Harberger's Friends

To the Editors of The Crimson:

At Sunday's panel discussion of his economics, Professor Harberger offered an explanation for his involvement with the Chilean government which invites further reflection about the wisdom of offering him an appointment.

Professor Harberger told us, as he had told The Crimson earlier, that it was loyalty to a large group of friends, his former students, which took him to Chile after these friends had become important officials of the Pinochet regime. If Professor Harberger's loyalty to his friends is really as great as he claims, then it can be safely inferred that moving from Chicago to Cambridge will not diminish the strength of this feeling. And this means that Harberger's friends will become our friends, whether we like it or not.

It is not hard to imagine what Harberger's loyalty to his friends will do to Harvard's relationship with the Chilean government: it will create one where none existed. Transcontinental phone calls will be placed on Harvard's account, travel vouchers will be issued for trips to Santiago, and high officials of the Chilean government will come to Harvard as honored guests of the Harvard Institute for International Development. Through the weekly, perhaps daily, exchanges between Cambridge and Santiago which Harberger's loyalty to his friends will require, Harvard and the junta will grow closer.

We cannot think that this can do Harvard any good. University faculties are rightly loyal to diversity and to a colleague's right to say and do unpopular things. But Professor Harberger is not yet a colleague of anyone on the Harvard faculty. So the Harvard faculty must think about other things to which universities and their faculties are loyal: open-mindedness, civility and thoughtful discussion and resolution of intellectual issues. Harberger insists that he is loyal to these things, too, and it seems hard to doubt his sincerity on the matter.

But his friends, of whom perhaps we will be seeing a great deal if Harberger comes to Harvard, cannot be called loyal to those things to which American universities are loyal. Harberger's friends are loyal to institutionalized barbarianism. They are loyal to a clique of bloody-minded military officers which mounted an horrific reign of terror against the Chilean people (in summer 1973, the conservative Chilean daily El Mercurio called for an "Indonesian solution" to Chile's political conflicts--that is very nearly what Chile got), and which today rules without the slightest regard for the institutional and legal safeguards of civilized and liberal nations. This clique even sent its secret police in September 1976 to Washington, D.C., a city dedicated to political decency, in order to arrange for the assassination of a prominent Chilean exile and his American assistant, this only a few hundred feet away from the entrance to the Chilean Embassy, an event unparalleled in the history of that city.

It is not so much Harberger as his friends whom we should object to. For with friends like Harberger's around, it does not seem that Harvard will have to look far to find enemies. Richard Valelly   Kenneth Finegold   Joseph Singer