Former South African newspaper editor Donald Woods yesterday told an audience of 40 freshmen that if Harvard is so immoral as to invest in South Africa it may as well try to "get a better financial return out of brothels and drugs."

Woods, who fled his country after the government placed him under a ban last October, advised the students to "intensify" their struggle against Harvard's moral and financial links to South Africa.

"You will be helping people for whom apartheid is not an academic issue, but a matter of life and death," he said.

"If the administration won't listen to students, find someone they'll listen to," Woods added, suggesting that students attempt to gain the public support of Sen. Edward Kennedy '54 (D.-Mass.) and of other influential alumni. "This University does not belong to the administration," he said.

The visiting Nieman Fellow said that Harvard should "absolutely" return the money given to the Kennedy School by the Engelhard Foundation, whose fortune comes from the South African gold mines. Referring to Charles Engelhard and "others like him," Woods said, "The wealth of South Africa was skimmed off by people who exploited it."

The outspoken critic of apartheid told the students that he has been travelling around the country "raising as much hell as I can."