Pfizer Drug Co. Refuses To Talk to Chem Students About Corporate Policies

Charles Pfizer and Company, a drug firm, will not recruit at the Harvard Chemistry Department this year because it is unwilling to send a representative to discuss its policies with students in the department.

According to a departmental rule established after the Dow incident in 1967, a petition signed by at least ten per cent of the department's graduate students and research fellows can force a company to participate in such a discussion before it is allowed to recruit.

Konrad E. Bloch, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and chairman of the Chemistry Department, received a letter from the Pfizer company yesterday saying that Pfizer would not accept the invitation to the meeting.

Last November, the department's student-faculty policy committee received the petition and the signatures and asked Bloch to write to Pfizer. Along with the letter, Bloch sent Prizer a tentative agenda for the meeting.

The committee suggested that the discussion include:

the ability of the individual scientist to control his own research;

Pfizer's minority group hiring policies;

Pfizer's policies on drug pricing, pollution control, and defense research.

The Dow Chemical Company is the only other firm that the department has required to discuss its policies before it recruits. Dow also refused.

Douglas L. Shore, chairman of the student-faculty committee and a graduate student in chemistry, said yesterday his group may consider ways of modifying the department's policy in order to get a better response from the companies. He said that currently the chemistry job market is flooded. He said Pfizer may have decided that "it wasn't worth the bother."

By coincidence, the president of Pfizer, John J. Powers Jr., will speak at the Business School this afternoon on "Government Regulation of the Drug Industry."

Powers was originally supposed to speak to the Business School's Public Affairs Forum a year ago, but the date kept getting postponed for various reasons. Powers picked his own topic. The talk is at 4 p. m. in Aldrich 112.

Powers' secretary said that he picked where he spoke by how interesting it was to him. "Naturally the Business School is interesting to business people," she explained.