Students for Just Peace Press Charges Against 16 for Disruption

Members of H-R Students for a Just Peace (SJP) filed charges Wednesday against 16 people who they said helped disrupt the March 26 "counter teach-in" which SJP sponsored.

The organization's co-chairmen also asked Dean Epps yesterday to bar permanently from further use of University facilities four groups which it said organized the disruption: SDS, PL, the University Action Group (UAG), and the Radcliffe-Harvard Liberation Alliance (RHLA).

The 16 people whom the SJP members identified as disrupters include 14 students, one Faculty member and one Buildings and Grounds employee. Most of the students, SJP program director Stephen Rosen '74 said last night, are members of the four groups that SJP asked be stripped of University privileges.

Administration Charges, Too

The Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), according to chairman Donald G. Anderson, won't hear the cases of the 14 students until the Harvard administration has pressed its own charges against disrupters of the counter teach-in.

Those charges in all probability will be filed in the next week or two, according to Vern Countryman, professor of Law. Countryman is one of two members of the Law faculty whom President Pusey has asked to present to the CRR the administration's evidence against disrupting students.

UPI Film

To help identify disrupters, the administration is using a film of the disruption that it purchased from UPI. Senior tutors were invited to see the film this week, and at least one of them gave the administration the name of a student in his House whom he had identified in the film as "shouting and ?tomping his feet."

The administration has identified at least four other students as having disrupted the counter, teach-in. And, according to Countryman, further identifications "almost certainly" will be made.

SJP Statement

In a statement released Wednesday, SJP said that the 16 people it has accused of disruption "are being charged with actively shouting and chanting with the intention of preventing the invited guests from speaking."

It is SJP's responsibility, the statement continued, "to take independent action against persons who act to abridge [SJP's] right of free speech through coercion."

SJP co-chairmen Laszlo Pasztor '73 and Arthur N. Waldron '71 wrote to Epps that SDS, PL, UAG and RHLA should be deprived of University privileges because "we have reason to believe that [they in their] organizational capacity did plan to and did actually disrupt a scheduled teach-in on the war in Indochina in violation of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities."