"It's almost comforting to have the criticisms come from that side again," an administrator said last night. "If you had been in his place in those years, what party would you have joined?"
The Evans and Novak column also berates the Harvard Faculty for its torpor in responding to the terrorist threats, citing two specific examples:
"significantly," Evans and Novak claim, the CRIMSON's piece on terrorism "went unchallenged by either administration or faculty":
after a professor altered a course last Spring in response to student protest the Faculty is still "oblivious to the danger."
Lots of Response
The factual record suggests that Evans and Novak have misinterpreted both incidents. Conversations with Faculty members or a glance at recent CRIMSON letter columns show that the CRIMSON article did not go unchallenged. In fact, the "Defense of Terrorism" by Richard E. Hyland '69-4 provoked more dissenting letters than any other article of the past year.
Last Spring's incident also provoked Faculty response. On Feb. 7, Siegfried M. Bruening, visiting lecturer in Transportation, called off his plans to give a course in urban riot control after 85 black students staged a protest.
Within a week, more than 100 Faculty members had signed a letter urging the administration to safeguard academic freedom. Pusey responded with a letter of his own, and for the next month groups of students bought ads to support the "freedom of teaching" stand.
In discussing Hyland's piece, Evans and Novak suggest that it was the official "manifesto" of the CRIMSON. They identify Hyland-a member of the CRIMSON'S News Board-as "student editor," and they call his article "the CRIMSON's call for terrorism?"
In fact, the article was not "the CRIMSON's call" for anything, but the signed personal opinion of its author. The piece ran in a special supplement which contained another article by Hyland criticizing the Center for International Affairs, a response from an associate of the Center, and a more "objective" analysis of the Center by another CRIMSON member.
The CRIMSON did express an official opinion on terrorism. In an editorial on Sept. 26-the day after a group of people invaded the Center-the CRIMSON called the incident "a savage and infantile exercise in terrorism." Hyland's piece was originally planned as a personal disscut to that editorial policy.
Nowhere in their column, do Evans and Novak identify their source at Harvard. They say only that "a handful of thoughtful faculty members" feel "apprehension and melancholy," and that "a few faculty members (inappropriately labelled 'conservatives')" are the only group at Harvard opposing student radicals.
Neither of the columnists was available in Washington yesterday to answer questions about the piece.