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Steve Kaplan Ken Glazier

Two Kinds of Student Politicos Find Their Place in Harvard's Year

KKAPLAN, on the other hand, had been forced to go to the administration for everything the HUC did. He held weekly conferences with Glimp during the year and semi-weekly talks with Ford. Most became general discussions of student gripes, but the channels of communication were open to him. HUC had made Kaplan a natural student-administration coordinator. SFAC turned Glazier into an organizational head. Glazier and Kaplan not only think alike, but even talked the same. "During the strike, Kaplan and I didn't have anything to do with each other organizationally," Glazier said, "but we understood each other and thought about the issues in the same way. You'd better check with Kaplan about that." Two days before, Kaplan said, "I don't know what I did for three days during the strike. I talked with Faculty and students and the Corporation Sunday afternoon. I never really talked with Ken during the strike, but there was an understanding through it. We had the same areas of concern and argued in the same way, but you'd better check with Ken on that."

After February, Kaplan and Glazier both left their leadership of the HUC and SFAC, but saw each other while working unofficially with the Fainsod Committee on restructuring.

In March, when it was obvious that the SDS Spring campaign would peak after Easter vacation, Kaplan began to attend SDS meetings to see what was going on. Glazier, his year on SFAC over, returned to a non-political life. "You name it, and I didn't do it," he said.

"I had no particular interest in getting involved in anything," Glazier said in explaining his late appearance outside University Hall after the sit-in April 9. Kaplan, John Hanify, this year's president of the HUC, and Frank Raines, present chairman of SFAC had been there since noon.

While the moderate students spent all of Wednesday night looking for a middle ground between impatient radicals and outraged administrators, the need for a moderate political force during the crisis became readily apparent. The HUC and the SFAC were totally inadequate. Perhaps because Raines and Hanify had not adjusted to the roles that Glazier and Kaplan vacated or perhaps because of the lack of any substantive power in Harvard student government--a lack which Glazier and Kaplan had managed to overcome through the minor crisis at Paine Hall.

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"The leadership of Mem Church fell to me because I could jell more people around me than anyone else," Glazier said. As former chairman of the influential student committee, "I was the least common denominator," he added.

During the strike, Glazier became the only visible moderate leader; working through the weekend however, he tired of the pressures of holding together a group which was well-intentioned but totally unorganized and without any mandate for forging policy. While Kaplan continued through the entire wekend and authored the final proposal that ended the strike on April. 18, Glazier announced the dissolution of the Mem Church Group at the first mass meeting on Monday, April 14. Within three hours, he was on his way to the Cape with a friend from the Mem Church group to get away for two days.

With the Strike over and the issue of University restructuring now in the hands of both the Committee, Kaplan and Glazier have been consulted regularly on the role of student government in any new University government proposal.

Glazier has seemingly faded into and faded out of the Harvard political scene this year--rising to local and even national fame through his leadership of the moderates in the Strike. From his cramped single on the top of Kirkland House and back into it, he has only been a Harvard politician for one year. Still he believes that the movement in restructuring will be toward more student-faculty committees like SFAC.

Kaplan, on the other hand, has been in student government for four years and has difficulty getting out of himself to see where the changes have taken place. He too thinks that a student voice in University decision-making will come through joint committees rather than an expanded role for something like the HUC. "I really don't know what the effect of my year on HUC has had," he said. "The one thing that can be said is that we raised the sights of HUC and student government." Next year, the Faculty must make the final decision on what direction those sights are aimed.

In details, their styles flare away to separate poles. Glazier calls Kaplan, "Kaplan." Kaplan calls Glazier, "Ken."

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