The Strike Vote

THE EVACUATION OF Massachusetts Hall by Afro and PALC yesterday displayed once again the timing and organization which have characterized their seven-day occupation of the building. The exit was carried out with style and bravado. Unfortunately, the cohesiveness of Afro and PALC has not extended to the Harvard strike, which has fallen into complete disarray. Tuesday night, after rejecting a motion to continue the strike in its present form, over one sixth of the persons at the Sanders Theatre strike meeting voted to reconsider the question. It then passed by a 324-190 margin, and the meeting adjourned after two and a half hours of aimless debate, although there were 13 items on the agenda, the meeting was able to move only through the second subsection of the first item before adjournment. At one point, only 15 persons voted on a question before the assembly.

Even if Tuesday night's meeting had displayed some semblance of cohesion and had outlined specific goals for a continued strike, there would still be serious doubts as to how representative the opinions of 350 people can be. Less than one third the number of last Thursday's original meeting attended Tuesday's session, and no unanimous of opinion was discernible even among that group. No common goals, nor even any commonly-supported actions, were settled Tuesday night.

Last week, we called for a nationwide student strike with a very specific goal: displaying massive opposition to continued U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Since then, there have been several forceful demonstrations of protest against Nixon policy in Indochina; these must continue, as often as possible, with as much support as possible. But as we were careful to note before, any student strike or antiwar protests must center primarily on the war. The lessons of the 1970 student strike are clear: actions aimed at universities are misdirected and serve only to detract from the overall effectiveness of antiwar demonstrations. The best example of this misdirection is the current mess at Columbia, where students and police have clashed off and on for the past week, proving nothing and turning public opinion against student protest.

At Harvard, the strike and antiwar actions have veered from the central issue of the Indochina war. In fact, Nixon's bombing of the North has been frequently neglected, lost in a morass of university-oriented issues. The strike as it is currently constituted should end. There is no real base of student support for its continuation. But we should go on working in whatever ways possible to end America's reign of terror in Southeast Asia. Students should return to class, but should be prepared to disrupt again their normal schedules and lend support to specific demonstrations of antiwar sentiment. This sentiment must not be lost in a shuffle of university issues.