Aberrations at Harvard

Student demonstrations against the war in Viet Nam have not had much zing this fall, so the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society set out last week "to do something that would shock the college community out of its vicarious war weariness." Its mem bers managed to shock Harvard, all right --by breaking the university's tradition of rational discourse and outraging plenty of people elsewhere who share that scruple.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara went to Cambridge to deliver the first lecture at Harvard's new Kennedy Institute of Politics. The 350 members of the Harvard S.D.S. decided that this would be an ideal time for a debate between McNamara and an eloquent spokesman they had brought to the campus, Robert Scheer, an editor of Ramparts magazine and an unsuccessful anti-war congressional candidate. Institute officials quashed the proposal, and McNamara spoke for three hours in Quincy House to 15 students at a lunch and a random selection of 50 at a seminar. He urged students to work for civil rights rather than against the war.*

"We Got Him!" Outside Quincy House in the summer-like afternoon, some 600 students gathered to hear Editor Scheer denounce U.S. policy. Split roughly in half between those for and those against the Government, the crowd carried signs reading STOP THE WAR, NAPALM S.D.S., and BACK MAC. Scheer's oratory raised emotional temperatures even higher. S.D.S. members, awaiting McNamara's departure, watched all Quincy House exits. Officials dispatched several cars as decoys before McNamara slipped into a police wagon. About 25 S.D.S. members spotted . the vehicle, threw themselves under its wheels. Their shouts of "We got him--we got him!" brought the crowd running.

Trapped, McNamara climbed atop a car, agreed to answer two questions from the students and offered to meet them later for more talk. Each time the Secretary tried to answer a question, he was shouted down. Irked by one heckler, he yelled: "You come up here--you seem to have all the answers." Finally giving up, he shouted: "When I was a student at Berkeley, I was both tougher and more courteous than you are today." While some students continued to hoot, others yelled for quiet. Cops formed a wedge to lead McNamara through the mob, then took him away through underground food tunnels. In his wake, scuffles broke out between his defenders and detractors.

Apologies. Most of Harvard was embarrassed by the emotional display. Dean John Monro apologized to McNamara for "the discourteous and un ruly confrontation forced upon you." When two S.D.S. students walked into the Quincy House dining hall for dinner, other students hissed.

Students quickly collected 2,700 signatures from the 4,900 Harvard under graduates on a letter to McNamara saying that they respected the right of intellectual dissent but recognized that shouting a man down "threatens, rather than furthers, this right." In a reply to Dean Monro, McNamara said that "no apology was necessary" and "behavioral aberrations should not be a basis for curbing dissent."

*In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, McNamara also said that a lottery system could help ease the "uncertainty and inequity" of the military draft.

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