Rocket Society Treasurer Claims Professors Refuse to Support Club

The Harvard-Radcliffe Rocket Society is having trouble attracting faculty members as sponsors, Richard M. Spector '59, treasurer, claimed last night. "Members of the Chemistry Department don't want anything to do with us if we actually plan to fire rockets," he charged.

Leonard K. Nash '39, associate professor of Chemistry, said he had been asked to be a sponsor, but had declined. "I didn't want to take responsibility for a group whose activities might degenerate into fun and games," he explained.

"If a group is interested in a serious and scientific approach to rocketry, and was willing to put in some real study, I might consider sponsoring it," Nash said. "But I'm not interested in a club which merely wants to put rockets into the air."

Spector characterized this type of attitude as "highly deplorable, and threatening to thwart interest in rocketry." He complained that the Society was being "treated like a bunch of high school boys playing with fireworks."

The Chemistry Department evidently wants the Rocket Society to be a study group only, Spector felt. "But we're not interested in merely studying rockets," "The Society was formed to fire them."

"We had assumed that the Chemistry Department's members would do all in their power to encourage our organization," said the society's president, Edward C. Pinkus '59, "and we are now quite shocked to learn otherwise."