These critics go about their task in a way hauntingly familiar to an older generation. Their aim is to build a following for themselves. They would do this by sowing doubtsand suspicions. They hope then to attract sufficient support to be able to enforce demands on those whom they malign and designate as the enemy, using the old means of distortion, accusation, guilt imputed by association, and so on. And they thrive as people lend them credence.

Let me illustrate what I have in mind-During your freshman year this University experienced what I have been told was its first strike by employees. It was occasioned essentially by a contest for control between the leadership of two rival unions. But that is not the way it was reported in what I remember as one of the first of the scores of SDS propaganda leaflets to which we-all of us at Harvard-have since been continuously subjected.

In the view of the author of this early flyer the employees' strike was clear evidence of the University's mistreatment of its workers ("Harvard University uses scab labor and maintains oppressive working conditions"). You, the students, were called to a show of virtuous indignation to help set the grievous wrong right. And I remember certain young members of the faculty marched with the dissident students on this occasion.

The big lie let loose amongst us began then to take shape; that is, that the University is a hopelessly bigoted, reactionary force in our society which serves the interests of a hideous military-industrial complex by doing its chores and by intellectually emasculating the young entrusted to its care so as in time to turn them over as docile slaves to a contemptible "Establishment." It sounds a bit exaggerated I concede, but, as you can testify, this has been repeatedly asserted during your years in college.

In your sophomore year, you will recall for example, there was a considerable furor over who should or should not be permitted on campus to interview graduating students for possible jobs. The SDS, playing on a dissatisfaction widely held in our community, made an inflammatory issue out of the presence of a Dow recruiter on the campus, implying that his presence proved the University's insidious complicity in the hated war effort.

What should have been the issue, as was ultimately recognized, was the appropriateness of the Office of Graduate and Career Plans, which had been established and is maintained as a convenience to students seeking opportunities for employment or graduate study, and the validity or suitability of its procedures. Unless you are completely unlike the Harvard men who have gone before you, I doubt that any of you would ever want that office to confront you with an arbitrarily restricted list.

Last year among several egregious examples of distortion and misrepresentation designed to magnify indignation and sow distrust (I cite only two or three examples of a possible many) was the University's alleged "expansion." No attempt was made to understand or accurately report the University's building needs, activities or plans. These are many and complicated, but to our new critics, quite obviously, we were simply ruthlessly and senselessly exploiting the poor and the oppressed. The word "expansion" was then seized on as a slogan and chanted again and again in mindless fashion to confuse and defame, and beyond this, it was hoped, to impress the confused and by doing so to gain increased support.

THIS YEAR a major accusation has been the University's complicity with our nefarious government through the work-the very fine scholarly work, let me say in passing-of the Center for International Affairs. The fantastic unfairness-not to mention the ignorance-of this accusation is almost incredible to anyone who has made even a small effort to find out what the Center does in fact do.

Repeated efforts have been made to present the evidence in this and other cases for anyone who wishes to examine it, but apparently time for inquiry is short, and this being so, the accusations go on, the chants continue, and doubts conceivably grow. Sadly, a suspicion of this kind once implanted, as McCarthy knew, is dissipated, if at all, only in time and with the greatest difficulty.

One can read through all the leaflets circulated by these extremists who have dwelt among us in recent years, bent on slandering an institution it might have been assumed they would love, or lovingly find fault with, without discovering a single effort to clarify, to analyze, to explain or honestly to represent. Always they insinuate, distort, accuse, their aim being not to identify and correct real abuses, but always rather by crying alarm intentionally to arouse and inflame passions in order to build support for "nonnegotiable demands," and by this means, to enlarge their following and enhance their power. Clearly the old McCarthy technique is at work again, but this time-it is a sorrow to have to acknowledge it-by our own, and in our midst.

It is a shameful state of affairs. Nor is it made prettier by present growing tendencies to impose conformity. There is a broadening simplistic conviction among many in our community-in this case not just among the extremists-that there is a "right" way of looking at the various issues of these times and that non-agreement with this view is not to be tolerated.

Attempts are made to impose opinions by votes. Issues are of such importance that they and they alone must be of overriding concern to everyone. Meanwhile the most extreme ofour radical groups-like similar groups in all periods of history-have latterly moved on to a position where they unashamedly work to stifle dissent among their own members-that is to say, they have become less and less participatory, rather, more and more coercive, increasingly disdaining the rights of minorities within or without, and again like extreme rightist groups of other ages, advancing in righteous indignation, have now turned increasingly to violence and force. Ours has been a troubled situation.

LET ME give one more example to illustrate this new and growing tendency to enforce conformity, even among self-styled moderates, recalling that if there is anything which has always been distasteful to free men in the long course of history it is a loyalty or test oath of any kind. When the Congress undertook in 1958 to require such an oath of all those who were to receive funds under the student loan program of the National Defense Education Act a number of us within the world of academe contended with some success, after repeated efforts, to have this requirement removed. Now this kind of threat to freedom, motivated by a desire to impose conformity, grows among us.

A few weeks ago I received a letter from one of our graduate students. In its paragraph he deplored our Federal Administration's actions in Indochina and applauded his faculty's decision to enlighten academic obligations for those compelled by conscience to devote their time to war activity. It is hard to quarrel with this. But then he went on, and I quote: "Two important members of the Administration... are presently on leave from the faculty. I respectfully suggest that the Faculty immediately and publicly sever all the connections which these men have with Harvard. The fact the faculty contains many including perhaps yourself, who are personal friends [of these men] would only make more meaningful the faculty's and the University's condemnation of the Administration's actions. I hope to hear from you shortly."

The self-righteousness, the blind lack of concern for the rights and feelings of other human beings, the zealotry and opinionatedness of such a letter-above all in an academic community-are sickening to say the least.