Editor,
The real question is, is Dr. Berthold being put to trial for his personality or for his ideas? Dubbing undesirable political behavior as mental aberration was a favorite of the late Soviet regime and many other such regimes. So, let's keep personalities out of the discussion and let's focus on ideas.
To intimate that he is attacked for anything other than his callous statement regarding voting for bombers is to admit that we held a grudge against him and now we finally see the white of his eyes and we fire.
It is not American to treat a political statement as a crime. And I believe Dr. Berthold did make a political statement, and I will even grant that he has the obligation to present the truth as he sees it and that it is a historian's job to do so.
In fact, he has often played a positive role by erecting strawmen to stir up our passive campus, whether to the end he wished or not.
But if he is being attacked for his ideas, as a person with common sense may well see it to be the case, then our society, especially in the environment of a great University like ours, has proper venues for this.
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For one, I was surprised at the terseness and vacuousness of his apology.
Coming from the most vociferous member of our campus, I was expecting a real apology and an explanation for what he said. A letter to the Daily Lobo explaining how such a seeker after the meaning of events could make such an outrageous statement so spontaneously, and what he really told himself that night before going to sleep. And also, fill us in on the context.
Many of us took pleasure in reading his often-controversial columns, even thought that he occasionally had something informative to say.
In his 20 or so years at UNM, he has taught the excitement of the classical era to many students, and we cannot ignore this service. But he does owe his students an explanation, so they can gauge him and his words against his teaching?
Is he dreaming of Alcibiades or Demosthenes? Is he siding with the enemy out of prideful spite or simply trying to stir the Polis out of what he believes as disastrous passivity?
C'mon Rick, you owe us an article on yourself. Not an Orwellian doublespeak apology but the real thing that you have gotten us accustomed to. And let us judge you in our minds, and who cares what the regents do? It is the opinion of the wise few, not the many that counts, or do you forget your Socrates?
And those who want Dr. Berthold's head on a platter should go after his ideas. Debate the man to the ground; teach the rest of us about democracy not about the Bund. Not with threats but with well considered arguments. Prove him to be the one who "eats fecal matter" on this issue - that is the best way to "reprimand" him.
Evangelos A. Coutsias
UNM mathematics professor
