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Mosher case.
	I presently intend, at about the beginning of Fall Quarter,
a time suggested to maximize publicity, to release a statement of which
the following is a draft.
Until that time, I would welcome additional considerations
in favor or against my proposed action or suggested improvements
in the statement.  I especially welcome company.

Statement on Mosher case

	After a long time, I have decided to join the Stephen Mosher
Defense Committee out of opinion that Stanford University has not
acted fairly in this case.  I hope other Stanford faculty, students
and staff will join this effort for the reasons that follow.

	While doubtful about the action of the Anthropology Department
and the University in confirming it, I didn't see my way clearly
to taking a position because of the mystery charges.  After President
Kennedy's statement confirming the Mosher's expulsion on the basis of the
public record, I was deterred by the length of the documentation.  This
isn't a good excuse, perhaps, but better late than never.

	First, as to the mystery charges.  My present opinion is that
mystery charges have no more place in an academic proceeding than
they have in a judicial proceeding.  When the Government is unable
to prosecute a spy without revealing secret information, they have
to give up the prosecution.  It should be the same with a University.

	Second, the Anthropology Department really did rely on the
mystery charges in its action.  This is according to a statement
by its Chairman included in the documentation.  Thus the new charges
have been brought in order to support the previously taken action.
This looks like persecution.

	Some of the public charges lack any merit, some have little merit,
and still others would warrant only lesser penalties than expulsion.
I don't know whether the word ``expulsion'' used by the Anthropology
Department has a definite meaning in University proceedings, but I
note that President Kennedy's statement is headlined ``termination'',
which has weaker connotations.

	An example of a charge with no merit whatsoever is the one that
Mosher changed the subject of his dissertation without consultation.  Lots
of students change the subjects of their dissertations, and the
consultation is usually entirely informal.  At most it would require the
filing of a new form and a negotiation with his adviser to determine
whether the new subject is acceptable.  The charge seems particularly
dubious, because one would expect that a graduate student in anthropology
with an unprecedented opportunity to spend a year studying a Chinese village
would very likely change the subject of his dissertation.  What did they
suppose he was there for?

	The charges concerning Mosher's bringing the van into China, his
giving the van to the commune and the approvals of his trip to Chungking
have little if any merit.  He was in an unprecedented situation, in a
country with very informal procedures where the left hand often doesn't
even want to know what the right hand is doing.  He had to act as he
thought best.  In my opinion, pushing the system as far as he could make
it go was probably justified under the circumstances.  He was tactful
enough so that they let him stay his year.

	As to taking the trip that he thought was legal and post facto
turned out not to be, the same thing just happened to the New York Times
Bureau chief in Peking.  I wonder if President Kennedy will write a
letter to the New York Times proposing that John Burns be terminated
or maybe even expelled.

	In fact the Anthropology Department could have got rid of Mosher
without fuss by having his adviser withdraw and his being unable to find
another or by finding his dissertation topic unacceptable.  Of course,
it is common practice to allow a student with a legitimate topic
but no adviser competent in the area to find an adviser in another
department or even in another university.

	In answering Mosher's claim that the University did not follow
its judicial procedures, President Kennedy advanced the idea that
this isn't a disciplinary proceeding but merely an academic proceeding,
and no quasi-judicial procedures are required.  Certainly many
students are terminated for lack of progress without it being
a judicial matter.  However, when the basis of the termination
is misconduct and the word ``expulsion'' has been used, proper
quasi-judicial procedure is appropriate.

	What about the charge that the proceedings are politically
motivated?  There is unlikely to be a clear answer to that one.
My experience at Stanford, including two years as a member of the
Academic Senate, has convinced me that university professors are
very skillful at finding other reasons for doing what they want
to do in cases where a ``naive'' observer would conclude that they
were violating someone's academic freedom.  Indeed, the
Chairman of the Anthropology Department was one of the signers
of a statement proposing action against the Hoover Institution
that looked like a violation of academic freedom to me.  Others
didn't see it that way and found other criteria to justify
restricting the Hoover Institution in ways that seemed unlike those
applied to other institutions connected to Stanford.  To me, it
looked like an intellectual gerrymander.  My opinion, which I see
no way of verifying or refuting, is that political criteria, including the
obsequiousness to the Chinese communists, common in the American
intellectual community and especially at Stanford, played at least
a subjective role.

	In the informal discussion of the Mosher case at Stanford,
unsupported rumors that Mosher was ``a sleazy character''
played an important role in inhibiting people from supporting
him.  I was told that graduate students in anthropology played
a big role in this rumor-mongering, and I think they should be
ashamed of it.  However, I suppose that they are just as susceptible
as anyone else to mass hysteria.

	However, suppose Mosher is indeed not a nice guy.  It is a
long established principle in civil rights matters that an injustice
cannot be justified by establishing that the victim isn't a nice
guy and probably deserves everything he gets.  Stanford students and
faculty who think they have some reason to believe that Mosher isn't a nice
guy still have the obligation to oppose his being expelled for
insufficient reasons.

	What should be done?  In my opinion, Mosher should be re-admitted
and given a reasonable time to produce a thesis.  If he submits a thesis,
the University should find a way to evaluate it, using outsiders if
necessary --- as it probably would be.  He can be reprimanded, but the
associated punishment cannot reasonably be a suspension for longer than he
has already been out.  If the University wants to suspend registration
until he has either accounted for the camera to the University's
satisfaction or paid for it, this would be legitimate.

	I must confess that reading Mosher's two excellent books,
admittedly more like journalism than anthropology, led me to believe
that Mosher is an acute observer and that American social science
has lost (probably to journalism) someone who is capable of substantial
contributions.