To the Editors of The Crimson:

It seems reasonable to expect those who wish to engage in polemic to get their facts straight. When the wager of a polemic is a journalist, such a responsibility seems all the more incumbent. A "Brass Tacks" piece by Steven Lichtman entitled "Our Shantytown," whose salient point was that SASC should tear the shanties down, seemed sadly misinformed. This misinformation was entirely avoidable. Lichtman might have joined the hundreds of people who have asked questions at the information desk of the Open University during the last five weeks, and saved himself the burden of writing a shoddy article.

As a member of SASC, and of the Open University (between which there is a distinction), I wish to answer some to the points Lichtman raises:

Lichtman says the shanties are not successful.

With 2000 signatures collected in favor of divestment and well over a thousand in support of the Open University, shanties are, on the contrary, serving as a valuable physical focus for the struggle for divestiture. Several rallies of hundreds of students, a one day blockade of the Office of the Harvard Corporation, and much education on South Africa and divestment has taken place. Most importantly, the Open University has been the center of a community of thought and discussion with professors such as Orlando Patterson, Stanley Hoffman, T.J. Clarke, and Diana Eck giving special public lectures, and section leaders in History, Philosophy, English. Hundreds of students and many supporters of divestiture have come to recognize themselves as activists.

SASC has frequently compared South Africa with Nazi Germany, Lichtman says.

SASC has never issued any leaflets or press statements making such an equation. But while South African troops drive through townships at random with guns blazing, and while entire families are transported to bantustans where there is no rain, jobs, or health care, and while the Bushmen are dying in forced migration from the Namib Desert, then perhaps recognizing the genocideal aspect of apartheid and comparing it to German fascism is not so unreasonable.

SASC is confused about its argument for divestment, says Lichtman.

Lichtman should not confuse his own confusion for SASC's. In 1984 the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, (which President Bok had created to advise the Harvard Corporation), recommended to that body that Harvard totally divest. Their argument, which SASC shares, Lichtman may find in The Harvard Crimson of May 11, 1984. The committee comments: "It should be noted that while U.S. firms employ less that I percent of the Black work force in South Africa and accounts for only 17 percent of foreign investments there, they dominate several strategic sectors: energy, computers, motor vehicles and mining. In a critical way, then, some of the U.S. firms in which Harvard is invested contribute directly to the support and perpetuation of apartheid."

Lichtman says that moral and practical motivations are "mutually exclusive."

On the contrary, moral imperatives are usually highly practical. "Thou shalt not kill" seems to me to be a pretty practical way of keeping human society together. Similarly, "Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother" appears to be a good practical means of sustaining communities. That separating Harvard from supporting an evil regime and benefiting from tyranny also may happen to make the ending of that regime easier does not really surprise me.

SASC, says Lichtman, is "morally inconsistent" because it does not "favor and agitate for divestment from other regimes."

The acronym SASC stands for the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee. SASC neither favors nor opposes divestment from any other regime. A majority of SASC members, however, probably oppose the Soviet and Chilean regimes, and many have been active in organizations like Amnesty International, the Hillel's Committee on Oppressed Jewry, and Students Supporting Solidarity. In any event, if Harvard divested from companies that do business in South Africa they would, by the same gesture, divest of all of their stock in companies that are in the Soviet Union and Chile. They are the same companies.

There is no reason for the shanties to stay up any longer, contends Lichtman.

At a meeting of 80 members of the Open University in Luthuli Hall on Saturday May 17, it was agreed that the shanties should stay up until Commencement unless the University makes important concessions.

While the administration has considered the shanties a "legitimate expression of free speech," the members of the Open University have instead always thought of them as an act of confrontational protest. Yes, shanties are ugly, but so is the behavior of Harvard in the Cambridge community and in the world. We stand in opposition to the Harvard which organizes internships for uranium companies in South African-occupied Namibia. We intend to remain, facing arrest or disciplinary charges if necessary, to greet the members of the Alumni Against Apartheid on Commencement day. Richard H. Drayton '86   Member, Open University