SDS Marks Change in Campus 'Left'

A new group on the Harvard campus--Students for a Democratic Society--joined the long line of University organizations soliciting support at registration last week. Yet, despite SDS's newness, many of its members were old hands at manning registration tables, veterans of Harvard's peace group Tocsin.

The rise of SDS in the same year that Tocsin is quietly being laid to rest is no coincidence, for the new organization marks a fundamental change in the philosophy of Harvard's Left.

Its members are turning away from a passive study of peace and foreign policy and instead, embracing direct participation in the domestic problems which they see facing the country.

Where Tocsin was basically a study and discussion group dedicated to a single issue--disarmament--Students for a Democratic Society is activist, delving into a wide spectrum of problems, of which peace is only one.

"Our quest," reads an SDS statement, "is for a political and economic order in which peace and plenty are used for the widest social benefit, a participatory democracy in which people are given the means to control their lives."

Its projects range from campaigning against Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to setting up a local community center, from discussing domestic problems to studying conversion of military production to peace-time purposes.

What has caused this change of emphasis? Most likely a combination of the rise of the civil rights movement and the signing of the test ban treaty.

As David M. Kotz '65, vice chairman of Tocsin and acting president of SDS, put it, "We found that peace can't be won by studying the arms race, and all the student activists were drawn away into civil rights. While the arms race and disarmament negotiations are important, unfortunately they aren't very interesting."

Finding its single-issue approach too narrow last spring, Tocsin amended constitution to include problems of economics and civil rights. But it was still basically a peace group, and its member's interests had outgrown Tocsin's boundaries. When Anthony Graham-White '65, Tocsin president wrote to its other three officers this summer, for example, two of his letters were directed to Meridian, Miss., and the third went to a community project in Chester, Pa.

Thus, in a meeting next week, Tocsin's executive committee will propose to its members that when SDS receives University recognition at the end of October, the peace group dissolve, bequeathing to the new organization its mimeograph machine, its bankroll, and H. Stuart Hughes, its faculty advisor.