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Harvard activists are not quite certain what they want commencement '68 to be, but they are agreed that it will be unlike the first three-hundred and thirty-two--one way or another.
Plots range from picketing and leaf-leting to calling in Norman Mailer and a flock of pigeons.
Jesse Kornbluth '68 has asked Mailer '43, who will be at Harvard for his 25th reunion, to head a panel discussion on the Vietnam war. Mailer has so far declined, pointing out that he is already on a literary discussion panel.
Kornbluth is working with Douglas Myers '68, Harvard Draft Union, and Henry Norr '69, Students for a Democratic Society, to get seniors to sign a "We Won't Go" pledge as part of the commencement exercises.
Coming-Out Party
"The administration makes graduation sound like a coming-out party," Kornbluth said yesterday, "and we don't want to come out."
Myers said the group plans to wear white armbands and perhaps picket in the Yard. The aim is to "communicate to parents" student objections to the war, and Myers hopes to collect 150 to 200 signatures against the draft.
Norr will distribute a two or three-page pamphlet containing "various objections to Harvard as an institution" to the commencement day crowd.
Another group of seniors plan to feed Ex-lax to 500 pigeons and point them at the commencement crowd. "We got the idea from [Alfred] Hitchock's The Birds," said one senior, who asked that his name be withheld.
Kornbluth doubts that many of the plans will materialize. "Most seniors are willing to go out with a whimper," he said
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