President Neil L. Rudenstine yesterday issued an open letter to the University community in response to several recent controversies related to sexual orientation.

Earlier this week, the conservative magazine Peninsula touched off student protests with its distribution of a special 56-page issue on homosexuality. And on Monday, a Lowell resident reported that the word "faggot" scrawled on his door.

In the one-page letter, Rudenstine said he hopes to protect freedom of expression while building a community free of intimidating and harassment.

"Actions that are intimidating and are directed at specific individuals are repugnant and intolerable," he said in the letter.

Such actions are not only a violation of University regulations, but are "cowardly and contemptible," Rudenstine wrote.

University policy prohibits discrimination against students based on race, gender or sexual orientation.

However, he said, statements made "in a more general way" fall into the realm of freedom of expression and thus must be protected, even if they are offensive to some members of the community. To attempt to censor such speech, Rudenstine said, would be "totally inappropriate.

Rudenstine said he considers debate on controversial issues an inevitable and essential part of life in a University community. He added that he hopes all members of the community will try to evaluate ideas and ask questions in ways that advance learning, knowledge and understanding.

Rudenstine pointed out that it can be healthy and even necessary to disparage the vies of others. At the same time, he said, civil discourse, thoughtful arguments and genuine scholarship must remain at the heart of University life.

"There is no simple solution to these dilemmas or to the tensions inherent in them," Rudenstine wrote. "But a University by its nature should be prepared to address such complexity, to live with it and to deal with it in ways that are constructive and humane."

That will only happen, he said, if individuals and groups who disagree with each other continue to discuss their differences candidly, "in the hope of achieving deeper mutual understanding and a shared sense of being members of a University that has powerful common values and goals."

The statement represents Rudenstine's first entry into the debate over free speech that has taken place on campuses across the country during the last few years. Last year, former President Derek C. Bok issued a similar letter on freedom of expression after a Kirkland resident's display of the Confederate flag became a subject of much. controversy.

In a previously scheduled interview on Wednesday, Rudenstine said he had also written letters to the Lowell resident and to the masters of Lowell House