A mysterious fire on the Stanford campus yesterday damaged the office of John Rawls, a Harvard professor of Philosophy who is on leave this year, but his academic material was saved.
Four firebombs were tossed at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences around 5 a.m. Two started fires which did more than $50.000 damage.
At 1 a.m. yesterday. police had charged the Old Union building, which a group of students were occupying in an anti-ROTC protest. Police arrested 22 demonstrators, but about 100 escaped and rampaged through the campus breaking windows and setting minor fires.
Rawls, who is at Stanford to write a book on moral philosophy, was awakened at 6 a.m. yesterday by a Center official and told all his notes had been destroyed. "But I didn't lose a thing," he said last night.
Three nearby offices were badly burned; Rawls said an anthropologist lost several years of his work.