View of Incidents

There is a pretty good chance that in a few years little girls like Amy Carter, recently dismissed from Brown University, and Kristen Crabtree, the subject of your lead editorial, “Student’s Resolve to be Admired in FBI Incident” (Aug. 9), will grow up. Such has not occurred to your editorialist, nor to U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr.

Your editorialist seems to deplore the fact that “today’s college students are known more for their enthusiasm about joining the business world than for their social activism.” I suppose he or she harks back to the good old days when our nation’s campuses were fraught with devotees to pot and protest.

Now, we have a generation teaching, preaching, writing and judging who possess little knowledge of, in Lt. Col. Oliver North’s words, “this dangerous world we live in where we are at risk.”

Among those most at risk are FBI agents like Marene Allison. They are at risk from people like Kristen Crabtree who, by appearing among the “20 students protesting the presence of an FBI recruiter” on the UCSD campus, labels herself a radical. Crabtree’s taking of Agent Allison’s photo was, in all probability, no innocent gesture. It was probably done for the purpose of identifying an FBI agent in some radical dossier that might be used for some future malevolent purpose.

Is your editorialist or Judge Thompson so naive as to think Crabtree only wanted the photo of Agent Allison for her scrapbook? Heaven help us if this is so.

EDWIN O. LEARNARD

San Diego