Strike Observance Opens With Panel Talk, Rally

Participants in a panel discussion commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Harvard strike disagreed last night over questions of student strategy during the strike.

Several students who helped organize the 1969 strike, which resulted in more than 200 arrests, defended the decision to take over University Hall. "The occupation was not one of our mistakes," Michael Ansara, a leader of SDS during the strike, who also spoke at an afternoon rally yesterday in the Yard, said.

However, Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government, told the approximately 200 people in the Kennedy School of Government's ARCO Forum that "simply the fact that it was a good cause does not justify acts of violence." Hoffmann specifically noted that student demonstrators had "pushed a dean down a staircase."

The panelists also discussed the effectiveness of the strike, many of them agreeing that it was not overwhelmingly significant. "We chanted at the time 'The whole world is watching.' In retrospect, I think it wasn't" Kenneth Glazier '69, a member of the Student Faculty Advisory Committee formed to consider the ROTC issue in 1969 told the crowd.

"We were the people who built the movement, though, the people who opened the door and saw what was going on inside, however briefly, "Carl Offner, a former member of the Worker-Student Alliance said.

Many in the audience objected that women were not represented on the panel. "It would be grossly inaccurate to say that women weren't involved in the movement," Mary Jo Connolly said during a question period.

Adrian Wesley, a member of the ad hoc committee to commemorate the strike which organized the panel, said she considered the makeup of the panel a "significant problem." "We looked for people who were visible, who were discussed in the major works about the strike. I am disconcerted, if not appalled, to find the way our biaswarped the panel," Wesley said.

Throughout the day's events, organizers asked students to boycott classes on Monday. Activities scheduled for today to commemorate the strike include a talk on "Organizing for the '80s."

The panel also discussed current campus movements. "There is no overriding issue as completely compelling as the war in Indochina," Ansara, the director of Massachusetts Fair Share, said. He added, however, the "job which we began in the sixties remains to be finished" and listed Afro-American Studies, University investments in South Africa, the antinuclear movement and course curriculum as issues that deserve for student attention.

Glazier suggested apartheid is "perhaps the wrong issue to be taking about--It's an easy issue. The question of busing is much tougher, but it's also an area where you might have more impact," Glazier said.

"It is also important to build relations with people outside of Harvard," Skip Griffin, former president of the Association of African and Afro-American Students, during the strike, said. "The decision-makers here at Harvard will outlast you," he added.

At the afternoon rally earlier in the day, George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology emeritus, predicted that student activism would surge in the next few years. "Antinuclear slogans are the graffiti of our time," Wald told the sparse crowd.

He warned, however, that "the power elite" would try to disrupt the movement "Watch out for infiltration--you start even mild opposition and you are infiltrated right from the beginning," said Wald, who later led the crowd in singing "John Brown's Body".

City Councilor Saundra Graham told the rally that Cambridge's housing situation is just as bad as it was in 1969 when striking students called on Harvard to help the city.

"Although we implemented rent control, we now have to deal with apartments being converted to condominiums," Graham warned, citing the City's 0.5 per cent vacancy rate as proof that "we are in an emergency situation."

"This rally is part of the education process," Graham said later. "We have to convince students that it is in their interest to be involved. I'd be remiss in my job if I didn't try to make people aware of the fact that we are all going down together," Graham added.

Susan Peterson, a member of the strike commemoration committee told the audience that the rally organizers are not "hopeless nostalgics. We're not waiting for the sixties to return, but just as this University was complicit in the war through ROTC, it is complicit now in apartheid through its investments," Peterson said