Re: Confi Write-Up

The following letter refers to a write-up of Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson's Core offering, Foreign Cultures 46, `Caribbean Societies: Socio-Economic Change and Cultural Adaptations", that appeared in The Crimson's 1987-88 Confidential Guide to Courses.

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The Confi-Guide's red-baiting attack on me and my course on the Caribbean goes beyond all acceptable limits of journalistic behavior, including the most tongue-in-cheek forms of brat-journalism.

It is chauvinistic in the worst "ugly-American" sense in its crude mockery of the ritual language of one of the Black minority religions discussed in my course. I urge you to contemplate the reaction of the Harvard community to an article written by a Black West Indian student which began with a contemptuous jeering at the beliefs of the Jewish or Catholic faiths.

The diatribe also deliberately misquotes, and lifts out of context, a comment I made in a discussion of a complex subject, namely, the paradoxical relationship between British conservatism and the abolitionist movement during the eighteenth century. My discussion was not an attack on British conservatism--the paradoxical reationship is an established historical fact--and only the most ignorant kind of extremist could misinterpret what I said in the way your reviewer did.

Worst of all, the article is a McCarthyite smear of my intellectual and personal integrity. I am not a marxist. I deny it, not because I find the label offensive, but for the simple reason that I am not. There is a great tradition of marxist scholarship both here and in Europe, which has influenced me like many other scholars of all political leanings in my generation. However, while respecting and learning from this tradition of scholarship, I have long disagreed with most of its basic tenets. The most cursory reading of my works should make this clear to any but an idiot or a new right extremist. It would also show that I am not a mainstream liberal or a conservative, that indeed the only fitting label for me is that I am the world's first Pattersonist.

Not being a marxist, I have never belonged to a marxist or even a socialist party. If the author of your red-baiting article was troubled by the fact that I was a special advisor to Prime Minister Michael Manley he should have attended my highly critical lecture on the Manley regime. Better still, he should have been manly enough to ask me directly just what was the nature of my advice to the Prime Minister. This, too, is no secret, since I have published widely on the subject. There was really no need for the diatribist to have cornered one of my teaching assistants and prodded him on my political views. Such behavior is most unbecoming to a Harvard student, even one with extremist conservative views.

As with my lectures, the readings for my course provided a balanced mix of views from both American and Caribbean scholars with the overwhelming emphasis being on liberal to centrist academic writings. Ironically, the most important required text was by Eric Williams, the late, conservative Prime Minister of Trinidad, supplemented by an historical work by V.S. Nainaul, a political reactionary who is anathema to the Caribbean left. Only one of the required works was by a socialist, an English scholar who bent over backward to be fair.

The egregious swipe at my teaching assistants is the hardest part of the diatribe to fathom. All three were well prepared, lively, advanced graduate or law school students who enjoyed teaching the course. Whatever their faults, boring they were not; one was even strikingly beautiful. In the light of the diatribist's chauvinistic mockery of Afro-Caribbean religion I cannot help wondering whether his real problem with the teaching staff was the fact that they were all Black.

The article confirms the worst fears of those of us who sense a growing intolerance and resurgent McCarthyism in this society. Only this morning I received in the mail a campaign letter from Senator Howard Metzenbaum requesting support in his fight against a red-baiting smear directed at him by extremist elements in the Ohio Republican party. The Senator will no doubt be even more saddened to learn that a Harvard professor has suffered the same injury from one of his own students. Orlando Patterson