Students Picket M.I.T. Inauguration, Protest University Inner Belt Policy

While leaders of the academic world watched Howard W. Johnson take over the reins of M.I.T., a small group of students and local residents picketed outside Rockwell Cage asking a change in M.I.T.'s position on the Inner Belt highway.

In an open letter to the new president, M.I.T. student groups said "M.I.T. is threatened with being cast as the villain in a political battle that is of its own making."

The letter asked M.I.T. to repudiate officially the Brookline-Elm St. route for the highway; this route, originally recommended by the state and now under review, would displace between 3000 and 5000 people and cut through the heart of Central Square.

"We call on you, President Howard Johnson, as a new voice in M.I.T. leadership, to lead us in a rapprochement with a neighborhood that only M.I.T. can save from total and immediate annihilation," the letter declared.

M.I.T. has never officially endorsed one alignment over another, but, last February, it attacked the two other routes considered as the only practical alternates to Brookline-Elm.

One of these routes would have taken a number of M.I.T. buildings. The other is near the edge of the Institute's campus, but does not infringe upon it.

"As students at M.I.T., who live temporarily in Cambridge, it is painful to be regarded as representatives of an institution suspected of imperial designs on people who cannot defend themselves," the letter said.