Condemnation

To the Editors of The Crimson:

We write to condemn the intellectually shameful decision by Mr. Muhammad Kenyatta and the Harvard Black Law Students Association (BALSA) to thumb their nose at the norms that must govern discourse at this or any other university-the norms of free speech and fairness.

The ugliness of Mr. Kenyatta's behavior, cowardly acquiesced in by Afro-American students associated with BALSA, is especially shocking, in light of Black Americans long and bitter experience with racist victimization and brutalization. It is hard to believe that Mr. Kenyatta's and BALSA's knowledge of this experience is so shallow and unsophisticated that they could transform the occasion of the PLO's UN representative's talk into one of the vilest assaults on the norms of fairness and free speech to occur at Harvard in many years.

This frightening event should make us all less complacent about our relief that the experience of victimized groups in modern society groups like Blacks, Jews, Irish. Armenians, Palestinians, etc, is an automatic guarantee that such groups will themselves respect and uphold the norms of civility and fairness. These precious and Fragile norms must be learned, actively nurtured, and vigilantly defended. This is the only way they will ever endure.

That Mr. Kenxatta and BALSA could violate fairness and free speech for Jewish students indicates further their crass indifference to the unfortunate cleavage in national politics between some Jews and some Blacks, stemming in part from Rev. Jesse Jackson's irresponsible "Hymie" remark and from Rev. Louis Farrakan's idiotic comment on Hitler's "greatness." Whether Mr. Kenyatta and BALSA recognize it or not, such events at Harvard University are events "in-a-fishbowl"--readily transmitted by the media to the country as a whole, and thus subject to becoming fuel to a fire capable of getting out of control. The immaturity and irresponsibility of Muhammad Kenyatta's behavior is quite unbelievable.

Finally, we are fully in agreement with Prof. Alan Dershowitz's request to President Derek Bok and Harvard Law School officials that they immediately condemn and censure Muhammad Kenyatta and BALSA for their violation of the rules of fairness and free speech in our community. Martin Kilson   Professor of Government   Orlando Patterson   Professor of Sociology