Communications on Student Council

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

To one who was a member of last year's Student Council, the CRIMSON'S palaver over the powers and method of ratification of the new Council seems childish in the extreme. The old Council was organized in good faith to carry out the undergraduate part of an agreement with the Faculty regarding athletic regulation; its demise was a lamentable repudiation of its responsibilities; and its resurrection is absolutely necessary if the Faculty is to be given a square deal. And when the President and the Deans have been consulted as to the composition and authority of the new body, and when the necessity of reviving the Council while the machineries of class elections are convenient is self-evident, it hardly behooves a critic to discuss ideal methods of ratification and nomination.

As for the powers of the new Council: anyone who was in touch with the organization in the past knows that the defect of last year's Council was not its personnel--it was representative enough--but its careful observance of the limits of its authority; its punctilious avoidance of certain burning questions which concerned the whole body of undergraduates but which had not been expressly nominated in the bond which created the Council. The new Council of course will have any powers with which it is endowed by the President and Deans of the University on the one hand, and by the common-sense of the undergraduates on the other. To delay the formation of such a body by "nominations by petition" or futile discussions of the minutiae of ratification by everyone who is to be affected by the "direct jurisdiction over individual students" is, to say the least, shortsighted. Such a policy is part of the timid conservatism which killed the old Student Council. EDWARD EIRE HUNT '10.