* Council leaders feel that politics are completely outside the Council's realm and they opposed the referendum from the beginning.

* Due to a passage in the Constitution, which allows the Steering Committee, now dominated by Parker, to re-appoint Council members year after year without public election, opposition and new ideas can usually be kept to a minimum.

* The GSA speaks for less than half the graduate students at Harvard.

But these are merely political facts, honest conservatism and a desire for self-perpetuation aren't crimes. More disturbing are other steps the GSA leadership has taken to insure its power.

Michael Schwartz, a supporter of Miss Theeman and an anti-war activist, had worked on the social action committee and on Feintuch's biweekly newspaper, the Graduate Bulletin. But he was not yet a Council member. Last month, then-president Budelis promised that Schwartz would be appointed to fill the next vacancy on the Council. By early February, however, the referendum controversy was steaming. In a surprise reversal in-coming president Munyon chose Jon L. White, Budelis's roommate, not only to take Schwartz's place on the Council, but to immediately assume the job of secretary.

Munyon explains developments by saying that "it was voted to appoint Jon White at this time since he was the only person who had expressed an interest in running for secretary, since he had worked for the Council before, and since some members expressed their opinion that he would make a good secretary."

What seems more likely is that Munyon chose not to add to the activist forces, and that no list of lame excuses can serve to justify White's astounding rise in fortune.

Schwartz is a central figure in the second turbulence to shake the Council. Last fall, when David Feintuch assumed the editorship of the Graduate Bulletin, it was a monthly sheet measuring about 12 by 4 inches, and devoted solely to announcements of graduate affairs: meetings, sports tournaments, and Council minutes.

Feintuch transformed the Bulletin into a bi-weekly, four-page newspaper which included feaure articles, columns, and stories which reported as well as recorded Council deliberations.

The Bulletin staff, which includes Miss Theeman and Schwartz, also printed blunt editorials criticizing the Council, under whose constitution the Bulletin is published.

ON February 2, three days before the meeting at which he was denied a Council seat, Schwartz wrote an editorial scalding Pusey for his reference to radicals as "Walter Mittys of the left."

"It is obvious," Schwartz wrote, "from the hysterical tone of the President's phrases that they are neither informed nor articulate. In fact, they might aptly be described themselves as 'belligerent nonsense' or 'a world of fantasy.' It is appalling that Harvard's President can be so ignorant of what is happening on campus."

Feintuch went on TV that night, and though he is positive that he never mentioned the GSA, White says that "since many persons seeing the show received the impression that the Bulletin editor was speaking for the GSA, or, at least, for a large group of graduate students, and since he was not, it was felt that more care should be taken in making news releases."

At the February 5 meeting Parker proposed that from then on "the Bulletin editor shall make no statement to the press clamiing to represent the GSA or the Bulletin." The motion passed, but Feintuch hasn't accepted his reprimand gracefully.

"It was clear from the beginning that this was a motion of censure of the Bulletin editor for daring to put out a real newspaper," Feintuch says.