Another Boat Missed

Another Student Council committee has produced another report demonstrating complete inability to deal with the central issues of its chosen problem. The Parietal Hours committee has written a study which may overwhelm students and impress council members, but which has no hope of convincing the Faculty.

The difficulty is that the committee gives only the most cursory attention to the question of study habits and concerns itself at length with dating habits. The Faculty and the Masters, whom the Council is presumably interested in convincing, the evidenced not the slightest interest in the dating habits of undergraduates.

The Faculty's position has always been that there was no way that abridgement of study time could be avoided if parietal hours were extended. The best the committee could do was to suggest "Though many may consider Friday night a work night, are not the hours of 4-7 p.m. work hours also?" This was all the attention devoted to the subject which seems of most concern to the Faculty.

This inability to focus on critical issues has been characteristic of Council reports of the past half year. Since the HSA report, which was crippled by a biased committee, the Council received a report on NSA and two on NDEA. The NSA study devoted itself to the problem of how a representative student organization could be achieved, without ever really discussing the central issue of whether such an organization is desirable.

The first NDEA report became hysterical about the question of Federal aid to education, which both the Council and the Faculty felt to be a dead issue already decided, and failed to come to grips with the essential issues of the loyalty oath. Only the second NDEA report, a model committee report, concerned itself with the issues at hand.

Some of these reports were unimpressively written and badly argued, but the critical and disturbing problem is their inability to face the real issues instead of discussing personal concerns. Most students realize that parietal hours are not very well adapted to dating habits. But few, except students, are concerned with this. As usual, a Council committee has missed the point.