Sex and Mao At Princeton

By Yale students.

Princeton's top administrators were unanimous in their contrition. "We goofed," said Vice President Anthony J. Maruca. "An error in judgment," echoed President William Bowen. "A serious error," added Trustee Chairman R. Manning Brown Jr.

That group admission of guilt was inspired by a 48 -page pamphlet rather innocuously entitled Birth Control Handbook. Princeton's Sex Education Counseling and Health Program (its barbaric acronym: SECH) had distributed some 6,000 copies in dormitories. What outraged conservative students and alumni was not the pamphlet's routine discussion of anatomy, conception, contraceptives and abortion but its fiery introduction. The opening pages denounced the population-control movement as an instrument of U.S. imperialism in the Third World. The introduction also blamed urban ills on "America's white ruling class" and pollution on consumers. "We are the villains," it said, "because we drive to work in the only transportation system made available by G.M., Ford and Chrysler." The introduction suggested that Americans emulate China's Maoist revolution and find "new methods of distributing the riches of the world, which in fact belong to all human beings, not only to the Rockefellers, Fords, Du Ponts, Mellons, Rothschilds and their like."

While many students ignored the introduction as juvenile, others were angered by it. Some mailed copies of the booklet to all 40 university trustees and to the National Review, whose publisher is a Princeton alumnus. The magazine denounced the Handbook as a "scandal," and Review Editor William F. Buckley Jr., a Yaleman, suggested in his syndicated newspaper column that the "Princeton Maoists begin their revolution by cleaning up sexual immorality in Princeton."

All of which prompted Princeton officials to find out how Birth Control Handbook was chosen. It turned out that it originally had been put out four years ago by a group of students at McGill University in Montreal. Since then, some 4,000,000 copies have been circulated in Canada, England, Australia and the U.S. Among the recipients were undergraduates on at least a dozen American campuses, including Tufts and Boston University, where the pamphlet caused no controversy--perhaps because it was distributed by student groups and not by administrators.

After considering several pamphlets, SECH concluded that the Handbook was not only the cheapest available (4 1/2-c- per copy compared with $1 for others) but that its medical content was the best. "It's a very complete, succinct and medically sound book," says SECH's director, Dr. Louis A. Pyle. The committee decided that controversy over the pamphlet's introduction could be avoided by disavowing, in a covering flyer, the "wornout S.D.S. rhetoric of the late 1960s." But before distributing the Handbook in March--seven months after approving it--SECH forgot to staple in the planned disclaimer.

As a result of the publicity, letters from irate alumni poured into Princeton's Nassau Hall, where the university's copying machines disgorged clarifications, which were mailed in response. The trustees tried to soothe alumni feelings last week by declaring in a formal statement that "a serious mistake had been made." The administration reacted by halting circulation of the Handbook. When students ask at the university infirmary for sex information now, they will be given a publication called Student Guide to Sex on Campus. It is nonpolitical and published--as if Princeton's mortification were not enough--by Yale students.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.