Short Takes

Student Arts Group Opens Exhibit Tonight

Student artists will exhibit their work in a show opening tonight in the Buttrick Room of Memorial Church, members of a new student group for the promotion of the visual arts said yesterday.

The show will be the first this year in a series of student exhibitions sponsored by Triptych, an undergraduate group that gained formal status this year. Other topics will include music and fiction reading, said Chloe A. Breyer '91, who gathered the artwork for tonight's show.

Opening night for the exhibition will include entertainment by Peter H. Schwarz '91, who will play folk music on the electric fiddle and harmonica, said co-coordinator Allison C. Humenuk '91. The show includes a range of artwork, said Breyer, including photography, painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture.

"We are not aiming toward perfect, polished pieces of artwork," said Breyer. She said that although most submissions came from Visual and Environmental Studies concentrators, several came from students in introductory art classes.

Triptych members said they invited all student artists to submit work, whatever the type, said co-coordinator Juliette N. Kayyem '91. The exhibition, which includes about 35 pieces by 25 artists, has no specific theme.

Triptych plans to hold four other shows this year, said Kayyem. She said the next, set for December, will focus on music, and will probably include four or five of musicians playing original compositions in different styles.

The show is scheduled to open at 7:30 p.m.

Freshmen Adorn John Harvard Statute

The tourists who gathered around the John Harvard statue Saturday morning saw the same one that millions of previous visitors have seen--with one exception.

The statue was draped with toilet paper.

The culprits were two mischievous freshmen who pulled the prank "just for fun," said one of the students, who refused to give his name. "We were watching 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,' and then we didn't have anything to do," he said.

"So, at 3:30 a.m. we went into Stoughton [Hall] South with a garbage bag," he said, "and we took every single roll of toilet paper, even the ones in the stalls."

The pair then put a bag filled with toilet paper on the statue's lap and draped the statue with the remaining rolls, he said.

The toilet paper was removed by 10 a.m.

"It was a spontaneous thing done just for fun," the student said, "but if the cops had come along, I think we would have offered to put all the toilet paper back."

Tom Sawyer Mimics Paint Union Gate

Those Yardlings just won't leave the Freshman Union alone.

In their latest Union prank, still-unidentified students painted white both a men's restroom door and the newly-installed gate that adjoins the dining hall, causing more than $3000 in damages.

Dining Service Supervisor John Shaffer said he found the paint still wet on the gate when he arrived at 4:45 a.m. last Thursday. In addition, he said paint had been splattered on the stone passageway surrounding that gate, on the stone floor and on chairs inside the dining hall.

Shaffer said the gate--installed a month ago as a security measure--was still locked.

Beginning today, workers will remove the splattered paint from the stone, sand down the gate and repaint it black, its original color.

Union Dining Hall Manager Katherine E. D'Andria speculated that the students who painted the gate were the same students who moved all the chairs from the dining hall to the second floor last month.

D'Andria said that the management plans to tighten security in the Union to prevent similar occurrences. "It's not a joke wasting that kind of money," she said.

And the quality? "It's a poor painting job," D'Andria added, pointing to the mess around the area and the uneven application of paint.

Cancer Confidential, Radcliffe Panel Says

A panel discussing the complex challenges women with cancer face in the workplace adamantly emphasized yesterday that these women are in no way compelled to informed employers of their medical conditions.

Barbara Hoffman, a lawyer who serves as vice president of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, told an audience of 20 at the Cronkhite Graduate Center that employers had no right to know a woman's medical information unless her condition could impede her ability to perform her duties.

"Legally, your diagnosis is none of their damn business," she said.

Hoffman said that 25 percent of all cancer victims experience job discrimination because of their medical history. Widespread perceptions that cancer is contagious, automatically terminal or necessarily debilitating were the most common sources of this discrimination, she said.

A woman's decision to inform others of her condition must be dictated by realism, said Cynthia Secor, the director of a management training program who is currently recovering from inflammatory breast cancer.

"Tell as many people as you want, but know who your enemies are and figure out how to neutralize them," Secord said.

Radcliffe Career Services sponsored the forum, the first installment of "Towards an Open Workplace."

Ellsberg Speaks At K-School Forum

The obligation to expose government wrongdoing should always supersede classified information laws, Daniel Ellsberg '52 told an audience of 150 at the Kennedy School yesterday.

"Whatever the state of the law is, even if the Constitution is reamended and the First Amendment gutted, it doesn't give anyone the right, or obligation, to keep U.S. operations secret," Ellsberg said.

The former Defense Department official who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, the federal government's secret account of its entrance into the Vietnam War to newspapers, said that he did so partly to relieve guilt over his role in wartime planning, but also to help prevent the war's escalation.

Ellsberg said that the conflict between his job as a defense adviser and his shock at military plans had surfaced several times before, particularly upon learning that America's nuclear strike strategy was projected to cause 600 million deaths worldwide.

"I assumed I was breaking the law," Ellsberg said. "Many of you have studied the question of when to resign [and also divulge secrets]....I hope you will all consider risking jail in certain circumstances, and I hope you will indeed do it in certain circumstances."