The Dean's Rules

Associate Dean Watson has submitted to the Council the third draft of rules for undergraduate organizations which that group has received within eight months. The first set of regulations drawn up to clarify the present hit-or-miss set-up was presented by a Council committee which had spent nearly a year re-working suggestions of the Administration. When the Council turned these down, another appointed committee revised them into a form acceptable to the Council, only to have Dean Watson refuse to accept the rules.

In six months of revising since then, the Dean has succeeded in incorporating into his plan most of the faults and bad features of last spring's first set of regulations, the same bad points that forced their rejection. This fall's wording of some of the rules may indeed be different but the ideas behind them and their effects are unchanged.

Notice, for example, Dean Watson's rule on groups' financial status. The acceptable version last spring read: "Financial responsibility rests solely within each organization." The Dean's latest rule states: "Each organization shall be fully responsible for its own finances." Where the Council's regulation precluded any interference in financial matters by the Administration, the Dean's version is just ambiguous enough to be interpreted-now and later-as allowing such interference.

Perhaps the most outright and complete change made by the Administration from the Council draft is the substitution of this rule, "Members must be students in Harvard University," for this one, "Members must be students in Harvard University or Radcliffe College." Aside from the point that Harvard groups should have the right to choose their own criteria for membership so long as a majority of their members are Harvard students, the elimination of Radcliffe membership altogether is especially ridiculous.

There are a great many other faults in the Dean's new seven-page brochure, a book which largely brings things back again to where they stood early last spring. Later editorials this week will point out in detail why these rules are unacceptable and what revisions must be made.