To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

What in the world has gotten into the students of Harvard? I note in the Christian Science Monitor of April 9 that (a) the Law School Forum has cancelled the participation in a debate of Howard Fast, the Communist novelist, and (b) some other unnamed organization has cancelled a film starring Paul Robeson, the Communist actor. What are the students so frightened about? Is their faith in themselves and in democracy so feeble that they fear subversion from the dreary imbecilities of Howard Fast or from the cavortings of Paul Robeson as the Emperor Jones?

A year ago I had a no-quarter debate with Howard Fast before the Yale Political Union. I am happy to report that the Yale undergraduates seem to have survived the sight of Mr. Fast without fatal contamination; that their sharp and intelligent questions showed how clearly they saw through his arguments; and that they felt by a whopping majority that the anti-Communist side had the best of the debate. I can add that Mr. Fast said nothing that evening that my ten year old son could not handle on a bad day (and I suspect that Mr. Robeson impersonating the Emperor Jones would hardly be a danger to my four year old). What has happened to this generation of Harvard men that they should flee in panic before such hopeless bores as the Fasts and the Robesons?

I gather that in these cases the students ated on their own, without orders or even hints from the faculty. It is a stirring commentary on the courage of this new generation that the faculties and governing bodies of a university should be more in favor of free speech than the students.

Four years ago, when the Communist agent Gerhart Eisler spoke at Harvard, Dean W. J. Bender said, "The world is full of dangerous ideas, and we are both naive and stupid if we believe that the way to prepare intelligent young men to face the world is to try to protect them from such ideas when they are in college. Four years spent in an insulated nursery will produce gullible innocents, not tough-minded realists. . . . If Harvard students can be corrupted by an Eisler, Harvard College had better shut down as an educational institution."

Eisler was at least a top party dialectician, and Harvard survived. Now the students refuse to expose themselves to second-rate actors and third-rate novelists. What am I to say to my friends in New Haven, who took Howard Fast a year ago without scuttling and running, when they ask what is frightening the students at Cambridge?

I ask again: what are Harvard men so scared about? Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 38