Dear Editor

...Obviously, we were not really serious about civil rights As Margolis points out, we all fled when someone played a new tune called Black Power For Black Power meant less white power, even more frightening, it meant a change--or at least a reexamination--of our values and self images And we were not prepared for such a change if it entailed giving up something of our own But Margolis totally ignores the issue of poverty and its effect on black-white relations We know today that more than economic deprivation, poverty is a state of mind born out of generations of rejection, a state common to the nonpoor as well as the poor While integration tried to ignore those scars from the past, the power movements dealt with them saying in effect "We can't integrate psyches until we build psyches" Building psyches involves some expectation of economic opportunity and political efficacy for more than the few we were willing to integrate I would hope that Margolis might explore this failure of the '60s more deeply He came close to the heart of the matter when he asked if we had experienced a "failure of nerve " What we need in the '70s, I submit, is the courage to share more of our power and wealth with a larger segment of the population Ann Arbor, Mich Nancy Nupuf...

...Dear Editor Defending Tenure David Oshinsky observes that students are neglected by professors who publish a lot of trash to impress tenure committees ( The Inequities of Academic Tenure" NL, October 29) Even without tenure however, the quantity of publication could be weighed in deciding whether to retain old teachers as well as which new ones to hire Thus the culprit is not tenure but the notion that colleges need prolific authors more than proficient instructors Oshinsky also blames tenure for the retention of surplus professors Yet the system of six-year contracts he suggests as an alternative would actually mean five years of tenure for a newcomer found incompetent in his first year plus perpetual fear on the part of all faculty members that they might antagonize the contract renewers With the ethnic quotas now demanded by the Nixon Administration threatening impartial hiring retention and promotion at our universities, this is not the time to weaken the reasonable ]ob security afforded by tenure New York City Richard Hillel Shulman One-Sided Protest Carl Gershman should be congratulated for his commentary on "The Soviet Dissidents and the American Left," CNL October 29) If the "progressive" establishment had not caused a prolonged confusion and a crisis of fundamental Western values during the mid-'60s by chanting the name and invoking the Stalinist spirit of Ho Chi Minh, Gershman's article would have been a collection of truisms But under the circumstances obtaining today, it is an important moral restatement of rational facts To his perfectly valid analysis of the present one-sided detente one should add only that it all started nearly a decade ago with the clamor in some segments of the press for an unconditional end to the Cold War In contrast to the firm stand President Johnson took in Vietnam, he embraced this bombastic peace campaign, and by the end of his Administration the Soviet Union's mastery over its satellites was no longer challenged--not even by verbal references to their rights to self-determination or the UN Charter In harmony with the sentiments of this widely acclaimed opportunism little protest was heard against the Brezhnev doctrine a virtually undisguised proclamation of Soviet colonial suzerainty over Eastern Europe By being soft on Soviet imperialism in Europe Johnson had hoped that his domestic critics would allow him to thwart Hanoi's expansionist plans in Indochina As we know, LBJ failed to get this crucial mandate, for he was frustrated by his own contradictions He was unable to point out, let alone vigorously condemn--for the benefit of the average American--the ideologically inspired crimes of Ho Chi Minn's terrorists while he was building bridges to their "Rome", he could not tell the full truth about sham socialist totalitarianism in Vietnam while he was accepting its mendacity and permanence in Eastern Europe President Nixon has continued his predecessor's policy of unconditional detente with the Soviets, but he has gone one dubious step further in Vietnam by agreeing to the terms of an alleged peace that permits 150.000 North Vietnamese soldiers to remain in the South Here in America an internal threat of equivalent magnitude would mean 1 5 million terrorist "liberators" hiding in our forests waiting and gathering strength to crush the country with a sudden blow As a result of this Asian mini-Munich, it seems certain that Hanoi will strike again--a distressing prospect that will prompt no mass protests here even though it will inflict enormous new sufferings on the people of South Vietnam What will the members of Sweden's Nobel Peace Prize committee say when this new wave of devastation begins...

...They will probably praise Olaf Palme and blame Saigon New York City Laszlo T Kiss Beyond Integration The nostalgic reminiscing of Richard J Margohs' "The Still Possible Dream" (NL, October 1) does us a disservice In recalling the good old days when blacks and whites danced together to the tune of integration, he forgets that whites wrote all those melodies and invented all those steps We middle-class whites flattered ourselves by thinking we were planning "together with Negroes" But did we ever stop to ask the blacks if integration was what they really wanted--or all they wanted...