SUPPORTING SFAC ON RECRUITMENT

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

As someone who voted for the provision discussed in your editorial, "Open Recruiting?" of May 27, as well as for the still more complicated (and defeated) third proposal of the Student-Faculty Advisory Council, I thought it might perhaps be clarifying if I explained why, though I believe in completely open recruiting and distrust debates, I voted for measures I did not like. I did so because I was aware of the feeling of many students that the University as host was also their host, and because I prefer parliamentary procedures--whose very value may lie in a certain cumbersomeness--both to physical obstruction and to that kind of picketing that is supposed to be peaceful when it is often in fact coercive. My general attitude is that committees should be supported unless they are clearly wrong, and perhaps especially so with student-faculty committees with an inchoate mandate. Hence I was willing to allow a trial of that committee's proposals, even though I found all but the first distasteful.

I do not think that people should be required to debate in order to have a right to recruit at Harvard, for the proposal may encourage the glib and inhibit the different--and not at all the dishonest. And I continue to belive that students should fight the evils of society directly in the society, as a great many have done and are doing now, taking universities and even Harvard with less solemnity as the measure of all ideals, the forum for all polemics. David Riesman '31   Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences