To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your news story on the Teaching Fellows organizational meeting of Wednesday, February 15, described the occasion as "tumultous." Indeed it was. However, the article did not discuss the early motion to limit severely the life and purpose of the group (I believe your reporter was not present at the time). After conceding that abuses existed in some departments, and regretting that those thus abused felt unable to fight sucessfully their own battles within their own departments, I moved that if a Federation of Teaching Fellows had to be formed, it should have a life of one calendar year and should exist for the sole purpose of canvassing every Teaching Fellow for his or her opinion of the situation. The results of such an objective and fair survey should be presented, with an appropriate statistical summary, to the university authorities in a year's turning.

Only a very small minority of those present voted in favor of this motion. It should, however, be noted that only a small minority of Teaching Fellows (less than 20 per cent) were present at the meeting, to which, according to the tenor of the letter sent to all Teaching Fellows the previous week only those already interested in forming a permanent organization had been invited. The great majority of Teaching Fellows apparently do not feel that they are sufficiently badly treated to warrant a stroll to Burr Hall on a pleasant spring-like evening.

If the Federation does succeed in quadrupling its membership and in achieving some kind of tolerably representative status, the implications of its "adversary" stance are grave. One can refuse to sign a petition, one can even refuse to accept any salary increment resulting from the unlikely success of such a petition, but one cannot easily halt the trend towards an industrial-type confrontation. Harvard becomes a factory, Teaching Fellows become machine operators, the undergraduates become sausages and the administration the evil board of directors. My great-great-grandfather, who organized the miners on the Radstock coalfield, must be turning in his grave at the sorry use to which the noble principles for which he fought are to be put by the newborn Teaching Fellows' Federation. It opted last night for a long, ineffective and unrepresentative life, rather than one which promised to be short, useful, fair, and perhaps even merry.

J. P. B. Lovell Teaching Fellow in General Education