Amid rising speculation that the Nixon administration intends to widen the war in Southeast Asia, an Indochina Teach-In will be held in Sanders Theater at 8 p. m. tonight.

The teach-in will be one of the first in a series of 11 similar meetings, dubbed "Rolling Thunder" by their sponsors, to be held at major universities within the next two weeks.

Nine speakers, including former Senator Eugene McCarthy, New York Times associate editor Tom Wicker, and M. I. T. professor Noam Chomsky, will address the gathering. Chomsky was added to the list of speakers late last week along with Donald F. Reigle, a Republican Congressman from Michigan. The meeting will be chaired by Michael Walzer, professor of Government.

The speakers will also be heard by audiences in Memorial Hall, Lowell Lecture Hall, and Burr Hall by means of a public-address system connection from Sanders Theater. The meeting will be carried live on WGBH radio.

"Everyone is, in some sense, in despair," said assistant professor Martin H. Peretz, a member of the Student-Faculty Indochina Teach-In Committee which is sponsoring the meeting. "I think that we should be in informed despair."

Billed as a gathering that "will help define possible directions for the peace movement," the Teach-In will also include a period for statements and questions from the audience.

"Tactics will probably come up," said Mark Knudsen '71, co-ordinator of the Teach-In Committee. "Whether any speaker directs himself specifically to them is up to him."

Unscheduled speakers who are recognized by the chair will be allowed to speak for three to five minutes following the speakers, according to Knudsen. Three political groups-the Progressive Labor Party, SDS, and the Young Americans for Freedom-have been refused requests for speakers. SDS members made plans yesterday afternoon to leaflet in protest of the refusal, and to interrupt the program with chanting.

One member of the Teach-In Committee said late last night that the committee has not considered what to do in the event of such an interruption.

The sites of the other 11 campus teach-ins include Yale, North Carolina State, Kansas State, and Notre Dame. "Rolling Thunder," the name given to the series of meetings, was a military code name for bombing operations in North Vietnam; now the name is being used against that bombing.

Other speakers at the Harvard Teach-In will be: James C. Thomson, former staff member of the National Security Council and now assistant professor of History; Bella Abzug, the flamboyant Democratic Congresswoman from New York; Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government; Walter Pincus, former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Cynthia K. Frederick, former Harvard teaching fellow and recent visitor to North and South Vietnam.