Graduate Student Council To Hold War Referendum

After several long hours of debate on parliamentary procedure, the Harvard Graduate Student Council last night voted, 13-11, to sponsor a referendum on the war in Vietnam.

The vote reaffirmed the Council's earlier resolution, passed at a meeting on January 15, to hold a referendum calling for "the immediate withdrawal of United States armed forces from Vietnam."

Last night's vote was held because of ambiguity over the exact nature of the January resolution. The minutes of the January meeting-- which detailed the wording of the referendum and its "binding" upon the Council--were apparently lost in the flurries of exam period excitement.

In addition to the referendum the Council will poll graduate student attitudes on the war, the draft, defense contracts, campus recruitment, and the role within the university of the Graduate Student Association, which has some 1500 members. All graduate students will be eligible to vote on the referendum at any of seven polling places next week.

Heated Debate

At last night's meeting in Harkness Commons, there was heated debate over both the referendum and the poll. Margaret A. Theeman, second year graduate student in Social Relations, led the forces favoring the referendum. "Harvard graduate students should have a chance to express themselves on issues more important than new television sets," she said. "I want to remind the Council that there's a war going on."

Allan Parker, also a second year student, replied that the national issues raised by the referendum were beyond the scope of the Council's work. He said that a poll would be an equally vaild form of student expression.

Critics of the poll charged that by offering a student as many as ten different answers to a single question it would show no conclusive results. They added that left-wing positions were often omitted. Parker promised to revise the poll.

Frequent confusion over parliamentary rules of order drove one observer to comment, "Nobody except the president and his cronies knows what's going on here."