Coop Nomination Petitions Due Today; 'Cooperative Slate' Seeks Signatures

Eleven students from Harvard and MIT seeking nomination for election to the Harvard Cooperative Society's board of directors as members of an informal slate sympathetic to the store's union organization effort will wrap up their signature drive today. Petitions for the students' nominations are due at the Coop this afternoon.

To gain access to the ballot for the 11 positions on the board of directors set aside for undergraduates and graduates from the two universities, each member of the group--which calls itself "the cooperative slate"--must submit a petition with at least 100 signatures from Coop members.

Guy D. Molyneux '81-3 said last night he has received more than 120 signatures. Although he added that he is unsure if each of the slate's members has obtained 100 signatures, he said he expects all will be able to submit petitions with the required number of signatures by today's deadline.

Karen Jacoby, secretary to James A. Argeros, general manager of the Coop, said yesterday she will collect the petitions and check for duplicate signatures, adding that there would be no bias against the members of the cooperative slate in the nomination procedure.

No Distinction

The Coop will mail ballots to all members next month and will count the returned votes by computer after the April 28 voting deadline. Candidates "are nominated by the student body, and the student body is the one that elects them. The computer doesn't know that they're on the slate," Jacoby said.

Meredith J. Kane, a student at the Law School, and a member of the slate, said last night that because she submitted her petition with more than 140 signatures yesterday, she expects no problems with her nomination.

Amy Banse, a Harvard undergraduate running on the slate, said Wednesday that she had collected nearly 120 signatures, and planned to submit her petition on time.

Other members of the slate seeking nomination were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The election for the student directors comes more than a month after the March 26 union election, in which Coop employees will vote to determine whether to give the United Food and Commercial Workers the right to represent them in contract negotiation with the store's management.

Anti-Union Stance

Kane said her belief that the Coop had lost its original spirit as a cooperative as well as its concern for students was a chief factor in her decision to seek the nomination, adding that she would seek to change some of the Coop's present policies, especially its anti-union stance.

Base said that although the slate would tend to sympathize with union issues, if elected its representatives on the Coop's board of 23 directors would not be a rubber stamp for a union.