Harvard's Rule Of Unreason

SEVERAL HUNDRED lawless students at Harvard have accomplished what the virulently illiberal forces of the late Senator McCarthy failed to achieve. They have disrupted and suspended the historic rule of reason and academic freedom without which Harvard could never have become the symbol of the nation's quest for intellectual integrity and excellence....

The record of Harvard's readiness to listen to--and act on--demands for change is persuasive evident that the student confrontation was wilfully (sic) sought, not to reform but to destroy. In every area from the institution of a pioneering major in Afro-American studies to termination of academic credit for membership in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, Harvard showed not only an awareness of the need for change but did change....

The time has clearly come to stop pretending that the disruptions are adolescent pranks or justifiable excesses of young idealists. What is at stake now is nothing less that the perpetuating of universities as centers of reason in a free society. To permit them to be paralyzed or subverted by any lawless, coercive force of whatever ideology or objective is to give up on the survival of free society itself. --The New York TIMES