Another day, another meeting. It's the first really cold, clear day in late November, and secretaries at the Business School are coming in to Kresge Hall for their lunch hour. Kresge, you understand, is one of the B-School's imposing, immaculate buildings--quiet, a mass of glass and brick, exuding the aura of Olympian top-management executive retreats. Over on one side of the ground floor is a cafeteria where some of the secretaries eat plastic-wrapped sandwiches and drink half-pint cartons of Lo-Fat milk off of plastic trays.

On this particular day quite a few of the secretaries, about 50 of them, are filing off with their lunches into a room with gold chandeliers and a long horseshoe of wooden tables. As they walk in they see at the far end of the room, sitting behind a table, a man and a woman conferring.

The woman is tall and thin, with short blondish hair; she looks vaguely unusual. Perhaps it is that she is so nervous and full of energy--her long arms and fingers constantly dart about, lighting cigarettes and touching her hair. She has big, quick-moving eyes that sweep the whole room as she talks.

The woman's name is Traudi Schroder, and she is a secretary at Harvard too. She is a German emigrant, 34 years old, and for the time being, devoted to the idea of forming a union for Harvard's 4000-odd clerical and technical workers. The secretaries coming into the room with their lunch trays are here to hear about the unionizing effort.

The man sitting next to Schroder, Peter Van Delft, will do most of the talking; he is an organizer of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, a New York-based clerical workers' union with which Schroder is affiliated. Van Delft is an extraordinary-looking man, especially when he is sitting down. Although he is short, wears non-descript clothes--corduroy trousers, a shirt open at the neck--and is getting paunchy, he is impressive from the neck up. He has a huge, craggy head and a bushy brown beard that blends into his bushy brown swept-back hair. His eyes are deepset, big and bulging. He has a cigarette dangling from his lips, bobbing up and down, unlit. Although Van Delft is barely whispering to Schroder, his voice is so deep and resonant that the secretaries can hear it as they enter the room.

Van Delft knows his pitch well and delivers it smoothly, just as he has before at Columbia, Barnard, Princeton, MIT, Harvard Medical School and all the other places he has been since he and District 65 several years ago got the idea of organizing clerical workers in universities. Every organizing meeting is different, of course--the secretaries here are older than their Cambridge counterparts, have been working for Harvard longer and are more suspicious about the idea of joining a union. When Schroder says, in her mild German accent, that District 65 is "the first union that has really looked at women's problems," the secretaries just sit passively. At a Faculty of Arts and Sciences organizing meeting, the women might have murmured their approval.

Still, Van Delft is on the case. A woman named Linda Brown introduces him--"We most of all want to feel that at the richest university in the world we should have a voice," she says--and Van Delft starts to speak in booming, reassuring tones, the unlit cigarette jouncing up and down in his mouth.

He begins to talk about District 65, telling the story of its secession from the AFL-CIO after quarrels over the Indochina war and minority representation in the union. "We advocated changes," he says, "and in 1968 we decided that no longer in good conscience could we continue in a union we so sharply disagreed with."

The secretaries look skeptical and start peppering Van Delft with questions--Do you have a closed shop? How much are union dues?--but Van Delft handles them well, explaining that District 65 has a union shop and low dues. This meeting, in fact, seems better than most. When Van Delft has had business elsewhere and couldn't make it, things seemed unfocused and less authoritative. Shroder, meanwhile, counterbalances Van Delft; she is funny where he is serious, impulsive where he is knowledgeable, Harvard-connected where he is alien.

Along towards one o'clock, an earnest young man, a member of District 65's Harvard organizing committee, raises his hand and says, "I think we should talk more about why we want to have a union. We haven't talked about this enough. Nobody's really said why we want a union. There's even some people who aren't here." The speech is hardly a brilliant stroke of organizing strategy; these meetings are supposed to be anything but long self-explanatory sessions. Schroder and Van Delft start to whisper and shuffle papers and the secretaries, their lunch hours almost over, shift in their seats and begin to get up to leave. The young man gives imploring gazes around the room as the secretaries file out, off to an afternoon back at their offices typing and answering the phone. Schroder reminds them as they go that they should come to the organizing committee's Christmas party a few weeks hence, and then she goes back across the river, to her own office at the Observatory.

* * * * *

Traudi Schroder wants a promotion from Secretary I Technical to Secretary II Technical, and to apply for it she had to fill out a seven-page job description. The form now neatly typed out and signed by her boss, begins like this:

Name: Gertraude L. Schroder

Department: Astronomy

Faculty: FAS