Rules and the Undergraduate

Harvard College, President Conant has Said, seeks to turn out "tough minded idealists," individuals who will be able to fight for their principles against the force of worldly realities. Hence the Harvard educational pattern has always been aimed at getting the student to order his own life, instead of spoon-feeding him and running his life for him as many other colleges seek to do.

This principle of education--that students should learn to stand on their own two feet by having to do so while at college--has long been the basis of the College's attitude towards student extra-curricular activities. Until recent years, student organizations were left entirely unregulated by the College; as recently as 1934, a newly-formed organization merely handed the Dean's Office a list of people who would be responsible for its debts and then was on its own.

This hands-off attitude towards student activities was not the result of laziness or lack of care on the part of the Dean's Office. It was, instead, a deliberate policy which recognized the ability of students to run their own affairs, and the desirability of having them do so.

A "brave new world" seems to be dawning for undergraduate organizations, however. If the Dean's Office and a Student Council committee have their way, student groups will soon be enmeshed in a 33-page network of rules, many of them codifications of recent Dean's Office attitudes and many of them new. Some of them, if strictly enforced would put several activities out of business. All of them are based on a theory of administration which breaks sharply from the policy which Harvard has followed with notable success in the past.

This policy, which is the basis of the University's guarantee of academic freedom for its Faculty, is rooted in the belief that it is administratively easier to leave people unregulated than to try to regulate, and by regulating assume responsibility for all their activities. Thus there is no attempt at Harvard to restrict the utterances and affiliations of Faculty members. If anyone complains to the University about the activities of a Faculty member, the University simply points out that it is not supervising the Faculty and hence any complaints must be taken directly to the Faculty member in question. In the past, this same policy has proved administratively soundest in dealing with undergraduate activities. If anyone wanted to complain about what an organization was doing, he was sent to the organization.

Now the Student Council committee and the Dean's Office want to substitute a system of complicated rules which would, if actually put into effect, seriously limit the freedom of the College's extra-curricular activities. Thus the proposed rules declare that organizations must be regulated so that "the relations of the University with the community are maintained." Hence "the Dean's Office must be enabled to keep track of what the various organizations are doing" so that it can prevent any acts by an organization that "would have particularly undesirable consequences. . . or which bring or threaten to bring discredit upon the University.

Three questions promptly arise. Who is to determine whether a given consequence is desirable or undesirable? And who is to determine whether a given act brings credit or discredit to the University? Should public opinion be allowed to affect the University's relations with its extra-curricular activities? Implicit in the proposed rules is the belief that this determination should be made by the Dean's Office, with the advice of the Student Council. This is certainly a far cry from the traditional College attitude towards extra-curricular activities. Not only is the new approach administratively far more complicated than the old, but it also subverts the College's overall aim of developing and encouraging student self-reliance.

The specifies of the proposed rules are as bad as the theories that motivate them. Thus one rule states, "A majority of the publication's (one using the name Harvard in its title) working capital must come from sources within the Harvard community," this community being defined as the "students, faculty, and alumni of Harvard University and Redcliffe College, and their families." Sine most publications get the bulk of their funds from advertising, this requirement, if enforced, would put them out of business. Again, the rules say that Saturday night social functions on club premises at which women are present must end by midnight, claiming that this is required by law. Such an assertion is untrue, since police state that a private function at a club is not subject to blue laws. Through and through, the proposed rules contain suck poorly drawn up regulations.

Both the rules and the theories behind them are poor. If put into effect, they would reduce substantially the educational value of the College's extra-curricular activities. They should not be adopted.