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Poll Reveals Conservative Core in Freshman Class

(This is the second in a two-part feature.)

IS THE Admissions Committee playing polities?

The first class admitted to Harvard after what President Pusey called a "dismal year" has been called straight, conservative, and dull. Some charge that a conspiring admissions committee is the culprit, scooping up conservatives and screening out radicals to bring more stable student population to Harvard.

Chase N. Peterson '52, dean of Admissions and Financial Aids, strongly denies any political mancuvering, however, in choosing the class of '73.

"We've a long tradition of tolerating a variety of points of view and encourage them. So we do not make a political analysis and don't intend to," Peterson said.

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"We should bring power into this University and the University should have the traditions and respect for civil liberties sufficiently strong to control the occasional and predictable out bursts of any strong bunch of guys," he added.

"We could guarantee safety only with an outrageous pouring in of blandness. We'd have to be going with the blandest of our applicants," he said.

Peterson concluded "the byproduct of diversity happens to be a fair amount of balance. There's a built-in honesty to our diversity."

Strike Discourages Conservatvies

Last Spring, more students turned down Harvard than in any other recent year. Two-hundred fifty-nine students from the admitted class of '73 went elsewhere as opposed to 203 the year before. Although Yale's coeducation is probably part of the explanation, the occupation of University Hall must certainly have given many conservative students second thoughts.

The annual freshman profile gives us only a mixed view of the class's possible polities. While students from lower-class non-radical families have more representation than ever before-and thus might tend to make the overall class less radical-there has been a simultaneous decrease in the number of students from upper class non-radical families, thus maintaining the political balance from previous years.

Statisties for the class of 1973 show that there are more sons of blue-collar workers here than ever before. There are 111 sons of laborer, factory hands, and public workers this year, in contrast to 86 last year.

Where 101 students in the class of 1972 came from families with university professors or administrators asfathers, only 78 such students are in the class of 1973. The same all-time low, dating back at least seven years, can be found for sons of government administrators or diplomats, 47 this year and 61 last year, and for sons of officers in the Armed Forces-13 in the Class of 1972 but only 7 in the Class of 1973.

Definitive Conservative Sentiment

The Class of '73 chalked up a 20 to 25 per cent conservative response on questions ranging from the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities's disciplinary decisions to the University Hall crisis last April.

Freshmen gave the CRR a sizeable vote of confidence with more than 40 per cent endorsing each of its decisions as "just about right" But the conservative contingent revealed 20 per cent calling the CRR decisions "too lax"

The poll showed that 18 per cent of the class agreed with Pusey's decision to call in the police and that 28 per cent would not have supported last April's strike after the University Hall bust.

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