NO EXPANSION

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Speaking as one member of the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard Association, and not representing RTH, I would like to reply both to The Crimson article of April 24, 1974 and to the recent WHRB broadcasts about the strike of '69. The main problem with the article is that since it focused on the new housing we are building, it did not mention either that a lot of the old housing is remaining (for how long is constantly in dispute between us and Harvard, but it will remain, for a while, at least), or that people who will have to move can choose between moving either to the new or to the old housing.

Listening to the WHRB broadcast I was wondering why Mr. von Stade was complaining about being thrown out of an office building while Harvard was going to evict people from their homes, until he said something about how it was wrong to lay a hand on an official of Harvard University. Then I understood, because the people who run Harvard are elitist, and think that since they are from the social class which enables them to know more about Celtic Literature or kidney transplants they also know better than working class people what is better for the latter. Do they know more about Celtic Literature than people who grew up in Ireland? (although of course people in RTH have all kinds of backgrounds). How can they know better than we what we would like our community to be? What makes them think that one has to go to Harvard to be brilliant?

In all the fast thinking and talking during the strike, one of the main differences between the administration and the radical students was that we were not lying--and that is probably one of the main differences between Harvard and RTH now--we mean what we say.

Doug Levinson is doing his part in helping people learn to have control over their own lives by becoming one of the few competent therapists I have met or heard about. If everyone in this society had equal control over his or her own life, people in RTH who want to move would financially have no problem moving and those of us who want to stay would have no problem staying. But meanwhile we have to fight for survival. If you listened to the WHRB broadcast you could hear that while the police were breaking down the doors of University Hall the students on the inside were chanting "Smash ROTC! No Expansion!" More and more of the rest of Mission Hill means it now too, Harvard: No Expansion. As Woody Guthrie sang, "It isn't the outlaws that drive the people from their homes." Jeanie Neville   Mission Hill Resident