Students and Faculty on the Overse ers

WHEN President Pusey retires in a few years, the Corporation will nominate a successor, and the Board of Overseers will be responsible for accepting or rejecting the appointment.

The Overseers, a body of 30 elected alumni and the President and Treasurer of Harvard ex officio, is responsible for approving all appointments of more than one year's duration. Unlike the sevenman Corporation, the Overseers are not responsible for the daily operation of the University. They are strictly concerned with long-range questions; with the general drift of the University as a large corporation with huge assets, and as an educational institution.

It is exactly on such a body that everyone connected with his University should have a voice and an interest. Students, Faculty members, and others holding Corporation appointments should be eligible for election to the Board of Overseers, and should be eligible to vote in an Overseer's election.

At present, students in the College and graduate schools, as well as professors and anyone else holding a Corporation appointments, are ineligible to serve on the Board of Overseers, and only alumni of the College or graduate schools may vote. Every year, five alumni are elected for a six-year term from a slate of nominees drawn up by the Associated Harvard Alumni. The nomination procedure should be changed so that anyone who wishes to run would need a certain number of signatures of eligible voters on a petition.

The prestige of the Board of Overseers makes it an ideal place for an airing of long-range questions about the University which are now asked only at SDS meetings or in House dining hall conversations. The Overseers have not been publicly participating in the present dialogue on the University's role in the community, its role as a hotel administrator, its conscious or unconscious influence on American military campaigns, the way Harvard invests its billion dollars, and its labor practices.

A DEMOCRATICALLY elected Board, with the franchise extended to students and Faculty, would encourage the examination of these University issues. Since only about 30,000 alumni vote in an Overseers' election, the largest voting bloc would be in Cambridge. Candidates for the Board would be campaigning here on the issues, instead of getting elected on the basis of a biography in Who's Who.

Student and Faculty representation on the Board of Overseers would not radically alter the balance of power in the University. Through Harvard's history, power has continually been shifted from the central administration to the various faculties. Decentralization, which has for the most part been a beneficial development, would not be reversed if the Board of Overseers were democratically opened to all persons connected with the University.

The power which still resides in the central University would remain primarily in the hands of the President, who works closely with the Corporation on day-to-day business. The Board of Overseers is essentially an advisory body, but it has a legitimacy which a group like the Student-Faculty Advisory Council does not have because the Overseers are responsible for appointing the people they are advising.

TO THE EXTENT that the University is a large, thriving business it is not practical that it be democratic. Students and Faculty have neither the time nor the inclination to run the University's business on a day-to-day basis. To the extent, however, that the University is more than a business--to the extent that it is a forum for responsible thinking--it should be a place in which students, faculty, and alumni can examine together the problems of being Harvard. In such discussions, distinctions between college seniors and alumni who graduated the previous year are clearly artificial.

Because of the historical limits on the power of the central administration, student representation on the Board of Overseers would be no substitute for increased student power at the faculty level. Neither the Board of Overseers nor the Corporation concerns itself with whether a Social Relations concentrator is required to take junior generals. That power has been delegated to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which in turn has delegated much of it to the departments. But precious little of it has been delegated to students. Even while students are seeking such control, however, they are entitled to a voice on University-wide matters.

The most obvious hurdle to the democratic election of Overseers is that it would require an act of the Massachusetts Great and General Court. A far higher hurdle, however, is the general feeling among administrators and alumni that men who long ago passed through Harvard are somehow more capable advisors than those who are passing through now.