'Administrative Harassment'

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Once again, the Spartacus Youth League (SYL), a socialist youth group, is the target of administrative harassment at Harvard. Last spring the administration forcibly evicted the SYL from its campus office. According to the Official Rules Handbook, authorized student organizations are allowed office space. Yet the Friends of the Spartacus Youth League was locked out of its office and had its literature seized. We were replaced by none other than the infamous Harvard Delivery News Service (one of whose directors has allegedly absconded with thousands of dollars in funds). Then last semester, after having been evicted for this alleged thief's benefit, the house co-master at Currier approached an SYL literature table, accused the SYL of being a "security risk" and threw us off the premises as if we were common criminals. This semester the administration has continued this campaign by harassing SYL literature distributors at the Kennedy School and Adams House. Equating Marxists with muggers is the type of vicious slander spewed by McCarthyites during the fifties. This is an attack on open political discussion and the democratic rights of everyone and must be protested.

It comes as no surprise that these attacks are happening now. Reagan sponsors brutal political repression through "friendship" with the likes of South Korea's Chun Doo Hwan, and lethal aid to the murdering junta in El Salvador. And on the home front, the racist "justice" in Greensboro set the stage for Reagan's America: it's open season on Blacks, workers and the left.

Far from being an ivory tower, Harvard is an important think-tank for U.S. imperialism, training such notables as war criminal Henry Kissinger. Harvard is also the home of Klitgaard, whose racist "admissions report" calls for Blacks to leave this enclave of wealthy white privilege. Here lies the reactionary hypocrisy of the Harvard administration: Marxists are "outside agitators" and "security risks" while real criminals like Brzezinski and Harold Brown--nuclear-armed cold-warriors who are genuine "security risks"--are welcome guests and paid to mouth their imperialist propaganda at Harvard. The Harvard administration may well despise the SYL for being communists, but the SYL will not tolerate harassment for the slanderous allegation that we are "criminals," "terrorists" or "security risks."

Communists are not the only ones under attack at Harvard. The administration has a history of harassing union organizers (also labeled "outside agitators") and is currently waging an anti-union campaign against District 65 in the medical area. In the early seventies the administration purged the Economics department of leftists and still consistently denies tenure to black and women professors. Even the students who wanted to see the movie Deep Throat last spring were not free from the administration's "protection" from the real world as they were subjected to a raid by the cops.

The harassment of the Spartacus Youth League is in this context. This is not a question of agreement with the political perspective of the SYL but a question of democratic rights. If the administration's harassment of the Marxist SYL is not protested, a dangerous precedent will be set to witchhunt every leftist, every union member, every Black, every minority on this campus. An injury to one is an injury to all.

The Harvard administration may think it operates in South Africa where the hated "pass law" system exists, but in fact, Bok, Epps, et. al. are privileged members of a bourgeois democracy where certain political freedoms are ostensibly tolerated--by law. The SYL fought and won a similar case of administration harassment at the University of Chicago, Circle Campus in 1977. The case against an "outside agitator" went to court and Federal Judge James B. Moran ruled that "the present regulations contain the implicit notion that university students must be nurtured in a controlled and protected environment if they are to blossom. The notion is incompatible with the First Amendment." As a socialist youth group, the SYL has the right to express its views and students have the right to investigate Marxist politics and dedicate themselves to the fight for socialism. This is not a privilege but a right which the SYL intends to keep. Everyone who is interested in free and open political discussion must join in combatting the administration's incipient witchhunt. Tom Gordon '83   Friends of the Spartacus Youth League