Henry D. Aiken, professor of Philosophy, has criticized McGeorge Bundy, special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, for his refusal to "acknowledge a special accountability" to the academic community on the subject of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

In a letter in this week's issue of time magazine, Aiken decried the chilliness and scorn" of a letter written by Bundy--and printed in Time (May 7) in which he rejected the invitation 127 faculty members to come to Washington University and answer their questions about Vietnam.

Aiken described Bundy as "more rapid than accurate, more facile than . . ." He said that the icy tone Bundy's refusal was a sign "of bureaucratic self-righteousness" resulting from prolonged "insulation" from the anxieties that Mr. Bundy's colleagues toward the foreign policies that he has helped shape in recent years."

In his letter to the Washington University professors, Bundy had doubted that their invitation to him had reflected great credit on its authors as a serious effort to engage in discussion."

"I do not understand," Bundy wrote, why a group of academic men, permeably careful students of the historical record, should frame a question about the elections on the premise that the in Hanoi might permit such elections in North Vietnam."

Regarding his obligations to the academic community, Bundy said he had supposed that in public service, "a former businessman was not especially accountable to business circles, a man from labor to the unions, or a professor university people. There is no reason why I should be especially accountable you, even on the uncertain assumption that you are truly representative of the academic community."