Call the Cops

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I agree with LeRoy Collins (Crimson 16 May) that the assault on a Harvard student by the non-Harvard "thug" at Tommy's Lunch last Saturday was reprehensible, and I admire the courage of the second Harvard student who intervened to defend the first. What I still don't understand, after hearing several accounts of the incident, is why the anger, indignation, sense of the need for action now, that people present felt at the time, did not result in a simple call to the Harvard police as soon as it became apparent (which must have been very early on) that violence was about to break out? Why did those present wait for the tension to rise to the point that lives were endangered before summoning the police?

There is no question that we all have a responsibility to change the society that produces such violence and to do it by making ourselves heard, as Mr. Collins has done, in conspicious ways. But are we not also responsible for smaller, more prosaic acts of responsibility such as making use of the existing structures designed by the University for the protection of its students from the ugliness of the outside world? Or is it that the use of such structures implies the counterrevolutionary concession that they exist? Peter Dale   Senior Tutor of Adams House