RUS: Sweetness

"THEY wanted confrontation; we want to cooperate." That's the difference between the RUS's first officers and the people who drew up its first constitution, Debbie Batts, President, explained to a group of trustees assembled early Saturday morning in the penthouse of Hilles Library.

This may or may not be true, but the atmosphere that morning--first in the Colloquium room and then in all but one of the five trustee-administration-student discussion groups--was sweet reason and affability. The conference was programmed as a discussion of the "inconsistencies" the Radcliffe College Council detected in the RUS constitution, but very little time was actually spent in going over specific clauses. The meeting was rather an opportunity for each side to present his case, and more important, for each to convince the other of his own reasonableness and openmindedness.

The conference didn't start out that way. The Friday evening panel discussion was, in the words of one veteran 'Cliffe administration-fighter, "a slogging match. They put up two people to talk and then we pitted our two against them. It was us against them."

Saturday morning the participants were quickly broken up into small groups of seven or eight: a few students, a few trustees, and an administrator or two. Miss Batts recognized that much of the trustees' antagonism at the previous meeting was a visceral reaction to the notion of "student power," and she emphasized repeatedly to the four trustees around the table of the Hilles seminar room, "We don't want to run the College. That is impossible, ridiculous, and stupid. We want to be recognized as rational and responsible."

THE trustees on their side sought to show they were indeed very concerned about student opinion and very eager to get student ideas on decisions affecting them. "I think that there would have been a great deal less rancor if students had been in on the decision-making for the off-campus tax," one trustee admitted. And both groups agreed strongly when Lynne Gerson, President of Moors, urged that "students should be encouraged to develop an interest in their college before they graduate."

It was not all sweetness. Reporting for one of the five groups later that morning, a trustee told the gathering, "It was mainly the trustees speaking," and proceeded to read a list of more or less specific criticisms of the constitution ranging from direct rejection of the clause stipulating student government autonomy (In the old RGA constitution any change in the constitution had to be approved by the College Council) to disapproval on the wording.

But the conferees arrived at no specific solutions to the differences between students and trustees: that was not the real purpose of the discussions. A new phase was established in the dialogue between the two. It is no longer a shouting match. It is now rather a cautious courtship, each eager to show there are no ogres at Radcliffe.