This "slow, inefficient" system protects people like me against people like you; and (though you don't realize it) protects innocents like you against those "reactionary...fascist forces" you fear: They, like you, prefer "action to talk." As for "security"--at what price? The most "secure" of human institutions is a prison; would you choose to live in one?

You want "a society in which the young speak their minds against the Establishment." Where have the young more freely, recklessly and intransigently attacked "the Establishment"? (Every political order has one.) Wherever "our heroes--Marx, Mao, Che" have prevailed, students, writers, teachers, scientists have been punished with hard labor or death--for what? For their opinions. Where but in "fake democracies" are mass demonstrations possible, or your bitter (and legitimate) dissent televised?

You rail against "leaders crazed with power," who "deceive the people." Your leaders are self-dramatizers who demand that power, which would craze them, and they deceive you in not telling you how they plan your "confrontations"--to force the police to use force, whose excesses I hate more than you do. I, unlike you, want no one put "up against the wall." No "cheap politician more cynically deceived you than fanatical militants did--and will. Your support feeds their neurotic (because extremist) needs. Washington's "'Non-Violent' Co-ordinating Committee" has engaged in gunfire for three days as I write this.

You say Marcuse "show that capitalist freedom actually enslaved." (He doesn't "show"--he only say.) He certainly does not sound enslaved. And does mouthing fragments for 19th-century ideology (Marx, Bakunin) really liberate? And in not Marcuse 40 years "older that 30," your cutoff on credibility? Incidentally, would you trust your life to a surgeon under 30--who never finished medical school?

Your irrationality makes me wonder how you were ever admitted into Columbia. You confuse rhetoric with reasoning. Assertions are not facts. Passion is no substitute for knowledge. Slogans are not solutions. Your idealism takes no brains. And when you dismiss our differences with contempt, you become contemptible. Very sincerely yours,   LEO ROSTEN

P.S. Please don't take any more courses in sociology, which seduces the immature into thinking they understand a problem if they discuss it in polysyllables. Jargon is not insight. Vocabulary is the opiate of radicals.