A Two-Way Responsibility

By approving Dean Bender's report on parietal rules yesterday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has made sure that another year will pass without any solution. Like Bender, the Faculty presented no alternative to the Council's proposal whatsoever.

In his letter of rejection, Bender merely urged the Council to seek other, better answer. But why should the Council be forced to do all the work on this problem?

This year the Councilmen did one of their finest jobs in preparing the parietal proposal. They organized the House Committees into action, delved through many different solutions, wrote up their proposals with the House Committees' Chairman, and presented the result to the Housemasters, all within one week. The Housemasters, who had rejected every other proposal before, thought well enough of this one to pass it. The Council has done all the work on parietal rules, not the Dean's Office.

The Council was justified in saying "...if the Administration sincerely believes that some other solution really exists, it should direct some body such as the Committee on Houses to propose an alternative answer." After many years of University Hall negativism, it is the Administration's turn to work out an alternative.

We still believe that the Council's solution is the best one presented so far; if Dean Bender has another, better one, we have not heard of it yet. Whatever the Administration does, we hope that the Councilmen will keep working on a proposal for next year. But there is no reason why the Council should have to come up with all the solutions especially if its best ones are always rejected.