The Council's Reply

Like the New Dealers, the Student Council just loves to meet its problems by creating bureaus, investigations, and committees. Like the New Dealers also, it is a little inclined to feel that said creations are in themselves a solution for the evil or maladjustment, that if you let the committee alone for a while it will turn up with an enlightened "report" which will straighten out the whole nasty business. It will not do for the Council to take such a comfortable laissez-faire attitude toward its latest baby, the Permanent Committee on Curriculum and Tenure.

Properly conceived and properly directed, this new committee may assume the significance of a charter of rights for the undergraduate: a guarantee that the students' voice shall be heard on important issues of University policy. The Council evidently has started out with this admirable purpose; the idea was that "protest" groups, springing up whenever the tenure of a valued teacher is threatened, are a haphazard method at best. However healthy it is that they should arise, their effectiveness is sure to be hurt because they are locking the stable door after the horse, in the form of a brilliant educator, has already departed along with his horse sense. Quite obviously the Council's committee must function in cooperation with the Faculty and the Administration, enunciating the students' views on broad trends as well as particular details of curriculum and tenure, and making it clear in every case before it's too late. No such medium has heretofore existed in the University.

In molding the policy of the committee, the Council must make certain that it really does represent the undergraduates, and in the long run this can be achieved only by democratic selection of committeemen. In the short run the committee, faced with the budget cut question, may achieve somewhat broader representation by enlisting the aid of PBK and the HSU's Committee to Advance Harvard Education; in doing so it will also avoid duplication of effort and working at cross purposes.

Without the active encouragement of the Powers That Be, the Council's-fledgling will be no more "permanent" than the Monroe Doctrine would have been without the British Navy. Without a firm rooting in representation among the undergraduates, it may well be a major development of democracy in education.