Bok-Shocked

To the Editors of The Crimson:

After the Watergate crisis and the Vietnam War, President Bok stepped forth with a call to bring back a sense of ethics and morality into undergraduate education. We can presume that the title of one category of new Core Curriculum courses, Moral Reasoning, springs from that initiative. So also may his wife's commendable book on the ills springing from lying in public affairs.

Now, in the midst of the Harberger controversy, the same President Bok tells us that the quality of scholarship of an appointee is considered from "political, moral, or ideological considerations." My sense of snock is profound.

If Bok intended to make Harberger palatable to the university community, he would have done much better to attempt to argue that his politics, morality, and ideology were reasonably civilized. And if he wanted to demonstrate that he is capable of running a prestigious university, he ought to have given some clue that he has heard of such a quality as intellectual integrity, which most people consider to be part of personal morality. I suggest that he now retire to the drawing board and think again about just what "Veritas" is all about, and in the meantime entrust the running of the university to his most morally incorruptible assistant.

Beyond this, I would suggest that the instances in the history of human thought where personal moral integrity bears a causal relationship to the discovery of important truth are legion. The same is true in "belles letters" and perhaps also in visual arts. The problem is not merely to find "excellence," as John Silber puts it, but to define what "excellence" is. Humanity is general seems to think that excellent scholarship has something to do with meeting the needs of the world's unfortunate and underprivileged people. Academic administrators in the Boston area increasingly seem to feel instead that it involves mainly promoting the interests of the privileged few, no matter how many may suffer in the process. Douglas Kohler