SDS and PL can persuasively attack the University for complicity in imperialism at home and abroad because the University has instrumentalized itself. It has said that moral judgments are irrelevant, that research is value-free, that the wanton slaughter of Orientals is less important than the niceties of free speech. Such is the sickness of "pure rationality." The University produces Walt Rostows. Henry Kissingers, McGeorge Bundys. It can carry on its affairs with a president who refuses to see undergraduates, and a dean who blithely and automatically reduces emotionally-charged issues such as equal sex admissions to an abstract discussion of "relative pain levels." The problem, however, and we must be very clear about this, is not single persons, for these people merely embody the characteristics which our educational system, and our society, select for. The problem is fully systematic; the Dump Nixon movement will be no more successful in putting an end to the war than was the Dump LBJ movement.

The response on the Right to the rising tide of protest to our debilitating educational system is to call for ever greater restrictions, for "law and order," and for ever greater elitism. ("Let those who are not here for scholarship leave, or be expelled.") This is the plaint of those so successfully socialized into the system that they have but one morbid fear: disorder. It doesn't matter how morally repugnant your actions are, they are acceptable as long as you keep them orderly and through proper channels. This is a pathological attitude, and the University suffers from it. It elevates rationality to extravagant heights, presuming that personal commitment, emotions, creativity and subjectivity can safely be ignored, allowed to languish, and be suppressed, and that you can have a meritocratic system based exclusively on analytic abilities and competitiveness without creating warped "successes." While we may not all be "Henry Kissingers on the make." in one way or another we personify similar characteristics.

Competition lies at the core of the problem. From the very beginning American culture has been afflicted with the contradiction between a meritocracy and an egalitarian society. As long as a meritocratic system founded on the exclusively "rational" values remains, and Harvard embodies the epitome of that system, order-obsessed, threatened, and emotionally-crippled men will continue to lead this country. We must begin immediately to redefine our conception of success to include the long neglected subjective values: actions from and with ideas and direct experience, organic growth of interest and competence instead of forced, arbitrary progression (Pass/Fail, General Education majors, guidelines rather than requirements). Harvard must get out of the business of fostering and producing emotional and moral defectives. Even further, we must put an end to competition itself, to the whole idea of a meritocracy of any kind, no matter how inclusively defined. Competition excludes community, and there is precious little community in this University or in this society. The whole concept of a meritocracy, that someone is better than someone else and is therefore entitled to more of the goods of society, must be recognized for the illegitimate notion that it is.

You can always tell a Harvard man. He has repressed enough of himself to become a member of the intellectual elite.