The Battles Behind The GSA Referendum

THE Graduate Student Association Council has traditionally been one of Harvard's most apolitical student organizations. In years past, the great bulk of its activity has consisted of running social events: sherry parties, beer blasts.

In the last two months, two related struggles over the purpose and direction of the GSA have racked the Council, and an end to the bitterness and differences is not yet in sight. The issue came into the open this week with the appearance of a radically worded Vietnam referendum which, Council activists claim, has been structured to insure its own defeat.

The GSA's Constitution leaves little doubt of the Council's intended activities. It's two most promnient "purposes" are "To provide liaison between the administration and the graduate students and to maintain a spirit of friendly cooperation among the graduate schools..."

But the political aura of American universities has thickened since 1954, when the Constitution was written. Predictably, the war in Vietnam intruded into the modest workings of the Council. The referendum and poll being held this week is only the visible portion of an encroaching iceberg.

Last April, Madgaret Theeman, a second-year graduate student in Social Relations, was elected to the Council. At the Council's May meeting she suggested that a slot in the budget for the Fall, '67 semester, which was being discussed, be set aside for "social action." She was hissed.

THIS October, Miss Theeman nevertheless secured permission from the Council to chair a four-man "social action committee." For three months the committee made little headway in the various projects and ideas it submitted to the Council, but last month Miss Theeman presented several well-prepared resolutions, including one that called for a referendum on Vietnam.

The social action committee, aided by David Feintuch 1L, who had been appointed editor of the Graduate Bulletin some months before, put together an uneasy coalition which managed to secure passage of the resolution, but only after smoldering differences in opinion burst into the open.

Opposition to the referendum was led by Allen Parker, a past president and very active present member of the Council. He, along with past president Joseph Budelis, current president Paul Munyon, and others, are determined that the Council take no political positions on behalf of graduate students.

The climax of the referendum battle took place at the February 5 meeting of the Council. After elections for the semester were concluded and Munyon was installed as president, Parker proposed that a non-binding opinion poll be substituted for the anti-war referendum. The latter called for prompt withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam and would have been binding on the Council if approved. Parker's motion passed.

The motion was amended to allow only dues-paying GSA members the right to vote. (Of approximately 4500 graduate students, only 1500 pay GSA dues.) The Council also retained the opinion poll, which will be offered to all graduate students. Finally, the Theeman forces were unable to moderate the wording of the referendum, which called for "immediate withdrawal." Council member Roger Rifer, a close associate of Parker's, had originally proposed "unilateral withdrawal" for the referendum, and the activist group was forced to compromise on the severe "immediate withdrawal" wording.

"It's clear to me," says Feintuch, "that Parker and his group fovored 'unilateral withdrawal' to kill the referendum. They limited the referendum to GSA members because they know graduate students as a whole would not support the referendum," he charges. "Now only the most conservative element among the graduate students, those who live in the campus dorms and pay $2.50 a year to attend the sherry parties, can vote to commit the Council on the war."

Feintuch and Miss Theeman assert that the poll is a sop to the other graduate students. "The leadership of the GSA has provided 7-10 answers for each question so that it's impossible to get a majority on any one question," Miss Theeman says.

Munyon, Budelis, Parker, and Council Secretary Jon White answer that the different proposals on the wording of the referendum were just attempts "to clarify" its intent.

White notes that the GSA referendum, as introduced, contained the phrase "The GSA, speaking for its members..." "It would be point to allow non-GSA persons to influence this motion," he says. Moreover, he asserts that the poll "has sufficient latitude that a person can come much closer to expressing his true feelings."

These explanations, however plausible, do not change several pertinent facts:

* Council leaders feel that politics are completely outside the Council's realm and they opposed the referendum from the beginning.

* Due to a passage in the Constitution, which allows the Steering Committee, now dominated by Parker, to re-appoint Council members year after year without public election, opposition and new ideas can usually be kept to a minimum.

* The GSA speaks for less than half the graduate students at Harvard.

But these are merely political facts, honest conservatism and a desire for self-perpetuation aren't crimes. More disturbing are other steps the GSA leadership has taken to insure its power.

Michael Schwartz, a supporter of Miss Theeman and an anti-war activist, had worked on the social action committee and on Feintuch's biweekly newspaper, the Graduate Bulletin. But he was not yet a Council member. Last month, then-president Budelis promised that Schwartz would be appointed to fill the next vacancy on the Council. By early February, however, the referendum controversy was steaming. In a surprise reversal in-coming president Munyon chose Jon L. White, Budelis's roommate, not only to take Schwartz's place on the Council, but to immediately assume the job of secretary.

Munyon explains developments by saying that "it was voted to appoint Jon White at this time since he was the only person who had expressed an interest in running for secretary, since he had worked for the Council before, and since some members expressed their opinion that he would make a good secretary."

What seems more likely is that Munyon chose not to add to the activist forces, and that no list of lame excuses can serve to justify White's astounding rise in fortune.

Schwartz is a central figure in the second turbulence to shake the Council. Last fall, when David Feintuch assumed the editorship of the Graduate Bulletin, it was a monthly sheet measuring about 12 by 4 inches, and devoted solely to announcements of graduate affairs: meetings, sports tournaments, and Council minutes.

Feintuch transformed the Bulletin into a bi-weekly, four-page newspaper which included feaure articles, columns, and stories which reported as well as recorded Council deliberations.

The Bulletin staff, which includes Miss Theeman and Schwartz, also printed blunt editorials criticizing the Council, under whose constitution the Bulletin is published.

ON February 2, three days before the meeting at which he was denied a Council seat, Schwartz wrote an editorial scalding Pusey for his reference to radicals as "Walter Mittys of the left."

"It is obvious," Schwartz wrote, "from the hysterical tone of the President's phrases that they are neither informed nor articulate. In fact, they might aptly be described themselves as 'belligerent nonsense' or 'a world of fantasy.' It is appalling that Harvard's President can be so ignorant of what is happening on campus."

Feintuch went on TV that night, and though he is positive that he never mentioned the GSA, White says that "since many persons seeing the show received the impression that the Bulletin editor was speaking for the GSA, or, at least, for a large group of graduate students, and since he was not, it was felt that more care should be taken in making news releases."

At the February 5 meeting Parker proposed that from then on "the Bulletin editor shall make no statement to the press clamiing to represent the GSA or the Bulletin." The motion passed, but Feintuch hasn't accepted his reprimand gracefully.

"It was clear from the beginning that this was a motion of censure of the Bulletin editor for daring to put out a real newspaper," Feintuch says.

He interprets the constitutional clause dealing with the Bulletin broadly. The passage reads, "The Graduate Bulletin Committee shall publish a newspaper containing notices and news features of interest to all graduate students."

"My personal opinion," Parker replies, "is that the Bulletin should be a newsletter. It's not independent--the Council supports it."

THE move to silence Feintuch is complicated by the role allegedly played by J. Petersen Elder, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Both Feintuch and Miss Theeman claim, in Feintuch's words, that "pressure from Dean Elder to kill the Bulletin after the Pusey editorial" was the decisive factor in securing passage of the motion curbing it's editor.

There is no doubt that, regardless of whether Elder and Pusey actually wanted pressure brought on the Bulletin, Council officers said that they did.

One member of the Council recalls that "Joe Budelis told me that he had spoken to Dean Elder and that Elder had told him that he was very angry about the Pusey editorial, and that President Pusey was angry and upset."

This member also overheard Roger Rifer, who had spoken to Elder, say "that Pusey wanted to get Feintuch expelled from school."

The statements by Budelis and Rifer were made the evening of February 5, minutes before the motion to silence Feintuch passed.

This Councilman also says that "I asked them (the sponsors of the motion) point-blank, and they said their intention was to end the Bulletin as a newspaper and turn it back into a monthly newsletter."

Elder said last night that these accounts of his role "sound like an Orient Express plot. I'm not going to try to get anyone out of an editorship--I not only didn't I wouldn't." Although asserting that he deplored Schwartz's editorial for what he called its inaccuracies, he said he had congratulated Feintuch for doing a good job with the bulletin. He added that "if President Pusey is furious about something he can express his own fury."

Parker says that "Elder did not exert any pressure" for a particular manner of dealing with Feintuch. "He mentioned it, and we mentioned it, and he just wanted to know if this was the position of the Council."

THE referendum clash and the battle over the Bulletin are both crucial points of departure in the GSA issue. The referendum, if it fails to pass, may well be the last attempt for a long time to make over the Council into a partially political animal. And Feintuch's support is eroding on all sides.

As for Budelis, Parker, Munyon, and company, on many sore points between their group and the radicals, they are guilty merely of clever politicking. But White's appointment and the Elder myth that served as a bludgeon prior to Feintuch's muzzling constitute something more.