The New Student

A sub-committee of the Student Council has been considering for the last week a petition of the Harvard Youth for Democracy which asks a review of the Administration ruling denying recognition to the New Student. Cases of this kind, where the issue of freedom of the press seems to be involved, are always difficult; the problem of the New Student is doubly difficult because it is unavoidably tinged with issues which the Administration hopefully tried to remove from consideration. From a mass of conflicting testimony and opinion, the Council must find some sort of path, set up some sort of guideposts, to be used in all future cases.

The Deans Office used two criteria in turning down the New Student's application for recognition. Generally, the idea was that since the writing and circulation were preponderantly non-Harvard, there could be no valid argument that the magazine should be thought of as a Harvard enterprise. Though denying that more percentage figures could be the determinant, the Administration pretty clearly based their public case on figures and figures alone. In so doing, they left out a crucial function in magazine work: editing. A brief soon to be filed with the Council by the New Student's editors proves quite conclusively that this work was handled entirely by undergraduates, who determined what stories were wanted, solicited these articles from writers of their own choice, and edited the copy when it arrived. In some cases, articles were sent back to authors for revision.

Alongside this criterion, considerations of who writes most of the material for a magazine and who is going to read it, became distinctly less important. The latter is almost totally irrelevant and only the first requires an extended answer. The real reason that the question of authorship has been raised at all lies in the nature of the material. Literary magazines have periodically printed issues written entirely outside Harvard in the past, with no harsh consequences from University Hall. The New Student, however, proposes to publish controversial matter, and furthermore to take a view to which most people do not adhere. That is why the Dean's Office found and magnified the question of who does the writing.

In its unarticulated premise, then, the Administration's argument considers the political coloring of what is to be said in the magazine. It leaves untouched the most important single aspect of magazine publishing. The Deans have broken no paths and set no guideposts in denying a group of Harvard undergraduates the right to use their organization's name in their magazine. The Council should recommend a reversal as soon as possible.