Edward J. Logue, former head of the Boston Redevelopment Agency, yesterday urged Boston area institutions of higher learning to take the initiative in improving ghetto schools.

Urging the seniors at the Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises to rechannel their energies from Vietnam protest to domestic problem solving. Logue attacked white complacency in the area of urban redevelopment.

"It's time for an end to tokenism," he said in the Oration. "We better all start doing things we have no business doing to make things better."

Logue specifically requested universities to invest resources--financial and human--in the form of a contract with a ghetto school. The contact would include provision for recruitment to the ghetto schools, curriculum supervision and guidance.

Logue said the relevant government agencies--the Superintendent of Schools, the School Board ("now that one member has returned to the private practice of law--a salutary thing," he observed) and the Mayor--would cooperate, because they are all looking for help to solve the city's problems.

'Without You'

In the other presentation at the exercises in Sanders Theater yesterday, poetess Anne Sexton read "18 Days Without You" to symbolize he grief at the death of Robert Kennedy.

The poem expresses sorrowful reactions to John Kennedy's assassination ("We fell in love with a delicate breath. On the eve that great men called for death.") to the war in Vietnam (where "napalm is in the frying pan") and to the experiencing of personal loss.

Logue outlined three principal areas where action must be taken in heed of Riot Commission warnings to stop the United State's progress toward apartheid:

* The government must make use of tax incentives to lure private enterprise into creating ghetto job opportunities. The United States must make such investment so profitable that private industry is "scrambling for ghetto opportunities," he said.

* As has been done in Europe, Logue said the government must step in to provide low-cost, integrated housing in the suburbs as well as in the central city. "The lily-white suburbs," he said, "must open the doors."

* Education must be upgraded through massive interjection of white time and money. "The solutions to the problems of black America do not lie in the ghetto," he said. "They lie in white America."