5 Demonstrations Mark Graduation

Four protests were scheduled to take place during today's Commencement Exercises and at least one more was a good possibility.

The issues protested ranged from the United States' involvement in Southeast Asia to the status of women in the University and the financial problems facing graduate students and teaching fellows.

Over 60 per cent of the Harvard-Radcliffe graduating seniors wore white arm-bands with double red bars to protest for equal admissions for men and women.

Students also wore black arm-bands to protest the war in Indochina.

In addition, the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow Union leafletted information concerning the financial policies of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the controversy over the discontinuance of the Staff Tuition Scholarship program.

A group of women alumnae from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) were also on hand to circulate a petition protesting the failure of the GSD to take affirmative action in hiring and recruiting women faculty and graduate students.

The Pan-African Liberation Committee (PALC) also planned a protest over Harvard's holdings of $680,000 worth of Gulf Oil Corporation stock, which was to include a mass walk-out by black students.

In April, 34 black members of PALC and Harvard-Radcliffe Afro occupied Massachusetts Hall for six days, charging that Harvard's Gulf stock holdings implicated it in Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. None of the 34 were punished by the University in disciplinary actions completed last week.

Today's demonstrations marked the fourth consecutive year of Commencement Exercise protest. A protest for equal admissions was held last year, and protests against the war in Indochina have taken place every year since 1969.