The labor situation at Yale this fall is a useful ease in point. The situation was a real mess, no doubt, in which it was difficult to separate the heroes from the villams, but it was also difficult not to be struck, in conversations and encounters, by the extent to which students there viewed the stand-off as a personal nuisance, rather than as a real debate about principles of worker benefits and rights. I wonder what the Harvard student body reaction would be to a similar situation here.

And it could happen Harvard officials express the same virulent attitude that their Yale counterparts do. In the wake of a favorable decision last spring from the National Labor Relations Board on a disputed union election. Harvard declared virtual war on the United Auto Workers local trying to organize clerical and technical workers in the Medical Area, vowing to high the union for the good of the University community. The liberal ideal that unions are socially useful in situations, upheld just last year in a book by a pair of Harvard professors, evidently is not applicable at this university. J. P. Stevens they're antiunion. This is enlightened Harvard. And what would we students do it push came to shove?

But exhibitions of this kind of insular opinion appear on campus more regularly than do labor strikes--in the arrogance that creeps imperecptibly into intellectual discussion in classrooms and dining halls around campus, automatically framing the terms of debate before there is any real give and take.

At the height of the disturbances of free speech that took place in the early 1970s, professor James Q. Wilson remarked on the growing number of subjects which could not be discussed in a free and open setting, citing the Vietna, War, race relations, and other such topics. Nothing on the order of those disturbances now threatens free speech--at least openly. But try, at dinner or in a section, to start an argument against divestiture, or for U.S. military involvement in EI Salvador, or in favor of Reagan--ior against affirmative action, for that matter--and see how far you get.

CHALLENGING THE conventional wisdom of Harvard Liberalism has gotten easier in the past several years--but not by much, as our attitude towards the election this past year showed. I supported Walter Mondale for president, openly and vocally, as did most other students on campus, if polls conducted last fall are accurate. But much of this support, you got the sense, was predicated on the notion that there was no intellectual basis for backing Reagan. "You voted for Reagan?!" was a phrase said only half in jest most of the time, as if somehow the errant person were a mental midget.

Such is the attitude that colors the predominant campus view about ROTC--scornful condescension--and the more absurd minority position that it is incumbent upon Harvard to "oppose" the military establishment. It is to Harvard's discredit that as an institution it effectively subscribes to this minority notion in maintaining its policy, a result of the 1969 tumult, of nor permitting ROTC on campus. Beyond the benefits the program offers students seeking a way to pay for college and serve their country, what does this policy imply about our adherence to the liberal ideal of tolerating a diversity of political view points?

It would be disingenuous to suggest that leftists are alone responsible for this kind of intolerance--reactionaries are no strangers to hypocrisy--but the point has special significance for liberals. Much of the liberalism Harvard says it stands for, after all, has to do with process, with fair play and tolerance for all views, a process which is tacitly subverted by the attitudes cultivated around campus. And this is the worst of all the results of the insularity bred by this University.

I confess I don't have any grand solution, to the dilemma I have been describing, perhaps chiefly because it involves attitudes and thus is not susceptible to quick administrative fixes. The best we can do. I think, is continually to question the assumptions that under he our politics. Why is it that we claim to believe X? Are we willing personally to be accountable to the logical extension of a particular policy? The more we force ourselves to undergo this kind of scrutiny, the more truly we adhere to what the ideals of a Harvard liberal education are all about. With tuition fast approaching $15,000 per year, isn't it worth a throw?