CRR to Hear Case Arising From Cancelled Lecture

The Committee of Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) will tonight hear the case against a graduate student charged with preventing Edwin H. Land '29, president and chairman of the board of the Polaroid Corporation, from delivering a scientific lecture on color vision at a Physics Department Colloquium on March 8.

No actual disruption of the lecture took place, but expectations that demonstrators would attempt to force Land to discuss Polaroid's policies in South Africa led the Physics Department to cancel the lecture shortly before it was due to begin.

About 60 people attended a meeting which took place immediately preceding the scheduled lecture, several rooms away from the hall in which Land was to speak, to consider ways in which to confront. Land over the issue of Polaroid's business activities in South Africa.

Polaroid equipment is used in preparing the identification cards which black South Africans are required to carry.

The CRR will consider charges tonight against the chairman of that meeting, Allen S. Weinrub, who is a student in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics.

Another graduate student, Donald Chodrow, filed the charges against Weinrub. He charged that Weinrub had prevented him from hearing Land speak by chairing the meeting "with the intent of having that meeting decide to disrupt Land's address."

Chodrow complained that as chairman of the meeting. Weinrub "made no attempt whatever to rule out of order those suggestions that involved clear attempts to violate the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities."

The Commission of Inquiry has already considered the incidents surrounding the cancellation of Land's lecture. In its initial report, it stated that the "vote of the meeting [which was held before Land's scheduled lecture] was to disrupt the lecture and not allow Mr. Land to speak."

In a second. "supplementary" report it stated again that the group "voted overwhelmingly . . . not to let Mr.Land begin to speak," but recognized that the group might only force Land to delay the delivery of his prepared speech.

According to Weinrub and Margaret Marshall, a student at the Ed School and a member of the Africa Research Group. a majority at the meeting voted to raise the issue of Polaroid's policies before the end of Land's lecture and not wait until a question-and answer period which might follow.

But both said that, when the meeting adjourned, no agreement had been reached on the manner in which the issue would be raised.

One person had suggested preventing Land from speaking until Polaroid's policies had been changed, Weinrub said, but others proposed that Land be prevented from speaking until he had agreed to discuss the Polaroid issue. "It would not have been a situation in which Land would not be allowed to give his talk." Weinrub said.

Robert V. Pound, chairman of the Physics Department and one of the professors who made the decision to cancel the lecture, said yesterday that he had not expected that the demonstrators would completely prevent Land from giving his prepared lecture. He said he thought they would let the lecture proceed once the South African question had been discussed. But, he said, raising the issues would have created an unsuitable climate for the lecture.