Michael Gelber Hates Harvard: Mayoral Hopeful Makes His Case

Last week they held a mock funeral for the International Monetary Fund. Sunday, they are staging a production of "Macbeth" to illustrate how Boston public education has ignored high culture.

And in November the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) is running a full slate of candidates in Boston for mayor, the city council, and the school committee. They are campaigning on a platform that promotes x-ray beam technology, accuses respected U.S. diplomat W. Averill Harriman of being America's "biggest racist," and believes Harvard has a "master plan" to destroy, the city of Boston.

The NDPC--which is not affiliated with the National Democratic Committee (NDC)--is just another name for what used to be the United States Labor Party, an organization headed by 1984 presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.

Star Wars

In Boston, the "Beam Technology Slate" is headed by Michael Gelber, a transplanted New Yorker who has become notorious for his exploits and accusations in an otherwise sedate mayoral race.

Gelber will probably not be in the running much longer. The eight-man field will be reduced to two next Tuesday in a preliminary election--the winners face off November 15--and Gelber will most certainly not be one of the survivors. In recent media polls, he has received negligible support from voters contacted.

But Gelber, in an interview last week, said he only felt "sorry" for those people who did not accept his politics, which he termed "conservative Democratic."

Harvard's Crimes

Sitting in a cafe across the street from a sparsely attended forum at the Berklee Performance Center, the candidate made his case against Harvard--the University, not its "victimized" student population.

* The "Boston Compact," a widely heralded educational program to provide work for local high school graduates, is a plot developed by the Vault--a powerful group of local business leaders--and the Harvard Graduate School of Education to "take children out of school and put them to work as cheap labor."

* Ever since Charles W. Eliot was Harvard president in the last century, the University has promoted theories of racial supremacy and "the idea that non-Anglo Saxons should have no rights."

* The Harvard-educated Henry Kissinger '50 is a "traitor to the Jewish people and a traitor to human civilization."

* Harvard is trying to reduce the world's population by reducing industrial growth and destroying the family unit.

* Professor of Economics and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Martin S. Feldstein and other proponents of "Friedmanite bullshit" are lying when they say the country is in the midst of an economic recovery.

Gelber has been heckled, jeered, and, according to the candidate, "almost lynched" because of a Jesuit joke he made in the predominantly Irish-Catholic South Boston neighborhood but every so often he wins someone over.

And, every so often he convinces a voter of one of his campaign slogans: "Before Hitler there was Harvard."