IN ORGANIZING against the Kraus program, the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow Union has challenged more than a financial aid plan. It has questioned the priorities behind the Harvard budget and the process that sets those priorities. We support the Union's challenge.

We firmly endorse the Union's demand that the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences fund all students up to their calculated need. We support, too, their stipulation that the GSAS maintain the size of its teaching staff without increasing the teaching loads of current members. We agree that an increase in funds for graduate education must not come at the expense of undergraduates or Harvard's non-professional employees. The Union demand for departmental educational councils--half of whose members would be elected student representatives--is a reasonable request for more student participation in educational policymaking, and it has our strong support.

However, some of the Union's demands seem unnecessarily rigid, given the tightness of University finances, and we urge the graduate student to revise or explain the reasoning behind them.

The demand for $5000 of protected assets is excessive. Students have accepted the Kraus plan's estimate of $3300 per year for Cambridge living expenses. Yet the Union has demanded financial aid for its members who have assets that exceed the amount needed for a year's budget.

Furthermore, the demand that the plan contain no calculation of parental assets is unrealistic and can only injure those students from lower income families. Given that all parties must compromise, those graduate students having access to large amounts of aid in the form of parental assistance should seek it. As the Kraus plan's calculation of parental assets is unsatisfactory, we urge the graduate students to seek an acceptable formula accounting for such assets, thus freeing funds for those who have no other source. The present set of student demands rules out this possibility.

It is also unclear how these two demands, which require an increased University allotment for graduate student aid, can be met without withdrawing funds from undergraduates and non-professional employees, as the Union has justly demanded.

We support the unionization of graduate students. The Administration has demonstrated, through its maneuverings behind the Commission on Graduate Education, that it will not negotiate with graduate students within the framework of the Harvard bureaucracy.

However, the strength of a union lies in its numbers and the appeal of its demands. At this point, the graduate students' union may have neither. The 200 students at Wednesday night's meeting are only 10 per cent of the GSAS student body. And students who are not immediately threatened by the Kraus plan may not readily join a union whose demands seem excessive.

In order to convince the Administration of its power, the Union must enroll more than the 500 students that it hopes to attract by March 12. And the students must remain organized around their demands beyond the lifetime of a strike if they are to be a continuing check against any tendency in the Administration to retract financial commitments to graduate students.

Uncompromising attitudes killed the chance for a financial aid plan that would win acceptance from student and Faculty members earlier this year. Such attitudes could also kill the Union when it begins bargaining with the Administration, which has not been known for unbounded generosity toward students. The Union's present stance could also keep it from gaining the support among all graduate students that will enhance and maintain its bargaining power.

Thus, we urge the union to reconsider its demands so that it can present a more effective challenge to the Administration's prerogatives and can change the priorities that produced the Kraus plan and the present dilemma.