Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...should like to offer the following response to the notice in the CRIMSON of October 7th endorsed by numerous Harvard faculty members, opposing the faculty's taking a stand on issues relating to the war in Vietnam. The statement in question includes four reasons for opposing the attempt to "bring political issues" before the faculty. I would like to consider each in turn...
...exists in the world and has effects on it. (This is not to speak of the relations between the university and the government which obtain at a variety of levels.) It is a one-sided conception of polities indeed that allows as political. say, only opponents of the Vietnam war, and reduces the silent and acquiescent to the status of a-political onlookers. One is thrust into a political role in taking part in the world: this has been repeated from Aristotle through twentieth-century existentialists. The question is thus not "am I or should I be political?" but " realizing...
There is another objection to this first point. For assuming, even, that the university is a-political, point one comes nowhere near meeting opposition to the war as a moral issue. Will the faculty claim the right to function 'without moral objectives,' a la Werner von Braun? By choosing to view opposition to the war as a strictly "political" issue the faculty simply defines things to make it easier for itself, and fails completely in meeting opposition whose roots are in moral outrage...
...faculty or otherwise (unless it be the Harvard Corporation, which has meted out what many consider political punishment for some of last year's events). Students, for example, have not been "bound" or "spoken for" by the numerous polls over the past few years on issues such as the war or the U.S. Presidency. There is, indeed, a widespread sense that the U.S. government itself or particular people therein, including its highest official, are not speaking for oneself. This role being vigorously denied to the elected leaders of the nation, how much more so will it, then, to gathered colleagues...
...whether appealing to "rule and precedent" is on any count the best way of handling problems, especially in a period of rapid and unforeseen change such as our own. One may question the validity of the fear that the consequence of joining in a national effort to end the war in Vietnam will be to drown the Faculty in "continued and inevitably impassioned political debate." It is a great bother, and it takes a great deal of time, to engage in such debate. Most of those who do engage in it do so because they feel driven...