Dignitaries Deserve Respect

To the editors:

What would you do if the Secretary-General of the United Nations came to Harvard to speak? Before today, I thought students here would give him the respect a well-respected world leader deserved. Kofi Annan's speech was met with warm feelings and multiple standing ovations.

Unfortunately, it was also met with the kind of action you would expect from a first-year trying to get out of an Ec 10 lecture to secure a good spot in the lunch line. Students started leaving Sanders Theatre while President Rudenstine was speaking and well before Annan had left the stage.

It is a mystery to me what could have been so important to those students that they couldn't have waited five more minutes so as not to treat our esteemed guest as a mere professor. NEIL R. BROWN '01   Sept. 17, 1998