from an ivory tower. This ideal is now totally unrealistic--in most departments, academics shuttle between the University and the "real world."

It is unpractical and wrong to structure the DuBois Institute around this outmoded concept of academia. While there is an important need for scholarly work in Afro-American Studies, the Institute should be open to researchers who will not isolate themselves from the current social and political issues affected by their work.

The student coalition's proposal for strong ties between the DuBois Institute and the Afro-American Studies Department is also both more practical and more likely to promote quality research than the advisory board's plan.

While members of the board took a proper first step in saying that representatives from the Afro Department should be appointed to the advisory board, their continued insistence that the DuBois Institute, as a graduate research institute, should have no ties to the undergraduate department is unrealistic. The students are right to insist that two bodies, both concerned with studying Afro-Americans, should not be artificially isolated within the University. Both groups would lose in such a situation.

Brimmer did an additional injustice to the students by issuing his reply in a haphazard, derogatory manner. After six weeks of silence on the proposals, he hurriedly replied only after the student coalition led 130 picketers in a demonstration outside Mass Hall--even then his reply, a letter addressed to the students, was released at a press conference before it was mailed to the coalition leaders.

The advisory board should meet with members of the coalition to discuss the students carefully, researched proposals, and work to open a dialogue on all plans for the DuBois Institute, rather than ignore and insult the undergraduates. In the attempt to avoid debate and controversy, the advisory board has unnecessarily limited the scope and validity of its project.