Revise the Council

Tonight a Student Council sub-committee will formally start work on revising the Council's constitution. The revision has been dragging along for more than two months, and unless the sub-committee works with uncommon speed it is going to run into embarrassment: Council elections under the old constitution are scheduled for this week, and there is a referendum afoot to throw out that constitution entirely (unless the new Council poll is unsatisfactory).

If the Council wants to avoid electing its members under a non-existent constitution, it had better prod its sub-committee into some quick and intelligent action. The committee has a chance to work the Council into an organization which can do far more good than recent Councils; if the revision group makes up for wasted time, the new constitution can head off much of the criticism that has currently been dropping around the Council.

A new Council constitution should build on the philosophy that the Council must not be a student government or a regulatory body or even an errand-running service organization, but simply an advisory group which can represent student opinion to University Hall. The best work done by the Council since the war has been advisory (the Poskanzer report on Harvard Education is a good example). The football ticket exchanges and forums have been useful, but they have terribly distracted the Council from its primary job.

To ensure the Council's return to an advisory function, the new constitution might split the Council into two groups, one to take over service functions, the other to handle advising. The service group could be elected in the same way as the present Council; it would give local politicians a comfortable opportunity to keep their names in front of the College. This elected body could appoint the considerably less glamorous advisory group, and there is good recent evidence that an elective council can make its appointments reasonably non-political. But whatever the mechanics of the new constitution, it should establish advising as the chief function of the Council.

It is unfortunate--though largely the Council's own fault--that its new constitution has been carried along until it will come up at the same time as a referendum for scrapping the old one. But this delay is no reason to have a referendum. With a constitutional revision imminent, there is no need for snapping rugs out from under a Council which has a genuine chance now to rebuild. A referendum will only aggravate an unhappy situation which the constitutional revision committee can do so much to correct.