Rights Rite

"YOU kids wanna know why you screwed up the world so much?" a Cambridge cabbie asked last week. "It's cause all the crazy stuff that happens in college gets you all confused and mixed up and weird." The workings of Radcliffe student politics, proverbially, bear the cabbie out.

Last week the Radcliffe College Council added a new twist to Garden Street's political contortions. Meeting during vacation, the Council--a Radcliffe version of Harvard's Corporation--turned down the Radcliffe Union of Students' fourth attempt to draw up a constitution for itself.

The Council's objections to RUS constitutions have by now become familiar. The same issues--RUS "autonomy," student representation on the Council, and the actual wording of the constitution--that students and administrators have churned up for four months emerged again at this meeting.

The consistent rhetoric is deceptive. Although the term and focus of the argument have remained the same, each side has continually shifted its position in the last four months. It's hard to know where RUS and the Council are today without also knowing how they got there.

The problems began last fall. After a long campaign aimed at making the old Radcliffe Government Association more aggressive, Cliffies finally voted late in November to disband RGA. A few weeks later, they faced a choice: they could vote for RUS, for rival RUA, or for scrapping student government altogether. The elections committee wisely suspended the rule requiring half the student body to vote in order to make the election valid. Forty-three per cent of the Cliffies voted, and RUS won.

Since then, it's been an uphill fight for RUS. Its first attempt at constitution-making provided some disappointments, but no real surprises. Two days after the election, Mrs. Bunting had said that the RUS platform calling for complete RUS "autonomy"--specifically, the power to change its own rules without administration approval--would probably be rejected by the Council because it was "inconsistent with College regulations." On January 8, she announced that the Council had rejected the constitution, because it was "inconsistent with College regulations."

There were other problems. Mrs. Bunting said that the Council objected to "vagueness and internal contradictions" in the constitution, citing some fifteen clauses that the Council felt needed further clarification. RUS had also asked for permanent voting student representation on the Council. Mrs. Bunting said this too was impossible because College rules said that only Radcliffe Trustees could be permanent voting members of the Council.

But the Council also recommended a number of specific solutions. It suggested that RUS elect some officers to work on the constitution, and that the students and Trustees hold a conference to discuss the problems.

AFTER conference, held in late February, agreement seemed near Deborah Batts '69, RUS president, summed up the students' mood when she said, "We are for cooperation, not confrontation." The Trustees, too, seemed eager for a compromise solution.

The constitution that RUS offered in March was the result of this conference, and represented a major shift in RUS' aims. Instead of complete autonomy, RUS only asked for a joint student-administrative committee to review college legislation. Instead of the four voting seats it had originally sought on the Council, it wanted only two non-voting seats. RUS had cleaned up many of the loose parts of the constitution, making it more like "a realistic contract between two parties," one Trustee said.

As the Trustees met to consider the latest constitution, hopes once more were high that RUS might finally become legitimate. First there was a victory--the Council approved the joint committee; then a minor setback--the Council found some technical problems; then a real blow--the Council decided not to include student representatives.

There had apparently been a shift in the Council's plans too. It still wanted contact with the students; Mrs. Bunting said that she expected "that students will be invited to the future Council meetings." But the Council was uncomfortable with the idea of having permanent members: thinking it could "better sample the diversity of Radcliffe students by inviting selected girls to each meeting," a Trustee said.

This stand was particularly frustrating to Cliffies since it ignored the RUS' whole purpose. "We don't care what students they have on the Council--they can pick them at random if they want--as long as they guarantee us that someone will be there," one sophomore said. Miss Batts added that "we don't want invitations dependent on the good will of the Administration. We want to be a regular part of the structure.

Miss Batts called the meeting "disappointing." Mrs. Bunting said it was the "start of real cooperation." So the problems continue. In two or three weeks, RUS will try again.