Testimonial letter from Jack W. Burnham
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from Jack W. Burnham. It is "Exhibit A-303" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Dear Sirs: Through the national news on television, I recently learned that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is being prevented from immigrating to the United States to join his community in Oregon. I have read several of Bhagwan's books and his writings have positively influenced my own work in art. From television it is difficult to understand why Bhagwan is being kept out of this country, or precisely in whose interest it is to keep him out. My feeling is that he is a great and prolific teacher, someone whose influence on the arts will gradually be felt through the coming decades. Given this country’s indiscriminate policies for allowing aliens into this country, it seems tragic that such an influential and valuable human being should be excluded. I do hope that the Immigration Department will reverse its decision in respect to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Most sincerely, |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
