After a cooling down period since the late 1960s, American universities around 1982 began to be plagued again by student hecklers. To name a few of the more prominent incidents:

*at Brown, in October, 1981, 13 students attending an Alumnae Hall speech by CIA Director William J. Casey began reciting the "Jabberwocky" poem by Lewis Carroll, interrupting Casey's speech. The Jabberwocky 13, as they came to be known, were reprimanded by the administration, but not formally punished.

*at Stanford in 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger '38 had to battle with protestors screaming and banging on the windows of Kresge Auditorium as he spoke. With difficulty, Weinberger managed to get the speech off.

*at Smith, United Nations Ambassador Jeane E. Kirkpatrick was invited to be the 1982 commencement speaker, but voluntarily declined after a variety of student groups protested her planned appearance.

*at Berkeley on February 15, 1983, Kirkpatrick was shouted down by Berkeley's Students Against Intervention in El Salvador while giving a speech to a packed crowd of more than 900 at Wheeler Auditorium. Kirkpatrick was forced to leave the stage, but later returned to finish her speech. There was no administrative punishment for students involved.

*at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School last March 20, Nobel-Prize winning economist Lawrence Klein was giving an introductory economics lecture when three followers of political guru Lyndon LaRouche burst in, accusing Klein of Nazism and genocide. Klein responded, "I insist that you are a bunch of screwballs, and would you please get out," and university police arrived and evicted the LaRouchites. Two weeks later, the South African ambassador to the United States was scheduled to come to Penn to speak on apartheid, but opted out when members of the eight-group United Minorities Council threatened a mass demonstration.

President Bok, in his open letter on free speech issued last Friday, writes that all those incidents weighed heavily in his decision to sit down at the typewriter.

The issue had also begun to appear closer to home. Two years ago, speeches by a Palestine Liberation Organization representative and by the Rev. Jerry Falwell were disrupted by demontsrators.

Last year, at the Law School, members of the Black Law Students Association refused to allow Jews in the audience at a speech by a Palestine Liberation Organization representative to ask questions. But what seems to have tipped the scale was the Caspar Weinberger disaster.

When Weinberger came to speak to some 1200 people at the Law School Forum last November 17, dozens of demonstrators, some dressed as Grim Reapers, some unfurling American flags upside-down from the Sanders Theatre balcony, some hurling blood-red water balloons at Weinberger, made his speech virtually inaudible.

Bok said he apologized to Weinberger for the incident: "I wanted to give him a chance to yell at me, but he didn't."

In the aftermath of November 17, the Faculty spent a good deal of time in intense discussion about free speech. Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield went as far as to recommend that Weinberger be invited back as the Commencement speaker, while two Quincy House Trotskyists who had participated in the protests were warned by their Senior Tutor that a repeat of the incident might warrant expulsion.

Finally, last April, the Faculty asked Bok for his advice and clarification of what free speech means. "Any violation of free speech is disturbing, and I think that there have been a number of incidents going back some years, not only at Harvard but at other places as well," said Henry Rosovsky, former dean of the Faculty. "When you have a pain in the foot, and then a few months later you have a pain in your knee, eventually you come to the conclusion that you have to go to the doctor."

Harvard has a treatment for the disease, to continue Rosovsky's analogy, but the 1970 Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities has never really been put to use.

While abridgement of speaking rights is far less intense than in the '60s, "my sense is that there is more heckling in the last few years than in the few years before that," says Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr. "It goes up and down depending on the intensity of public concern over one or another issue and the intensity of organization by one or another political group on campus."