No Class In This Gift

JUST A FEW WEEKS from now, Derek Bok will solemnly welcome the Class of '81 to "the company of educated men and women." We congratulate those who have become educated during their stay here, and we urge them to show their learning in two ways.

The first is by boycotting the Class gift, and by refraining from giving any money to this University, until it changes its investment policies. Many in the past few years have refused to donate money to an institution that will use it to invest indirectly in apartheid; to a University as interested in donations as Harvard, this kind of pressure is likely to be extremely effective. If students feel they must give money somewhere this spring, they would be serving a more honorable purpose by aiding the Central American refugee fund administered by the American Friends Services Committee, as The Harvard/Radcliffe Committee on El Salvador has suggested, or any other organization working for world peace, such as Oxfam or CARE. And if graduating seniors feel an irresistible compulsion to give money to Harvard, they should support the Steve Biko Fund, a program that helps Black South Africans study at Harvard.

We also hope that seniors will see fit to wear green and white sashes on their commencement gowns. The symbolic protest against the violation of human rights in El Salvador and in memory of the slain children of Atlanta, organized by the campus committee on El Salvador, deserves the support as well of the class marshalls. They should decide at their meeting today to recommend that all seniors wear this decoration, a simple affirmation of the principles we might have learned here.