Group Organized to Bring Students And Teachers Into Active Politics

A group of students and teachers met in Cambridge this weekend to form a national organization that will train students and teachers to run for political office.

"It's time for seven million students and teachers to start taking steps to make decisions that affect their lives," the Student-Teacher Political Action Committee's statement says.

The group chose Cambridge as a recruitment center because it wants to attract Harvard students and faculty members, and becouse it already has several members from Brandeis and Northeastern.

They have raised $3000 during the past week, plus a small grant from an unnamed company. Spokesmen at a press conference yesterday claimed they have already enlisted members at 41 schools across the country. They are setting up a headquarters in New York city.

The committee has disaffiliated itself with any existing political group. "We don't want to have to sacrifice our principles," said Gerald M. Schaflander, a member of the steering committee. Schaflander is an instructor in Sociology at Brooklyn College, N.Y.

Schaflander and a teacher at Hunter College conceived the idea of a student-teacher political action committee after they had taken a group of their students to Washington, D.C., last Tuesday to meet with Senator Robert F. Kennedy '48 (D-N.Y.).

Press RFK

The two teachers and their students had hoped to press Kennedy to take a firmer stand on Vietnam, and were disappointed. They decided that teachers and students needed a more powrful way of advancing their views than talks with senators.

The group's policy statement calls for;

* support U Thant's three points for ending the Vietnam War.

* a public re-investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy.

* support of Martin Luther King's $100 billion program against "poverty, discrimination, and urbon chaos."