Rules

If you wanted to found an undergraduate organization back in the early thirties, you had a pretty easy time of it. You were in business as soon as you gave a kindly old man known as the Regent a list of the people who would be responsible for bad debts if your group went broke. You could hold meetings anywhere, publish and distribute anything you wanted, have Radcliffe girls as members, just so long as you stayed solvent and obeyed the laws of the City of Cambridge, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Federal Government of the United States.

Start about the same process today, and, if you're the least bit more controversial than the chess club, you've probably bought yourself an ulcer. You've got to get approved by the Student Council and by the Dean's Office. You've got to keep on file at the Dean's Office a complete list of members and an up-to-date version of your constitution. Every one of your members must be a member of Harvard University, and half of them must be students at Harvard College. You can't undertake any activity outside the limits of Cambridge without Dean's Office permission. You've got to get Dean's Office approval if you want to put up posters or distribute printed matter in the Houses. You can't appear on a sponsored radio or television program. If you want to hold a rally, the Student Council decides when, and the Dean's Office decides where. And if you want to put out a publication, you've got still more restrictions to hurdle.

Of course, no one knows precisely what rules an undergraduate organization must live up to. Like Topsy, they've just growed. To correct this disorder, the Dean's Office and the Student Council are in the midst of preparing a complete codification of the rules. The Dean's Office has suggested one set of rules. The Student Council, after a year and a half of deliberation about the Dean's Office's proposals has come up with a set of its own, differing from the first more in organization than in content. Regardless of which set gets the final nod, the rules will be long, they will be detailed, and they will mirror the policy of the last three years, during which undergraduate activities have been subjected to far more supervision and restriction than ever before in the history of Harvard College.

Why have these restrictions arisen? There are four reasons:

1) The cold war. Political tensions since the war are, in the eyes of the Dean's Office, much greater than before the war. The Dean's Office feels that political groups of which it disapproves will use the Harvard name as a shield. Hence the Dean's Office wants to make it much tougher for groups to be chartered or to put out publications.

2) Bad debts. The Dean's Office is much more concerned about financially floundering student organizations, and it wants to protect them from the pitfalls of bankruptcy. Protection, however, means a certain amount of control.

3) Public Relations. The University, and especially the Dean's Office, is considerably more sensitive to what the general public thinks about Harvard than it used to be. The Dean's Office doesn't want undergraduate groups bearing the Harvard name to do things that will, in its opinion, cause an unfavorable public relation reaction against Harvard.

4) Radcliffe. The Dean's Office has become extremely worried about Harvard-Radcliffe relations since joint instruction was adopted as an emergency measure during the war and instituted permanently after the war. The Dean's Office is determined to halt what it considers an unfortunate trend towards closer union with Radcliffe, especially in undergraduate activities.

These four factors have caused the imposition of a vast quantity of rules on undergraduate organizations. Precisely what these rules do--and whether they are justified--will be the subject of future editorials in this series.