Harvard Shies Away From the Saudis

The phone was installed yesterday.

In a small office in the 300 block of Brookline Ave. in Boston, University Associates Inc. in digging in.

The reason University Associates, a private academic consulting corporation, is renting space on Brookline Ave. is that Harvard University wouldn't allow University Associates to rent space at the School of Public Health just a few blocks away.

And the reason Harvard doesn't want to rent to University Associates is that the firm has so far only done consulting work with Saudi Arabia, a country whose religious restrictions on issuing visas make it an unacceptable client for Harvard.

President Bok explains that his standoffish policy on Saudi Arabia is strict enough that he does not want to be accused of sponsoring any consultant work there--even if that means telling Dr. Roger L. Nichols, president of University Associates and Given Professor of Microbiology, that the consulting group has to keep its distance.

And Bok's stance may have been vindicated by the difficulties other American universities, anxious to get Saudi petrodollars, have had trying to contract for medical or technical assistance consultant work while avoiding a sticky clause in the Saudi visa policy.

The Saudis refuse to admit any scientist who has worked in Israel or professed "Zionist" views, and reserve the right to deny visas to Jews.

MIT President Jerome Wiesner tried to hold the Saudis down to an agreement to allow any MIT personnel to come into the country to do consultant work on a $2 million study of water purification, but the Saudis backed out of the contract last week.

And at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, President Steven Muller has reportedly had trouble sealing an agreement to have Hopkins do a planning study for a medical school for Jedda, Saudi Arabia--again, the problem was the visas.

Muller is expected to name at least one Jew to a group of academics he will dispatch to Saudi Arabia, if only as a test case.

Dr. Carl E. Taylor, professor of international health at the Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, said this week that too much publicity about the visa question will only increase Saudi "paranoia" that it is the Jewish community that controls American universities.

Taylor is also a consultant to University Associates and says that rather than "boycott" Saudi Arabia, it is better to do consultant work for the country on its terms, "in the interest of peace."