While a score of newsmen urged them to "make a little noise--chant something," some eighty students from Harvard, Radcliffe, Brandeis, Tufts, and Simmons set out from the IAB yesterday afternoon, in a march to demonstrate sympathy for the student demonstrate at Berkeley, California.
As the line made its way through the House area and the Yard, students peered out of their windows to see what all the fuss was about. By the time the lively group reached Lowell Lecture Hall for a rally, they numbered about 200. A spokesman for he Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society had predicted Monday that the rally would attract "up to 400 people."
Once inside Lowell Lecture Hall the leaders of the group hoisted their banser, "We Support Berkely (sic) Free Speech," on the black board. "Take it down quick before they photograph it," one student cried suddenly, "Berkeley is spelled wrong." A Brandeis co-ed supplied a red stick of lipstick, and an "e" was inserted between the "I" and the "y".
First to speak was Arthur MacEwan, former president of the University of Chicago student body, who summarized the history of the Berkeley conflict.
Barney Frank '62, assistant Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Winthrop House, then told the gathering that the University of California officials have "compounded stupidity with ineptitude." The obligation for a university should be to clear away obstacles to political freedom, not to raise them," he asserted.
Stanley L. Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Associate Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, formerly a member of the Berkeley faculty, declared that the University had "under-estimated the character of the students involved. They underestimated both their moral and intellectual courage," he added.
Cavell, who noted that Berkeley had a "long history of grievances between the Administration and either its faculty or its students," said he was sure that friends of his "are fighting the good fight."
Also addressing the rally were Sumner Rosen, professor of Economics at Simmons, and Michael Hercovits, a sophomore at Brandeis. At the close of the meeting a telegram calling upon Clark Kerr and Governor Edmund Brown to drop all civic and academic charges against the demonstrators was unanamously approved
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