The Council & the Class

In order to function in a workable fashion, the Student Council has split itself into committees of one sort or another--right now there are some 37 such committees. In order to find out what these committees have accomplished, the Council asks each of them to submit a report--almost every weekly Council meeting is devoted to discussion of one or more of such reports. Last December one of these committees--the one on Class Affairs--drew up and offered to the Council a comprehensive and well-thought-out plan for a revised schedule of class activities and organization. After the customary period of discussion and disagreement and delay, the Council, on March 2, got around to adopting, almost in toto, the committee's proposals.

Once a Council report has been finally approved, it is submitted to the University as a recommendation for action. Quite often, that is the last that is heard of the report. This time, though, the tale is somewhat different. Several serious blocks stood in the way of the committee's new class plan--under the proposed system the University was asked to offer financial aid to the Class Album, and to partially underwrite the expenses of Class Day. Both of these the University has agreed to, at least for the present graduating class, and for this the administration deserves commendation.

But the Council has apparently been far less efficient in carrying out its share of the proposals--proposals made by its own special committee. Most important are those particular recommendations that have to do with the Class Album: the committee outlined a system under which a Temporary Album Committee was to be appointed in a class's sophomore year, and an Editor chosen in the early spring of the junior year. Without these two pieces of action, the Album cannot be the "complete record of the class" that the committee envisioned; nor, as the most recent two Albums discovered, can the yearbook be published before Commencement Day.

Once having discovered these two facts to be true, however, the Council seems promptly to have ignored them. For only just now--as the term draws almost to its close--are the most rudimentary preparations for the '49 Album beginning. And there has not yet been a whisper of planning for a Temporary Album Committee for the Class of 1950. Perhaps it is asking too much for the Council to begin acting on its own plans in so short a time after they have been published (a mere two months). But then perhaps it might be wiser if the Council devoted a little less time to reports, and a little more time to implementing the reports with concrete action.