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Kennedy and rhf
%kenned[w89,jmc]		Notes on conversation with President Kennedy

I had a 20 minute discussion about rhf with President Kennedy.  Here
are some remarks about it.

1. He has referred the matter entirely to the Academic Senate.  The
Senate's procedure will be decided by its Steering Committee.

2. Kennedy was not persuaded by what he called the metaphor of the
library, and didn't seem to be convinced by the argument that
the comparison wasn't a metaphor - that we were talking about
a small part of the library of the future.  He didn't take a
position on whether rhf should ultimately be in or out.

3. When I asked how the decision came about, he said the first he
heard about the matter was at a President's Staff meeting just
before rhf was removed.  At that time he concurred.

4. He didn't know that rhf is currently on other Stanford computers.
He advocates no further action before the Senate acts, i.e. neither
to restore it to AIR and SDC or remove it from others.

5. He didn't know that most of the content of usenet is technical.
He did know that there had been no complaint about any specific
joke at Stanford.

6. He regards the whole matter as minor and mentioned it to the
Senate only because of its relation to the much more important
free speech issue raised by the Schwartz-Brest statement.

7. Kennedy supposed that the Steering Committee might refer the
matter for recommendation to the Committee on Research.  This
seemed strange to me and seemed strange to others.  The idea
seemed to be that the network exists for research purposes
and is therefore under their jurisdiction.  Perhaps he expects
this committee to say whether rhf has potential research value.
Of course, the network has educational, internal and external
communication, operational computing functions that entirely
dominate its function as an object of research.  Indeed it also
has other library functions already, a point that I didn't think
to make to him.

Perhaps the Senate should refer the matter to a committee on
libraries if there is one.