DEAN WATSON AND THE SOCIALISTS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Having spent my undergraduate days roaming from one provincial university to another, I am no longer shocked when a college administrator shows by illmanered remarks that he believes human dignity to be something which one finds, certainly in wealthy alumni, perhaps in student officers of powerful campus organizations, but never in student representatives of protest groups whose activities might tarnish the school's bright silver name. But surely the CRIMSON has misquoted Dean Watson on the subject of Mary Gillmors and the Harvard-Radcliffe Socialist Club. Surely a Harvard faculty committee is not planning a rule change to insure that "there wont be any more Mary Gillmors."' Such a statement would indicate lack of good sense, to say nothing of grace.

Already possessing the right to regulate the membership of student organizations with regard to race and university status, the administration now proposes to tell these groups which of their members may be elected officers. Although this restriction may have some merit for groups organized for the purpose of giving undergraduates, in Dean Watson's words, "their fling," the Harvard-Radcliffe Socialist Club impresses me as a serious group of undergraduate and graduate and special students concerned in their own way with the fundamental problems of American society. In the context of a political activist organization Dean Watson's remarks seem simply irrelevant.

But the apparently personal nature of his harassment is disquieting even to those for whom in principle it does not seem entirely unreasonable. He was evidently not acting according to rules set up by a faculty committee but attempted to depose Miss Gillmor ad hoc on the basis of a projected change in rules: and the whole tone of his treatment of her, up to and including his dismissal of her protests as mere publicity-seeking, raises the most disturbing suspicions. Perhaps such treatment of a duly elected officer of a university organization deserves a certain amount of publicity. David Wade Chambers   Resident Tutor in History of Science