Senior Women, Grad Students Meet To Discuss Protest at Commencement

The Radcliffe Class Day oration will be a collectively-written summary of women's protests against University hiring and educational practices, the president of the senior class, Lynn Sakai '73, announced last night.

A poor response among Radcliffe seniors to an audition at which one speech and speaker for Class Day were to be selected compelled the cooperative approach to the oration, Sakai said at a meeting of 40 University women in Lehman Hall.

The women agreed unanimously that a collective speech could most accurately represent the attitudes of the graduating class.

Merger?

Later in the meeting, the women also debated recommendations for a complete Harvard-Radcliffe merger.

"We stand out as women at Harvard much more conspicuously than do women in the real world," one woman representing a women's graduate student organization said last night.

Members of women's organizations from the Medical School and the School of Education, in addition to Chicano un-dergraduates and women from Lowell House, attended the meeting to voice suggestions about the merger.

Liss Jeffries '73, an organizer of the meeting, said that suggestions offered at last night's gathering will be incorporated into the final draft of the Class Day oration.

Women at the meeting suggested as targets for this year's protest the lack of a strong affirmative action program in hiring, haphazard undergraduate recruitment and limited access to Harvard's financial and recruiting resources.

"Overwhelmed, we're asked to simply accept certain policy assumptions [about opportunities for women in the University]," said one representative. "We've got to get away from [our] sentimentalism," she said.

A variety of different protest methods were proposed last night, including the wearing of armbands, leafleting and the establishment of an educational table in order to supply information about the issues being protested.

The women have called a second meeting Monday night to discuss further proposals for Commencement protests.