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Students at the Graduate School of Design decided yesterday to organize a partial tuition boycott and pledged over $1000 to help pay the salary of Chester W. Hartman, assistant professor of City Planning, whose appointment will expire this June.
At an ad hoc meeting held yesterday, approximately 200 of the 310 students registered in the school voted "to recommend that Hartman be rehired and promoted to the non-tenured position of associate professor." Only one student present dissented from the vote.
Kilbridge Reaffirms Decision
Maurice D. Kilbridge, dean of the Graduate School of Design, reaffirmed Wednesday his decision not to renew Hartman's appointment, although he said that Hartman will be reappointed to the directorship of the Urban Field Service, a post he has held for the last five years.
Thomas E. Nutt, a third year student who is also head of the school's Student Senate, said that those at the meeting agreed that every student should be urged to withhold at least $25 from his tuition payment and contribute it to the Chester Hartman Trust Fund Nutt said that $25 represents the amount that would have gone from each student's tuition to pay Hartman's salary, had he been rehired.
Investigation Asked
The students at the meeting also voted unanimously to request that the American Association of University Professors investigate the termination of Hartman's teaching contract.
In his Wednesday statement, Kilbridge emphasized that Hartman's political persuasions had not been a factor in the decision to terminate his contract. "I don't see how it could be anything else," R. Stephen Browning, a second-year student and member of the school's student senate, said yesterday, 203 students have signed a petition calling Hartman "an effective, inspiring and dynamic teacher" and "an exemplary man in a mediocre department."
Pusey Unhappy
"It is also generally known that President Pusey is unhappy with Hartman's activities and views, and that the Dean has felt constrained by the President's views in other situations," a Student Senate statement said in reply to Kilbridge.
Last spring Hartman was a member of the short-lived Committee for Radical Structural Reform, a caucus of graduate students and faculty members which opposed expansion by Harvard in Cambridge and Roxbury and demanded that the University build low-rent housing.
Fifty-three students at M.I.T.'s Department of Urban Studies and Planning signed a petition requesting that Hartman be offered an appointment on the M.I.T. faculty.
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