Memorandum on Recruitment Resolution Of the Student--Faculty Advisory Council

(This text was written by several members of the Student-Faculty Advisory Council in preparation for the Faculty's meeting today.)

CLAUSE ONE: This recommendation encountered no serious opposition in the Council. It envisages opening the facilities of the Office for Graduate and Career Plans to any group whose advice bears on the career choices and plans of students, thus including political and draft-counselling associations and volunteer and service organizations in addition to the present range of private employers, graduate schools, and government services.

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CLAUSE TWO: The majority supporting this clause--presumably larger than that supporting the resolution as a whole--considered that the OGCP offers not only a service to students but a substantial convenience to the interviewing organizations. To the majority of the SFAC, such activities as the interviewing of students with a view to prospective employment or the providing of information by a company as part of its business policy, seemed ancillary to the University's central purpose. The convenience offered to organizations interviewing at the OGCP was held to be rather a privilege than a right. It seemed to the majority reasonable, therefore, to stipulate as a condition on the use of the OGCP that any organization wishing to interview there be required to discuss its policies publicly if those policies are profoundly disturbing to a sizeable number of the students in whose interests the Office is operated.

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CLAUSE THREE: This proposal was naturally the most controversial and received long and thoroughgoing discussion. It was maintained, against the contrary view of some in the minority, that the use which corporate and other interviewers typically make of the facilities of the OGCP cannot claim the strong protection which the University must give, as all agreed, to the speech of teachers and students in classrooms or to speech in other University forums.

Assuming this distinction, it was further maintained that the University need not play host in the OGCP to organizations whose activities conflict with its own ends and moral commitments as a university, and that if an organization is so perceived by a significant body of University opinion, the University may sometimes properly act on that opinion. It seemed, moreover, that undergraduates should have a strong voice in any such decision, since the OGCP exists primarily to serve them.

Many obvious difficulties attended these ideas, but the majority of the Council felt that a way of implementing them could and should be found. The mechanism finally proposed in the Council's resolution is designed to prevent hasty or unconsidered action. Under its provisions, a petition to withhold the facilities of the OGCP from an organization wishing to interview there can be initiated only after the organization has been given an opportunity to defend its policies, and the petition must then receive about 1200 signatures of undergraduates who feel that stronger action needs to be taken. It must further be approved by a majority of those voting at a meeting of the SFAC, after an open hearing in which the merits of the petition have been explored and opposition to it has been weighed.

Some arbitrariness was of course unavoidable in setting the minimum number of petitioners at twenty per cent of the undergraduate body, but the majority of the Council felt that this figure would be high enough to exclude all but the most earnest petitions. The SFAC would in any case be empowered to reject a petition if it were contested by an opposing group of students or for other; substantive reasons.