The following letters were received in connection with the campaign by the Harvard "Veritas" Committee against the appointment of J. Robert Oppenheimer '26 as William James lecturer. The Committee, which consist of 8 alumni from New York and Boston, has sent out some 10,000 letters to selected graduates in an attempt to gain their support toward forcing a reconsideration of the appointment. Although exact figures are not available, the communications below indicate opposition to the campaign among alumni and others. Sheehan's and Representative Donlan's are the only recent letters against Oppenheimer's lectureship.

Discredited Banner of McCarthyism

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I don't know whether the efforts of the so-called Harvard "Veritas" Committee, which is trying to interfere in the selection of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer to give the 1957 William James lectures, have made much of a splash in the CRIMSON's pages as yet. It seems to me a significant matter which should receive editorial attention.

You are doubtless aware that the "Committee" has recently mailed (I suppose to all alumni) a lengthy letter with two enclosures, on this subject. It appears to be a reasonably well-organized effort to launch some sort of "alumni probe" into suspected subversive influence in the Yard.

I hope that my reply, a copy of which is enclosed (following), is typical of the reactions of the student body and of most alumni.

Harvard "Veritas" Committee

Gentlemen:

I hasten to reply to your bulky communication concerning Dr. Oppenheimer's appointment to give the 1957 William James lectures at Harvard.

Let me say first that I would not have chosen Dr. Oppenheimer, had I been the one to make the choice. There is a clear need for the scientists, who so control our lives these days, to think and speak on a philosophical as well as a scientific level, for they may know best the awesome problems with which current philosophical thought must contend. Still, a scientist other than Oppenheimer might well have been chosen for the honor of grappling with these problems in the William James lectures.

But that question is not the issue you raise, as I see it. You disavow any intent to criticize the Harvard administration or to interfere with its usual processes of selection of teachers, speakers, subject matter, etc. But your activities amount to just such criticism and interference, and nothing else.

But your activities amount to just such criticism and interference, and nothing else.

It is the dirty and discredited banner of McCarthyism which you are trying to raise anew, clothed in the honored respectability of the Harvard University motto. What you are doing seems to me bad for Harvard and for our country. I don't like it, gentlemen. Count me out. Walter B. Raushenbush '50

Wish I Could Hear Him

Harvard "Veritas" Committee