A Light Dusting

Last weeks when the Council's committee on student porters returned from five members at the world of brooms and bedspreads, it seemed fair to expect a thorough and valuable report. What finally appeared is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is a catalogs of random observations, useful it at all--only as a goad to simulate the potter program's administrators.

The reasons for this inadequacy are difficult to pinpoint. The trouble is not in the report's conclusions though many of them verge on platitudes, nor with its facts, though they are often trivial. The report's deepest fault is its lack of any clearly developed point of view against which the facts and conclusions can be measured.

From the report it is impossible to determine the committee's views on the values, success, and future of the porter program or whether the committee believes that administrative and social difficulties are permanent and important enough to justify modification of the program's basic purposes. But the College has to consider all these issues before taking any action. It the report intended administrative policy, it should have dwelled more fully on than it did. By excluding such considerations, the student porter committee reduced its analysis to a hodgepodge of gripes.

An aimless wandering report then. But what of the recommendations themselves. Only three of the ten urge specific changes--the others are vague admonitions. Recommendations two and three propose returning maid service to Dunster House and centering the College porter system in the Yard. As the report pointed out, the ten or fifteen minutes required for the trek between classrooms and Houses complicates scheduling problems no end. Porters must be either late for class. As a short-range expedient, therefore, the recommendations are undoubtedly sound.

But there is a larger question which the Council committee ignored: should student portering be limited to the Yard? Perhaps, with the current emphasis on the Houses, it might be better to arrange the program along House and Yard lines. And what should be done if the applications for porter jobs over flow the amount of work available in the Yard? The College must consider all these problems before accepting the Council's proposal, and the fact that the Council committee failed to include them seriously lessens the worth of its recommendation.

The third specific proposal suggests more "equitable" distribution of work for student porters, and less severe duties for the porter captains. Overloading the captains was never mentioned in the report, nor did the committee define "equitably." However, this proposal was valid enough to be accepted almost immediately by Arthur D. Trottenberg, who is in charge of the porter program.

Except for the general recommendations that the porter system be continued in the University and also at Harkness Commons, the remaining conclusions are but pious hopes that urge the College to explain duties to the porters, raise efficiency, reduce the feeling of social stigma, inspire high morale, and proceed with caution.

Thus, neither the report nor its conclusions form a guide for administrative action, rather they serve only to focus attention on the most pressing short-range difficulties. This in itself is somewhat useful, but it is far less valuable than it should have been.