Second, we at Campaign GM will gladly relinquish our role in the selection process, if a better process is suggested. The Committee on Corporate Responsibility is too important to be jettisoned simply because of the difficulties in selecting its members.

We believe that every responsible shareholder should support our proposals. In particular we would expect support from MIT. This university, after all, is dedicated to making institutions and technology serve society. And that is precisely what Campaign GM is all about. We are trying to make a significant American institution-the giant corporation-and a significant technology-the technology of the automobile-benefit rather than harm this country.

University Non-Involvement

I have heard some objections to university support for Campaign GM. The first arguments goes like this: Universities are primarily concerned with education and research: they should not get involved in battles in volving their relatively unimportant role as shareholders.

I agree that MIT is primarily concerned with education and research. But it has secondary roles which it must perform responsibly. For example. MIT is an employer-of professors, secretaries, janitors. Surely MIT could not say that since being an employer is not its primary function it is free to discriminate in hiring or pay abnormally low wages. Similarly. MIT is a shareholder, and even though this is a secondary role for the university, the university must behave responsibly. It must vote its share in the public interest.

I have heard another objection to MIT's support for us and I have heard it from leading figures on this campus. "Look" they say, "you have to remember that GM gives a great deal of money to MIT and also that Dr. Killian, who may be personally sympathetic to you, is on the GM Board of Directors and is under a lot of pressure."

Of course. I understand this argument. But I cannot accept it. I would like to point out that MIT also gets a great deal of money from the Federal Government and that many MIT figures have served or hope to serve in the Federal Government. But does this mean that MIt people, collectively or individually, are barred from criticizing the Vietnamese War, or the deployment of ABM or the Administration's Southern Strategy. Of course not.

And if MIT is free to criticize the Federal Government, it must also be free to criticize General Motors, Academic Freedom is indivisible.

In closing. I would like to say only this. In the last decade we have been made painfully aware of the shortcomings in our society-our racism, our excessive feliance on military force, our rape of the environment, Naturally, therefore one of the leading institutions in our society are being challenged and attacked.

Some of the attacks take the most primitive forms-bombing and killing. We are following a different route. We are using reasoned argument and legal process the very methods which our major institutions say they respect. And many Americans will be watching to see how these institutions respond to us.

The time of testing is here. Our challenge to GM is based on irrefutable evidence and is being made in a manner which the dominant institutions in this society purport to endorse. I do not see, therefore, how any responsible institution in this country can, in good conscience, vote against us. Nor, frankly, do I see how any responsible institution in this country can afford to vote against us.