First Published: Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIV, Number 59, 10 February 1970.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Eight members of the New University Conference, a radical faculty group, have been expelled from the organization in a political dispute, reducing the membership of the group to fourteen.
The eight members, all members or sympathizers of the Progressive Labor Party, were expelled at a meeting last month for “obstructionist tactics,” according to Katherine Ellis, a member of the NUC steering committee and a preceptor in the English department.
Bob Leonhardt, a member of the expelled PL caucus, depicted the remaining group as “a small clique, a reactionary debating society who felt that two forms can’t exist in the same organization.”
“The issue is not PL vs. NUC, but whether a small group of people should destroy the organization rather than work with a mass group, with the workers,” he stated.
Ellis described the expulsion of PL as a logical step, since the PL caucus voted as a bloc on issues. “The WSA (Worker-Student Alliance) views the NUC as a large amorphous organization from which it can recruit people,” she said. “The group kept meetings at the ideological debate, so that things couldn’t get done.”
Assistant Professor of English Frederick Grab, a former member of NUC, but not of PL, noted “the Orwellian humor of the situation” in NUC.
At the time of the expulsion, NUC steering-committee charged the PL faction with inviting people to NUC meetings without authorization, citing the phone number of a PL supporter as a source of information on NUC in a leaflet, refusing to cooperate with NUC’s plans to protest San Francisco State President S.I. Hayakawa’s speech in December, delaying the publication of a leaflet on the Black Panthers and interfering at an NUC women’s caucus meeting.