Word: das
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks ago, DAS officials announced to a group of SDS demonstrators that they would not release their internal reports on the grounds that such memoranda are generally the right of any self-respecting agency. "The same situation obtains for any organization in or outside Harvard, whether it be an undergraduate House, the Dean's office or an underground newspaper," a printed statement said. "If the authors knew that their reports and letters would be available to a wide audience, a sense of responsibility would require that they be less frank, comprehensive, and communicative." The DAS thus asked the rest...
That argument by itself is a miserable failure. Student organizations, Harvard personnel offices, and underground journals are not engaged firsthand in the manufacture of public policy. The DAS, on the other hand, conducts cabinet-level activity in five underdeveloped countries. Unless one adheres to the memoir theory of history, which deems it permissible for top-level government decisions to be made in secret only to have them surface years afterward in the form of personal remembrances, then it is difficult to regard the DAS' reticence with anything but skepticism or distrust...
...second explanation given by the DAS seems at first glance to make more sense. If the reports were made public, "personal reputations would be unjustly damaged." The statement implies that lengthy portions of the confidential reports are character evaluations of individual DAS advisors or their host colleagues, and that release of the reports would unnecessarily drag purely private matters into the public domain...
...basis of several private DAS papers made available to the CRIMSON last month, this second claim is found to be equally misleading. Those reports-which concern the DAS' work in cooperation with General Suharto's military regime in Indonesia-paint a far clearer picture of what is actually meant by "personal reputations" than what is hinted at in the DAS statement. In none of those documents is any DAS member singled out for description; the only intimation of "personality" is made in connection with the DAS team as a whole, and these passages describe how the group stands in relation...
...STATE that such information is "personal" and not political is to do no more than provide a cover explanation for why the DAS does not wish its activities to be disclosed in greater detail. Perhaps more than anything else, a thorough understanding of how the DAS field teams relate to the varying levels of officialdom in the host governments is essential to any appraisal of that agency's goals and effectiveness. This information is not available in any of the published research carried on by the DAS in Cambridge, nor is it provided by the so-called "substantive documents," which...