Panel Focuses on Expansion, Boycotts

A Cambridge tenant organizer told students Saturday that Harvard's expansion into Cambridge, an issue in the 1969 student strike, is at least as big a problem today.

"Harvard has recently begun serious real estate investment in the city," David Sullivan, a lawyer for the Alliance of Cambridge Tenants, said during a Philips Brooks House workshop which also featured discussions of the J. P. Stevens and Nestles boycotts.

The workshops were part of the weekend-long commemoration of the 1969 strike. Other activities included panel discussions Saturday on "Organizing for the Eighties" and the future of Afro-American Studies.

Sullivan accused the University of "attempting to alienate Harvard students from the community." Harvard has consistently tried to keep students from voting in Cambridge, because the kind of students who would register here would vote against the Harvard line," Sullivan said.

Easy Action

Andrew J.Kahn 80, a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, told the 20 students at the workshop that a new boycott policy recently approved by the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) would make boycotts easier to organize.

Official Action

The policy, which awaits Faculty Council and University approval, allows for official University boycotts in some cases, and sets up guidelines for individual user boycotts.

Kahn, a leader of the J.P. Stevers boycott, and B.Corey Stone Jr. '80, an organizer of the Nestles boycott, agreed lobbying is necessary to get the CHUL recommendation approved by the administration.

Tightening the Screws

"We have to figure out what ways we can put the screws on the administration to get the policy passed, especially since it will be coming up during the reading period," Stone said.

A regional organizer of the Nestles boycott told the group the company may be ending heavy promotion of its infant formula in underdeveloped nations.