Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR HARLEM'S AMERICA I would like to thank and congratulate you for your special issue on "Harlem's America" (NL, September 26), which was devoted entirely to the testimony given by Claude...
...The arguments used by Professor Paish and others in the late 1940s and early 1950s were substantially the ones we hear in New York today: that the landlord is not getting a "fair" return on his investment...
...an inmate whose thoughts meant nothing to anyone...
...But this was interference of a purely negative sort: abrogation of a body of laws by a single act, whereupon society might be expected to adjust itself to the new conditions...
...Kintner would argue that scholars can do whatever they wish...
...but "What can we do along with them...
...Consistently interesting from beginning to end, particularly the pieces by S.L.A...
...So its members do cling to sentimentalism, sociality, and the like...
...There is a certain truth in Cousins' observations, and-as in those of your earlier correspondent, Ronald Steel-one interesting omission: the level of rents...
...The principles which should govern these relations include the following: 1. Every faculty member has the right to investigate any problem in which he is interested...
...Obviously, it is impossible to stop the reactionaries and defeat the liberals at the same time...
...If the government needs the assistance of scholars and intellectuals and the research functions they perform, then the government should see to it that its programs are such as to enlist the natural sympathies of educated men...
...4. Having made the results of his research available to others, the scholar must take the consequences in the form of judgments by others...
...We must not only stop the reactionaries but we must also defeat or change the liberals...
...During all that time I do not recall having read any articles by David Bernstein, the writer of "New York's Upstate Revolt" (NL, October 10...
...1. Prickett does not want to lose the authority of Thoreau for the kind of civil disobedience which the New Left cultivates...
...Preferably, he will do so by publication...
...No one stops them...
...that he has no incentive to keep his property in good shape...
...But they frequently need higher wages, not merely desire them...
...He manages this by worrying over the possible limitations on the freedom of professors who might want to engage in classified government research...
...We, however, have to make a sustained effort to build reform upon reform by legal enactment and enforcement of laws, and if we sabotage the mechanism of the law we destroy our own tools...
...But living in this imperfect world, whether a faculty member agrees, or refuses, to engage in sponsored research subject to those principles of academic freedom, is a matter for decision in the light of his individual conscience...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...2. Every faculty member is expected to make the results of his research available to others...
...New York City Arthur J. Raporte CLASSIFIED RESEARCH The role of universities in free societies is a subject that demands a more rigorous scrutiny than William Kintner gives it ("Thinking Aloud," October 10...
...Should my children also be made to carry the stigma of a criminal past in the family line...
...3. Every faculty member is free to decide whether the results of his research endeavors should be offered for publication and, if so, when and in what form...
...It was led by a number of "classical" economists-Professor Frank W. Paish of the London School of Economics among them...
...It's a shame that this first began in the 60s...
...or words to that effect...
...I can only hope that the readers will bear with me if for that reason I come back to the issue in spite of the time that has lapsed because of my traveling abroad...
...An educational institution is in a sense an abstraction...
...But the City Fathers, those outside the community, who invariably make up the local governing structure, fail to even recognize us as constituents...
...As things presently stand, the scholars whisper into their champagne that the government is corrupt and shameless in the way it bribes its "educators," at the same time publicizing themselves as only too eager to get a piece of the action...
...New York City Robert Boyers Editor, "Salmagundi" William R. Kintner replies: Winston Churchill once observed that democracy was the worst form of government but asked if anyone could think of one better...
...It is also very evident what the Great American racist can and will do if he's sitting at that discussion table when "they" decide on "what to do about, for and to" a group, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with color...
...For this endeavor one word seems appropriate: Bravo...
...New York City George P. Brockway President, W. W. Norton & Co...
...We need a fresh breeze occasionally...
...The tendency among liberal intellectuals like Kintner to embrace freedom as a standard for judging various positions is really ludicrous...
...And what possible motive can there be for such a policy except the belief that the disaster of a Goldwaterite rule over America will by some dialectic magic strengthen the forces for progress...
...We are called "the problem," yet we are not allowed to share the discussion table when the so-called leaders decide to react to us...
...Needless to say, of course, if scholars showed a little more resistance to the seductions of government endowments, a new atmosphere of mutual respect might develop...
...There is no evidence, to my knowledge, that Thoreau thought of any positive measures that the Federal government would have to take to reconstruct the life of the Negro on a sound basis...
...If anyone has ever gone to one of our municipal buildings and asked a civil question and seen the attitude and response received from the clerks and intake departments, then I am sure they can understand just exactly what I mean...
...Toronto, Canada Jerry Lerman James Prickett's reply (NL, September 12) to my "Open Letter to the New Left" (NL August 1) has come to my attention belatedly...
...At the same time, any academician who has had experience in the natural or social sciences will tell you that certain kinds of research are more prestigious and monetarily rewarding than others...
...They are a force with which the party must come to terms...
...Why should they...
...It occurred a little after Brown first mentions the Simulmatics Corporation proposal (p...
...What is important is that we be able to distinguish between the government and educational institutions...
...Hamburg, Germany Carl Landauer...
...He overlooks the obvious fact that no one can be dragooned into studying anything...
...The potentiality for corruption exists in the academic world as elsewhere...
...Likewise, if we do not support Clark Kerr against the Right we help somebody like Max Rafferty to the presidency of the University of California...
...Only he does not seem overly concerned about the fact that scholars who do not move in institutionally accredited directions may starve to death, or at least receive classification as marginal eccentrics, "nervous nellies" who would rather talk to their shadows than acquiesce, adjust, and become somehow influential...
...Every time I see it sitting there among my other interesting reading material I feel a special pride, a special sense of accomplishment and worth in realizing that one of my most profound dreams has been made into a reality...
...It is usually the diseased organism, or one which has passed its prime, that has to pay for its pleasures...
...And what of posterity...
...Too often, people describe this "youthful assemblage" as unrealistic dreamers...
...Brown's comments came in one of three lines of the transcript that were so garbled that they had to be cut...
...Brown had mentioned this because he was trying to explain why the Poverty Program had turned down certain politically sensitive proposals...
...Perhaps an earlier rise would have helped expose the spurious rantings spouted by the radical Right and extreme Left...
...Wilson's Labor government has temporarily frozen wages and prices, but has put no statutory ceiling on rents...
...Kintner evades the issue of governmental infringement upon the right of professors to choose their own research priorities...
...Halpern's suspicions are unfounded...
...Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Some of us are black and some of us are white...
...The people of the "problem" areas need the inside jobs that they, "the insiders," have become so lackadaisical about (clerks in official buildings, yes, even clerks in police stations, city sponsored day nursery aides, afterschool center workers, welfare surplus-food distributors...
...One of those dreams was to someday be allowed to stand up ("or sit down, as was the case), without any inhibitions, and tell the entire world that Arthur Dunmeyer (and others like him) do have a desire to contribute to the society in which we live...
...Prickett denies that I am right, but in the latter part of his letter he proposes a policy which reflects precisely this idea...
...No amount of rhetoric, no listing of the alleged or real sins of liberal leaders can get us around the fact that if we do not support Pat Brown we help Ronald Reagan to get elected (as he may well have been when these lines appear in print...
...If in 1968 President Johnson should run against a disciple of Goldwater, which does not seem unlikely at this point, we shall have to choose between a man who has escalated the war but now wants to end it with a political settlement, and another who will raise the escalation to the nth power and who will almost certainly involve us in nuclear destruction...
...Bernstein's article is as fine a commentary on the political situation in his part of the state as I have read...
...They fail to see that it isn't a matter of "What can be done about them, what can we do for them or to them...
...As normal human beings, scholars cannot resist the pressure to acquiesce and get a share of the good things of this affluent society in which people still go hungry, and the nearly illiterate are the first ones drafted to fight a war which they would be thoroughly incapable of explaining if they wanted to...
...Let's hope we hear again from Bernstein on this and other issues...
...What is at stake in Kintner's thesis is the nature of education, and the ability of educators to train young people to pursue knowledge independently...
...No such reduction need take place here...
...any verbal commitment to reform can then be no more than lip service...
...We are happy to have an intelligible rendition.-Ed...
...To me, this movement is a necessity for the non-Marxist Left...
...Arthur Dunmeyer I very much enjoyed the September 26 issue of The New Leader, in which you published the Ribicoff subcommittee testimony of Claude Brown, Arthur Dunmeyer and Ralph Ellison...
...for by extension one could argue, in the name of Kintner's blessed academic freedom, that the man who wants to do classified research for Mao Tse-tung on university time should also be subsidized by the government and patronized by university trustees...
...This is a specious and obviously self-defeating argument...
...NEW LEFT Recent New Leader writing has dealt with the so-called New Left...
...If someone is going to get it, why not me...
...It is no secret that the huge foundations which endow educational institutions are controlled by people who belong to the government or whose orientation makes them indistinguishable from government employes...
...DEAR EDITOR HARLEM'S AMERICA I would like to thank and congratulate you for your special issue on "Harlem's America" (NL, September 26), which was devoted entirely to the testimony given by Claude Brown, Ralph Ellison and myself before the Senate Subcommittee concerning the Federal role in urban problems...
...Only thus will our scholars become the kind of educated men who in their function as critics of all orthodoxies transcend the parochial limitations of political exigency...
...It may be worth remembering that decontrol in Britain literally sent rents out of control and helped to create precisely the kind of inflationary pressures that we are supposed to be trying to avoid here...
...On the most elemental level, this is so...
...Was the passage missing from the transcript you received or was this one of the "minor alterations demanded by the uncorrected transcript...
...Of course, like other people who have written along similar lines, he is the first to pay lipservice to diversity, and to the right of scholars to pursue whatever they wish...
...Their articles appeared first in the banking journals and other publications and crept into public discussion...
...That reply gives me a chance to drive home some of my original points-too good a chance to miss...
...We live and feel the many problems of our community if only because it is our community...
...So do we all...
...I did not seem to notice a certain passage which I remember rather vividly from the telecast of the hearings...
...One cannot argue with such a position...
...As a result, it is not uncommon for a working-class man to have to spend eight to nine pounds ($22 to $25.20) a week, plus rates, for a modest flat consisting of say two rooms...
...I object to Kintner's article because it does not engage the problem it pretends to deal with...
...Neither sociologists, statisticians or investigation committees will ever reach the roots of this nationwide situation...
...that controls lead to inequities among tenants, and so on...
...The freedom which Kintner is committed to defend is the freedom of scholars who are in virtually total sympathy with the designs of the ruling bureaucracies in Washington, D.C...
...you asked for it" tone that the Poverty Program was in political trouble because it had weakened the big city political machines, and that Vice President Humphrey had said, "See, I told you Shriver was no good...
...Marshall, Robert Meister, and Albert Bermel...
...It is about time that the rest of us in our big city ceased patronizing the voters in the hinterlands and recognized that they are at least as sophisticated as we...
...BERNSTEIN It is at least 12 years since I became a subscriber to your magazine...
...We are the first to acknowledge our wrongs just as we are the first to acknowledge the wrongs done to us...
...at least not until it is understood by "those who have" that the "have nots" are people like themselves and must share equally in every aspect of our great society regardless of how little they have to offer...
...There are quite a number of men, and women, who like myself live in these so-called ghettos...
...But the university is the only force which can protect its faculty and staff from the sort of incursions we have read about in recent months...
...In 1957 the Conservatives abolished rent controls on privately owned property...
...It would seem that freedom of individual inquiry may be the best principle for the conduct of research...
...In fact, contributions to knowledge are most likely to be made when scholars are free to explore what they like and to report their findings subject to the free and open criticism of others...
...HOUSING IN BRITAIN James A. Cousins Jr.'s article ("Wilson's Last Chance," NL, October 24) touches on most of the symptoms and causes of Britain's recent economic troubles, and inevitably points a moral finger at what is seen as the slothful, "unmotivated" mood of Britons today in management, the unions, the government, and among individual workers...
...The agitation for decontrol of rents began shortly after World War II...
...Though he probably would not like it stated in this way, he appears to be in favor of subsidizing the kind of research which produces results of a very limited variety: results which are useful to him and to people with a vested interest in maintaining ongoing government programs...
...I don't know how rents are officially "weighted" these days as a component in the cost-of-living indices, but I suggest that many Britons in the lower-middleincome brackets are losing something like 40 per cent of their salaries on rent, not merely on the nominal rent charges but on "rates" (local taxes), which are additional and may amount to 20 per cent of the rent figure...
...He is apparently annoyed by my contention that Thoreau, believing as he did that the government is best that governs least, had little use for the law as an instrument of social change and therefore could well afford to blunt that instrument, whereas the tasks we face impose on us the need for much greater restraint...
...20 in your issue...
...In 1959 the landlady of a large house which she had split up into one-room flats told me that the rent-producing income and real-estate value of the house had quadrupled in those two years...
...If then Prickett, as his words and those of likeminded writers seem to indicate, insists on "defeating the liberals" by staying away from the polls or by putting up splinter candidates, he will work for the victory of the reactionaries...
...Other people do not, least of all government employes of the upper echelons, with their fingers in a wide variety of pies...
...How, then, can they be expected to do research in the area of disarmament when the government pays only for research in the fields of missile development and space technology...
...The question Kintner must answer is: How can a professor be expected to inspire his students with the beauty of a selfless, disinterested orientation when he has a project to defend, when his every published word must demonstrate that he supports the government program which his research promotes and which pays for his offices, his secretaries, and perhaps his wife's mink...
...The continued relative scarcity of accommodations in these past seven years has driven rents far higher...
...If some county and borough councils did not maintain rents on public housing at a level well below the national average., many people would not in fact be able to afford a place to live in...
...Most of Boyer's observations are peripheral to the issue I discussed-to the relations between academic freedom, the scholar's obligation to publish his research findings, and the acceptance of responsibility for research by a university...
...Just a few years ago I was a number in Attica State Prison, a statistic and nothing more...
...The upstaters assumed a refreshing posture at the Democratic state convention...
...I considered this outburst by Claude Brown one of the highlights of the hearings and I was sorry to see that it was deleted from someone's copy of the transcript...
...They fail to see that we too abhor the violence of riots, unrest and agitation...
...These jobs do not call for college degrees, and if they do, they shouldn't...
...His subsequent sentences make it clear that in his opinion the liberals can be changed, if at all, only by at least partial defeat...
...Look at the Indian, if you can find him...
...The average salary in Britain is now about $55 a week...
...2. In the ideology of the New Left I had found the belief that things must get worse before they can get better, and a confidence that there is some element in extreme badness which turns it into good...
...If Kintner does not accept the validity of this extension, and I would presume this to be the case, then we have his position placed in a clearer light...
...Is it too much to ask that the university stop holding the hand of government administrators and demand that its professors be left alone to pursue research which they consider significant, rather than lucrative...
...New York City Albert Bermel KUDOS Congratulations on your issue of September 10...
...Cousins is right in saying that Britons want as much as they can get in the way of income...
...Boyers in his comments on my article assumes that the concept of freedom provides a ludicrous standard for judging whether an individual scholar should undertake research sponsored either by the government or foundations...
...He also assumes that scholars, being normal human beings, are invariably corrupted by their sponsors...
...Senator Kennedy asked Brown about the effectiveness of the Poverty Program, and Brown replied in an "O.K...
...The greatest mountain is surely made of the smallest pebble...
...Yes, ?¤ have a criminal record, but should that take away all my rights to the future, even the right to become a law-abiding citizen once again who may have something of value to offer by way of intellect...
...The prime suspect is obvious enough, but I wonder if you could confirm my suspicions...
...We know the things we do that cause the power structure (and the complacent middle class) to stop-look-and listen to us, just as we also see how they turn their backs to us when we ask for equal say as to how and by what means we may help ourselves...
...Whether or not the government is engaged in humane activities, whether or not its political gestures are more Machiavellian than liberal, and whether or not producing weapons of biological warfare instead of attempting to cure diseases is a good thing, are questions which are not strictly relevant to this argument...
...Even so, accommodations are still scarce, and outgoing tenants have a habit of asking for ??300 ($840) and up as "key money" for a pitiful assortment of "furniture and fittings...
...Scholars are all too human, as experience has shown...
...What's so wrong with that...
...Our scholars cannot be expected to behave in accordance with a long despised tradition of heroic self-denial...
...As a counter-argument, Prickett reminds me that Thoreau wanted the Federal government to withdraw legal protection from slave property, and thus demanded interference with property relations and social reform or revolution...
...P. Halpern Mr...
...Today., I am asked by the legislative branch of our government to give my views on the critical situation facing the greatest city in all the world (and as The New Leader so plainly stated), "a situation confronting all major American cities...
...Such arguments as these are usually reduced in the heat of debate to simple-minded displays of bad temper, rhetorical extravagance, and Leftist polemics against "the way things are...
...I just hope that the Blue Bloods of America still remember that the Pilgrims who settled in New England at Plymouth in 1620 were recorded to be thieves, murderers, rebels and criminals of the lowest ilk...
...Unlike individuals, it can operate on a set of principles and be expected to preserve them at all times...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 22
