Squashing Student Reform

Radcliffe President Mary I. Bunting and the Radcliffe College Council are alarmingly consistent when it comes to squashing student efforts at reform of pre-conceived plans for the college. It was no surprise, then, when the College Council last week tabled or rejected all the recommendations submitted by the student-Faculty Ad Hoc Committee on Housing.

As the CRIMSON predicted three weeks ago: "because the recommendations are not binding on President Bunting and the College Council, they -- in the end--will probably overrule any proposals that are not in keeping with their own ideas."

The Ad Hoc Committee recommendations were in fact direct challenges to Mrs. Bunting's plans for the College's immediate future. They would have thrown open the decision on the future of the House system to the student body, and allowed for immediate flexibility in letting Cliffies live on campus, in private apartments, or in the small comfortable off-campus houses that Radcliffe presently plans to eliminate.

The committee's recommendations, giving students a part in decisions that were committing huge sums of money to housing plans to which many girls object, were commendable, and the Council should be sharply criticized for not recognizing the merit of those recommendations and approving them.

But the Council, with the help of Mrs. Bunting and her aides, made an even greater mistake. Not only did they not approve the committee's recommendations, but they failed to give them a fair hearing. The committee met five times to debate, consider, and write their recommendations. They heard testimony from several students and administrators on the merits of the College's housing plans. They went so far as to survey the College on some questions. And after all this effort, which consumed the time of not only the student members of the committee, but such respected Faculty members as Giles Constable and Stanley Hoffmann, the College Council met without reading the recommendations before hand and dismissed them for the present in what turns out to have been a fit of pique.

As Mrs. Bunting herself admitted, the Council members were "antagonized by the hunger strike" which prompted the forming of the Ad Hoc Committee. That explains where the Council went wrong: they simply failed to see beyond their hostility. But it doesn't explain some of the administration's negligence in presenting the committee's case. Dean Barbara Solomon, who had agreed to prepare the recommendations in time for study by the Council members before the meeting, still has not explained why she failed to do so. Jacqueline Lindsay, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee, says she called Dean Solomon before the meeting and volunteered to run off copies for the Council members herself but was told by the Dean that her office could prepare them in time. Yet, when Mrs. Lindsay appeared before the Council, expecting simply to answer questions about the committee's recommendations, she found they had not read them, and was forced to read them aloud to the Council members.

All this bodes ill for the future of student-administration relations at Radcliffe. If Mrs. Bunting and the College Council wish to salvage some student respect, they should carefully consider and approve this Fall those recommendations they have tabled for further discussion. If, as is most likely, they do not carefully consider and approve them, it will only confirm the conclusion reached in these pages three weeks ago that "given [Mrs. Bunting's] history of making decisions first and seeking student opinion afterward, one can only smile at the hunger strikers' suggestion that their committee become a 'permanent' and 'independent' part of Radcliffe's administrative process. Mrs. Bunting's repeated refrain at RGA meetings, that Radcliffe is run both by its students and administrators, has always been a deception. And always will be."