Senior Class Asks I. F. Stone To Deliver Class Day Speech

The senior class yesterday asked I.F. Stone, the Washington-based journalist, to be the principal speaker at Class Day exercises on June 14.

The results of the voting by the senior class March 10 and 11 showed Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be first choice. However, Susan G. Cole '74, Radcliffe Senior Marshal, said that the Class Day Subcommittee of the Senior Class Committee decided that an invitation to the Russian novelist would be "infeasible."

Needed Firm Commitment

Cole said that "tracking him down" would take too long and that the committee needed a firm commitment soon. Another reason Solzhenitsyn was not invited, she said, was that "if Harvard were to harness all its energy to get him to come, they wouldn't do it for Class Day."

Stone edited the Washington newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekley, from 1953 until 1971, when he joined The New York Review of Books as contributing editor.

Stone said the letter he received yesterday morning from the Harvard and Radcliffe Marshals sounded like "some subtly ambiguous statement to be found in State Department documents." He said he wondered if he "wasn't too anti-Establishment for Harvard" and said that he could not imagine "a commencement speech that would not set my teeth on edge."

"It's hard to speak at commencements," Stone said, "without talking a load of crap. It's a terrible genre." Stone said he would "sleep on it" and respond to the invitation within twenty-four hours.