MAGNI IN PARVO

The average student council is apt to be like the House of Lords in doing nothing in particular and doing it very well. It generally further resembles the House of Lords in being chosen from the upper strata of society, and for service of one sort or another to the commonwealth. For the peer this service may consist in amassing enough money to buy a Derby winner and supply campaign funds; the student council member may have run the Barwell ends ragged, or may have shut out Yates.

And like the House of Lords the Student Council is apt to be intensely conservative because its members are usually satisfied with the status quo of the pond in which they are very big frogs.

Two problems, then, face public-spirited undergraduates in endeavoring to formulate a student government. One, to make it properly representative; two, to make it function.

The new student council at Williams very obviously attempts to cope with these difficulties. It solves the question of representation to some extent by granting a representative to each fraternity, and by making class officers ex officio members. But this makes for a body too large and unwieldy to be effective,--witness the dismal inertia of the portentous Harvard Student Council before the reform of 1924.

The Williams Council, therefore, will elect from its own number five men as a sort of executive board. These men will attend to much of the routine, and like the cabinet will pave the way for the operation of the council as a whole.

But here again the council may defeat its own aim. Whatever the Williams Student Council may accomplish in the future, will in all probability be put through by this pentarchy. The experience of the Harvard Student Council would seem to prophecy that the rest of the council will not be very active. It will receive its facts and opinions in more or less predigested form, and unless composed of rather extraordinarily energetic men will be inclined to let it go at that.

The student council would be ideal which was small enough to be a working unit, yet large enough and so selected as not to include merely the most popular undergraduates but a good proportion of the most capable--the two are not always combined. Such a body is, of course, as impossible as Plato's Republic ruled by philosopher kings. And if it should exist by some miracle, there would still have to be discovered a really vital use for it. But the human student craves a voice in his micropolity, and the Williams experiment, after all, gives him as effective a one as could be devised.