BACK WHEN the White House was Harvard's, the first "advisors" were sent to Vietnam.

Intellectuals today righteously denounce President Johnson and America's foreign policy in Southeast Asia.

But some of the more perceptive remember that one of the principal architects of our Vietnam policy was a former dean of the faculty at Harvard, McGeorge Bundy. These men are expressing their feelings in books like The Dissenting Academy, a collection of articles edited by Theodore Roszak.

To Roszak and others, the Vietnam war has uncovered long-standing failings of the academic community.

Roszak, chairman of the History of Western Culture program at California State College, said that "until the recent rash of campus protest related to the Vietnam war, nothing has so characterized the American academic as a condition of entrenched social irrelevance, so highly developed that it would be comic if it were not sufficiently serious in its implications to stand condemned as an act of criminal delinquency."

Intellectuals are challenging their own integrity. Where were they when John Kennedy was President? What did they say then? Has political science given the right answers? Has it raised the right questions? Have academics provided sufficient and relevant comment on today's issues?

Even the stolid American Political Science Association has reacted to C. Wright Mills' charge that political scientists are nothing but "the utensils of history makers."

The Caucus for a New Political Science, an APSA committee chaired by Harvard graduate student Sanford Levinson, will report on this problem to the association's September convention in Washington.

"Dismal Politics"

Levinson contends that political science lacks relevance to contemporary issues. "Just pick up any recent issue of the American Political Science Review. You'll be lucky to find even one article on Vietnam or civil rights. Who wants to read about the cultural patterns of some village in northern India?" Levinson said in a CRIMSON interview.

"Political Science cannot ignore the issues of our time. It is the moral responsibility of political scientists to address themselves to the questions our society needs answered," Levinson said.

Levinson wants his committee to outline what the nature of political science should be.

Some thoughtful consideration of just this problem was provided in Christian Bay's article, "The Cheerful Science of Dismal Politics," in The Dissenting Academy.

Bay, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, wrote that social scientists of today are efficient at their trade, but that their trade does not demand enough of them.

"Responsible social scientists must also demand of themselves something more, which may be called substantive rationality, . . . the requirement that ends should be as rigorously articulated and tested as are, in political science at its current best, the proposed means to those ends," Bay said.