Joint Group to Explore Issues Raised by Protest

A Faculty-student-Administration committee--the first of its kind at Harvard--will be created in the near future to study some of the issues raised by last week's Dow Chemical Co. sit-in.

The original proposal came at Tuesday's Faculty meeting, when Stanley H. Hoffmann, professor of Government, introduced a motion for such a committee to deal specifically with campus recruitment, the relation of Harvard to the Vietnam war, and agreed-upon forms of protest.

Because President Pusey asked to discuss the wording of Hoffmann's motion with him, it was never voted on. But yesterday Pusey acknowledged that "there is a commitment to set up some sort of machinery, yet to be defined."

Neither Pusey nor Dean Ford established whether the committee would cover the issues cited by Hoffmann, and just those issues, or whether it might be of a more general nature. Ford said it was "very unlikely that there will be any significant change" in Harvard's policy toward campus recruitment.

In Lowell Lecture Hall yesterday, close to 125 students threw questions at Dean Glimp and each other as part of a two-and-a half hour open meeting on the sit-in.

Glimp began the meeting with a short statement outlining reasons for putting some demonstrators on probation, admonishing others, and refusing to punish those who handed in bursar's cards but were never identified inside Mallinckrodt, where the sit-in took place.

The notion of collective responsibility could not be accepted, said Glimp, becited the Faculty's "old-fashioned reaction against guilt-by-association" as a heritage of the McCarthy era. cause "we have to distinguish between acts on the one hand and speech on the other."

A number of students, and one Faculty member at yesterday's meeting, suggested that a similar distinction between acts and speech existed with regard to Dow.

David Riesman '31, Henry Ford II professor of Social Sciences, questioned whether recruiting constituted free speech, and said it was wrong that Dow could recruit while SNCC and SDS could not.

Michael S. Ansara '67-4, a participant in the sit-in, said that--in the Dow recruiter's own words--he was establishing a "contact point." If this "contact point" amounted to the first stage in a criminal action, Ansara argued, then the sit-in was valid because it intercepted that action.

Glimp disagreed, pointing out that the alleged crime was not "immediate," and that "the issue is the thing to raise, rather than to physically take it out on Mr. Leavitt. [the Dow recruiter]."

When Glimp mentioned the student-Faculty-Administration committee, Ansara outlined the sweeping investigation he thought such a committee should make into Harvard's involvement--collectively and individually--with the government.

"In a sense," said Glimp cautiously, "the kind of investigation you're talking about resembles the one McCarthy launched 15 years ago."

At the meeting's end, several students asked Glimp to schedule another, but he declined, explaining that he hadn't been able to answer enough of their questions. He urged students to ask other members of the Administration to hold similar open meetings.

Also yesterday, Zeph Stewart, Master of Lowell House released the results of a poll he had conducted among House members on the Dow sit-in.

About 50 per cent of those polled favored probation or admonition for demonstrators identified as door-blockers. Twenty-five per cent preferred equal punishment--specifically admonition--for everyone who handed in his bursar's card, and only 10 per cent wanted to see no action taken against anyone.

An overwhelming 88 per cent said all agencies should be permitted to recruit on campus, but that figure included 25 per cent who suggested Harvard privately discourage certain groups.

"It was the consolidation of sentiment in answer to the last question which surprised me most, and which I shall be sure to bring to the attention of whatever joint committee is set up to examine these problems," Stewart said in a statement issued along with the poll results.

In another development, a group of 40 graduate students met with J. Peterson