The Student Council

Occasionally the University's proudly indifferent student body takes notice of its Student Council--but usually only when the campus politicos make a very obvious mistake. This year's council has had its share of errors, but it is unfair to overlook its accomplishments while criticizing its failings. While scurrying about advising the administration, foreign students, and freshman, the Council did somehow neglect to keep its own little corner completely tidy. Because of ineptitude traceable to both the Council and the Bursar's Office, the Council was able to collect only one hundred dollars of the three thousand pledged at Registration. Before banking almost entirely on term bill collection for financial support, the Treasurer should have checked sufficiently with the University.

Similarly, when Professor Buck announced the extension of Lamont hours to midnight, just one week after the Council had voted not to ask for extension except during reading period, many students chalked up one more boner for their Council. The organization dedicated to representing student opinion appeared less enterprising than the librarian in desiring to meet student demands. Though the Council's decision not to pressure for longer hours had resulted from careful consideration of previous year's figures, it hardly showed initiative.

Despite its occasional bumblings, however, the Council's 1955 record is at least even. Handicapped by its inability to retain one president for any considerable length of time, the group still managed to accomplish its usual odd jobs quietly, and usually efficiently. It succeeded in reorganizing the Class Day Committee, thereby unifying two previous committees and setting up a far more satisfactory election system. During the Spring, the Council took steps to avoid in the future the kind of financial fiasco it was to experience this fall: it initiated a capital found, hoping that Councils eventually will be able to subsist largely on its interest alone, using money collected from students only as emergency aid for undergraduate organizations.

Probably more significant, however, has been the Council's reaction to current and urgent needs, rather than its solutions to trivial and vague ones. After the HAA had entangled itself in its own red tape this fall, preventing students from securing tickets by any of the rules, the Council persuaded Mr. Lunden to open its doors one Friday afternoon to some two hundred undergraduates who had been baffled by his system. When PBH fell into dire financial straits, the Council came to the rescue not only with its own funds, but with three thousand dollars it "inspired" from other sources.

Most of these achievements seem fairly insignificant by themselves. Indeed they are. Yet it is hard to find any really concrete action that the Student Council can take under its present organization. The most that can be expected perhaps is an intelligent representation of student needs. It is on this basis that the Council must be judged. In the past year, Council surveys have studies problems faced by freshmen, the life of the foreign student here, the parking problem, the adequacy of the Harvard education for science concentrators, and the extent of interest in religion among undergraduates.

In 1955 the Student Council began, but has not yet concluded investigations of the expansion problem, the language requirement, and natural sciences courses. It is also attempting to set up a Better Business Bureau to investigate unfair trade practices around the Square. Sometimes concrete council action results from the surveys, such as the council's advising program for foreign students. The main value of the reports, however, probably lies in their usefulness in providing the Administration with some indication of student opinion, and with suggestions for administrative action. The Council's investigations of parking, for instance, led to the University's opening of Soldiers Field. Although the studies on religion and freshmen have not yet led to any particular actions, they offer valuable information--even if some of their conclusions are a little hard to take.

Possibly this day to day handling of practical projects and longer-range research into current problems is the best that can be expected of a Council whose role few undergraduates are quite sure of, and whose actions almost everyone ignores. Perhaps the time has come for a Student Council report on the Student Council.