JOCULAR EXCHANGE

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Time reports (Dec. 4) a "jocular exchange" between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger:

"My dear Henry, when our talks are completed, can you arrange a position for me as a visiting professor of Marxism at Harvard?"

"With pleasure. But of course. I must be permitted to teach a course in political science in Hanoi."

Professor Kissinger's opinions are well known, Le Duc Tho's are not. As Olivier Todd notes (Le Nouvel Observateur, Nov. 27), the North Vietnamese are now struggling with a hard choice between "socialism open to the whole world (and) Marxism-Leninism shut in upon itself... It will soon be known whether thirty years of war will produce an authoritarian state, stiffened into its war communism, or--at last--a state combining socialism and democracy." In that choice America, and in particular Harvard, cannot avoid being implicated.

Already Harvard's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is collaborating with the Hanoi Faculty of Medicine in research into the relationship between dioxide (present in defoliants) and liver cancer. Whatever the State Department may think, there ought to be academic exchanges between Cambridge and Hanoi. I hope that Harvard will take the initiative. David Derrance, '50