For about 24 hours beginning Wednesday evening, Harvard students weren't on strike.

But the failure of the Graduate Student-Teaching Fellow Union to get the 60 per cent approval necessary to extend their two-day work stoppage didn't even make the top of the news page, as Harvard prepared for Thursday evening's mass meeting which voted to strike for at least five days against the war and to endorse PALC's Angola demands.

Only in retrospect does it seem obvious that the meeting would choose the middle road, rejecting SDS's proposal for "militant action against Harvard" concerning such topics as the CRR, approving support of antiwar political candidates and yesterday's one-day moratorium, but still insisting on a longer strike and complete support for the blacks occupying Massachusetts Hall. Two conditions unique in Harvard mass meeting history may have contributed to this result: sound connections between Sanders Theatre and Lowell Lec which really worked, and a chairman--economics teaching fellow Paddy Quick--who could really apply Roberts Rules to 2000 easily excitable representatives of the entire Harvard political spectrum, from left-of-center to left-of-sanity.

The meeting demurred on a motion to declare support for Russian Jews, lost in confusion an amendment which might have dangerously clarified the meaning of a strike-not-against-the-University, and adjourned before voting on a condemnation of the CFIA trashing and a 36-hour hunger strike.

On other campuses things were similarly bubbly, especially at the University of Maryland, where Governor Marvin Mandel gave control of the campus to the National Guard, and political turmoil blocked route U.S. 1 for the fourth consecutive year.