Word: antiwar
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...familiar heat of antiwar fever surged sharply but briefly, after President Nixon's decision to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam and mine the country's harbors. Yet peace activity was both slower and less forceful at Harvard than at many other colleges throughout the nation. While many schools were whipped into nearly instantaneous rage following Nixon's March 30 speech, students here failed to mount any serious antiwar actions until a week later when a loose coalition of antiwar groups called a mass campus meeting to plan protests...
MANY who attended the meeting and who listened to it broadcast over Harvard radio station WHRB were unclear about what constituted a strike. One faction said it meant a boycott of all classes; another group said it meant a general orientation toward antiwar activity--classes would not necessarily be skipped unless there was a conflicting peace protest planned. In any case, by the end of the five-day strike period only about 10 per cent of the student body were cutting classes--just about the normal percentage during the academic year...
...weary protesters adjourned the meeting before any vote could be taken on resolutions calling for substantive antiwar actions. And the next morning, class attendance showed that the call for a strike had gone almost entirely unheeded. Antiwar protests continued among smaller, specialized groups, but the attempt to give the movement a mass. University-wide base had failed...
AMUCH MORE DRAMATIC conflict--and one which ran concurrent to and may have sapped some of the strength of the antiwar movement--was the controversy surrounding Harvard's ownership of 683,000 shares of Gulf Oil Corporation stock. A group of black students, calling themselves the Pan-African Liberation Committee (PALC), called upon the University to sell its shares in Gulf--valued at about $18.5 million--and thus sever its connection with the company the group said was causing the greatest harm to the people of southern Africa...
...says he thinks the students picked the University as a target for many antiwar protests simply because it was convenient. "The University was tangible. The problems were intangible," he explains. "What the hell we had to do with the policy in Vietnam is still very difficult to understand...