To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your issue of Wednesday, June 7, reprinting my broadcast with Bill Slater on the subject of education, together with your editorial comment, floated down to the foothills of the Berkshires, where I am currently engaged in a plot to take over American education. The issue interrupted me in the middle of plans that called for replacement of Mr. Conant with Gerald L. K. Smith.

The melodrama of your layout, the overweening nature of your analysis (e. g. running the broadcast under head "The Crime"; classifying my proposals as "most of the bad things that could happen to American education . . . run in space usually reserved for proof hacks, errors in grammar," etc) are engagingly representative of the emotive, superficial and desultory thinking that seems to characterize the mind trained at a university operating under your educational philosophy. And this is the mind which quite naturally resents any attempt at discipline or orientation on the part of educated and responsible elders who have had more extensive and apparently more fruitful experience in grappling with the problems of the world.

Just for the record: nowhere in my statement is to be found the suggestion that the student should not be allowed to explore alien philosophies of government or economy; nowhere do I indicate that the faculty should not be at liberty to indict and analyze deficiencies in American life; nowhere do I hint at an orthodoxy that should trammel the thinking of any faculty member who has a basic respect for Christianity and a free economy. If he has notions at complete variance with these latter, which are, to the best of my knowledge, considered by the trustees of Harvard, the vast majority of Harvard alumni, and myself to be of critical importance to a free America and to enlightened human thought and action, let him be treated as Harvard now treats let us say an avowed Communist or an anti-Semite (both exercising freedom of thought)--let him be dispatched on his way to an educational institution that is more liberal. William F. Buckley, Jr.,   Chairman, Yale Daily News, 1949.

(Our editorial said: "Mr. Buckley's broadcast is running as a "Crime" because it manages to advocate, in a compact 15 minutes, most of the bad things that could happen to American education. . . It calmly calls for student indoctrination, one-sided curricula, and alumni regulation of what a University may teach.")

Mr. Buckley denies that these measures would abrogate academic freedom. He says that "nowhere do I hint at an orthodoxy that should trammel the thinking of any faculty member who has a basic respect for Christianity and a free economy." There is where Buckley's "logically impregnable" position falls. For Buckley's conception of the basic nature of a "free economy" is just as much an orthodoxy as a party-line adherence to Communism. Adherence to Buckley's orthodoxy can trammel thinking quite as effectively as the "forces of socialism and atheism" which Buckley feared in his broadcast.

The CRIMSON fears Communism, with its abrogation of individual freedom. It equally fears the limiting of those freedoms in a Buckley-brand educational crusade against Communism. We feel that our own system can stand up well, without the ideological props Buckley seems to feel are necessary.