Hypodermic Hype

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION William J. Bennett last week told an audience in Dallas that the Harvard administration's relatively benign attitude toward undergraduate drug use is "unconscionable." Basing his assertions upon a trio of articles in The Crimson, Bennett called Harvard's stance on drugs "a violation, an offense to everything higher education stands for."

In a speech at Harvard in October, Bennett outlined a simplistic and dangerous vision of higher education in which the job of universities was to impart narrow concepts of Western morality to their students. With his Dallas speech, he has gone a step further: he would also like to see college administrators actively enforce those values and seek to regulate the personal lives of their students.

What is confusing about his latest outburst is that The Crimson articles indicate, if anything, that the level of drug use at Harvard falls below that at other campuses. Confusing, but not surprising. Spokesmen for the Reagan Administration would have us believe that drugs are the cause of all that is wrong in America and are quick to raise it as a red herring to draw attention away from other problems.

And if drugs epitomize evil to the Administration in general, Harvard seems to personify all that ails education to Bennett in particular. Two years ago he said he'd rather give his son money to start a business than tuition to go to Harvard. Two months ago in his speech at Sanders theatre he attacked Harvard's Core Curriculum.

It is bad enough that the secretary, a 1971 graduate of the Law School, consistently uses Harvard's good name to bring attention to himself and his wacky proposals. What is worse is when he does so in the service of ideas that betray an ignorance of what higher education is all about and the ways members of an intellectual community--any community, actually--ought to conduct themselves.

Bennett aside, the University's hands-off policy on drugs is both right and practical. Drugs are illegal, but students don't give up their rights to privacy when they attend college. That doesn't mean that college administrators should or do support or condone drug use, nor that universities should stand idly by and let student drug abusers kill themselves.

It does mean, though, that what students do in their own rooms is their own business. It's not for Derek Bok, Fred Jewett, Archie Epps or--least of all--William Bennett to say otherwise. Drug use scores low on the list of pressing problems facing higher education. America's colleges and universities would be better served if its representative in the cabinet channelled his energies toward those problems instead of ranting and raving to draw attention to himself and his noxious ideas.