Controversy Arises Over NSA Decision

The Student Council's withdrawal from the National Student Association evoked a storm of local protest yesterday, but other Ivy League student government officials expressed agreement with the Council's action.

A member of the Council minority which favored maintenance of NSA membership has threatened to resign; at least one undergraduate organization, the Freedom Council, is reportedly planning a formal protest against the withdrawal; and Paul E. Sigmund, Jr. 5G, a former officer of the NSA, attacked the council's counterproposal of an eastern college seminar as "provincialism."

Support for the Council's decision came from student government heads at Brown and Columbia. John Christie, president of the Cammarian Club, Brown's student government association, said his group withdrew for reasons similar to those advanced at Harvard. Brown considered the organization a "waste of time and money," and derived only "an abundance of literature that almost made us move out."

William Rosenblum, president of the Columbia University Student Council, said his group is also considering withdrawal. He expressed the opinion that "we give more than we take," and said the Columbia delegation to the recent national conference of the NSA was preparing an evaluation report.

The chairman of the Columbia College Student Board, Bernard Tucker, has invited Ivy League, Little Three, and Seven-College Conference colleges to send delegates to a student governmental seminar sometime in December. Marc E. Leland '59, local Council president, said yesterday that his group would probably cosponsor the meeting.

In a letter to the CRIMSON, Sigmund, international vice-President of NSA in 1954-55, wrote that the seminar proposal "reflects a kind of provincialism which I hope is not representative of the scope of interest of Harvard students." He asked that emphasis be placed on "what Harvard can do to contribute to the solution of problems which are the common concern of all American students."