WHILE HARVARD lulled in the calm of slow change and little protest this past year, the world saw dramatic triumph for the people of Vietnam. Our focus was turned away from the important issues at Harvard when, after thirty years of relentless fighting--and twenty years when the United States was the enemy--the National Liberation Front marched into Saigon victorious in its longstanding struggle for independence. And in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge won in its fight against the corrupt Lon Nol regime after five years of fighting.

Peace in Indochina

THE VICTORY of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front was a victory, first of all, for the people of Vietnam. Last April, for the first time in two decades, Vietnam was rid of an American onslaught and free of a barrage of bombs unprecedented in the history of the world. The thousands of refugees spawned by 30 years of war--seeking escape from bombings, marches and retreats, free-fire zones and protective reaction strikes; or ripped untimely from their homes by "strategic hamlet" programs and "forced-draft urbanizations"--have begun to return. And the people of Vietnam will benefit from a government with wide popular support, committed to equality and to industrial and agricultural development.

The victory of the Vietnamese people in shaking off a hundred years of French colonialism and of the NLF in defeating the half million American troops sent to stop them must not now obscure our memories of Vietnam. The official American response--that we need not try to learn from Vietnam but must now look toward the future, and that there should be a moratorium on recriminations--must not be heeded. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's statement, that the U.S. should not help rebuild North Vietnam--a country he did as much as anyone to destroy--must be disregarded, and Congress should allocate reparation funds for war-ravaged Vietnam immediately.

Reconstruction is not simply a matter of discharging America's debt to Vietnam--the war brought too many beyond the reach of debtors and creditors. It is more a matter of earning the astonishing friendship so many Vietnamese have expressed towards an American people that--sometimes, as in the bombing of a neutral Cambodia, unknowingly--let its government commit barbarities in its name.

Most of all it is a way of celebrating the victory of the Vietnamese people. For whatever our presidents and Congressmen say, that victory is ours as well.

One of the lessons of Vietnam that Ford would like to ignore is that more than two decades of repression by a series of corrupt regimes supported by the U.S. could not stifle the will of the Vietnamese people. Even though more than a million people died as a result of the American policy, its failure spoke--more eloquently than any polemic against the PRG--for the inadequacy of terror as a political weapon.

U.S. support for Gen. Pinochet's junta in Chile shows that Ford refuses to learn this lesson. Portugal provides still another example of the will of the people, in the form of a revolution ending 45 years of Fascism, over-coming the will of a few in power. Programs of nationalization are a welcome step toward economic equality, and we support Portugal's progress toward democratic socialism.

Ford, just last week, identified Portugal in cold war terms as a "communist element" allied with "communist elements from the East." In almost the same breath, Ford presumed to grant on behalf of all Americans in the U.S. "recognition of Spain's significance as a friend and partner." Ford's alliance with Franco's fascist government only speaks for the blindness of his foreign policy to the democratic ideals they pretend to uphold.

One to One

HARVARD'S AND Radcliffe's move to so-called equal access admissions next year will only make a gradual progress toward equalizing the number of men and women in college. For all the fanfare by a year-long study of the issue by a blue ribbon committee, some serious questions still must be answered about Harvard and Radcliffe's version of equal access.

* If equal access is a move away from quotas and "an artificially constructed student body," why has Harvard essentially promised alumni and concerned men in its community that there will be little or no change in the present male admissions quota?

* If equal access is indeed the method by which Harvard and Radcliffe intend to increase the number of women undergraduates, why do even Radcliffe administrators concede that there will be little or no change in the number of women admitted over the next few years?

* If a united admissions office will be operated by both Harvard and Radcliffe, why will there be only one dean, appointed by Harvard's president?

Beneath all the rhetoric about equal access, one fact stands out; there will be no noticeable improvement in the present 2.3 to 1 male-female ratio for at least three more years.