Ernest Mandel, noted European Marxist scholar, editor of the Belgian weekly La Gauche, and a contributing editor of Intercontinental Press, was barred from participating in a conference on 'Technology and the Third World' organised by the Graduate Students Association at Stanford University, California, 17-18 October.
Without giving any official explanation, the U.S. State Department refused to give him a visa for the four-day visit. Mandel, best-known as the author of the two-volume Marxist Economic Theory, was to debate Professor John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University as a feature of the two-day session, He had also been scheduled to address the student body at the nearby University of California campus at Hayward.
Although the invitation to Mandel had 'strong concurrence' from the office of the Stanford president, the State Department persisted in its refusal, disregarding strong protests from Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton faculty members,
Galbraith expressed the view of the overwhelming majority of the conference participants when he assailed the State Department action, in his keynote speech on the opening day of the conference, before an audience of some 1,600 people.
The conference was able to partially circumvent the State Department ban by arranging for a trans-Atlantic telephone discussion between Mandel and Galbraith.
On 18th October, the conference heard a tape-recorded address by Mandel on 'A Radical View of the Development of the Third World and Technology'. Over the telephone hook-up, Galbraith then commented on Mandel's paper, and Mandel replied to Galbraith's comments. Mandel's paper and the exchange between the revolutionary Marxist and the liberal were followed with intense interest by the 500 students present. Following the transoceanic debate, there was discussion from the floor with Galbraith.
The ban on Ernest Mandel is especially arbitrary since he made a two-month tour of the United States last September and October, speaking at 30 universities from coast to coast,
At that time his revolutionary positions (he made no secret of his Trotskyist views) were attacked by such right-wing voices as Barrons magazine, conservative columnist William Buckley, and in front-page editorials in the Hearst papers signed by Editor-in-chief William Randolph Hearst, Jr.
Mandel has been invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Columbia, Amherst, and the New School for Social Research in early December,
He has also agreed to participate with Andre Gorz, Lucien Goldman, and other speakers at a conference in New York on Nov. 29 on the subject of 'Agencies of Social Change' under the joint auspices of the Socialist Scholars Conference and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.
These sponsors intend to make a vigorous effort to get the ban on Mandel lifted so that he can fulfil these engagements. They contend that the right to hear and debate dissenting views face-to-face goes hand-in-hand with the right to read them on the printed page.
[illegible] authorities continue to refuse to give Mandel a visa.