NO SWITCH BY DOTY

To the Editors of The Harvard CRIMSON:

The decision which the Faculty faces on Tuesday with respect to the Vietnam War Motion may be of such consequence that I should like to corrcet before hand some misrepresentations of my own involvement in the issue. During the discussions of the past week I withheld my support until a clearly worded statement could be agreed upon. The statement of the Motion published in the CRIMSON on Friday met most of my objections and I can support it.

At the same time I insisted that no faculty member should be coerced in any way into supporting or rejecting such a motion if he did not choose to express his attitude on the War in this manner. Indeed I had suggested that a prior vote might be taken on the appropriateness of considering this issue. On Thursday I was asked to join a group of about 20 in discussing ways of permitting faculty members who did not wish to participate in such a vote to do so and I agreed. Since then, however, I have had no contact with such a group or any of its members. Consequently, I was surprised to learn that a document proposing a faculty committee on the expression of political opinion and bearing my name was being discussed and published in part in the CRIMSON. Any attempt to institutionalize political discussion in the faculty seems to me unwise and uncalled for.

That a willingness to join in discussing the problem was quickly escalated into the supporting of a detailed proposal without my being consulted may have been due to some kind of misunderstanding. But then to find reported in the Saturday Boston Globe that I had "switched twice" suggested that perhaps a more deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position was involved. While I am not at all adverse to changing my position as a political process unfolds and gives cause, this simply has not occurred in this instance-neither once nor twice.