Faculty Votes Down Recruitment Limits

The Faculty overwhelmingly voted down SFAC's plan to limit campus recruitment yesterday. But by a narrow margin it adopted a second SFAC recommendation that a recruiting organization "be required to discuss its policies at a public meeting" if 500 students petitioned requesting such a discussion.

With the entire section describing sanctions knocked out of SFAC's resolutions, several Faculty members thought it was unclear whether the remainder could be enforced. One said last night that the University could do no more than request corporations to debate. But SFAC members including Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History, said that SFAC intended the clause to bar any company which refused.

The Faculty's vote was 86 to 71, approving both the public meeting rule and a second plank directing the Office of Graduate and Career Plans to "make its facilities available to the broadest possible range of organizations offering information relevant to the future plans and careers of Harvard and Radcliffe students."

Debate Third Clause

The debate centered, though, on SFAC's third clause which would have barred an organization from recruiting at Harvard if one fifth of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates petitioned to keep the company off and 50 per cent of SFAC confirmed the request.

Rogers Albritton, professor of Philosophy, introduced the resolution and Handlin was the main speaker against it. Both are SFAC members. They presented a series of arguments that had surfaced in the Advisory Council's two-month discussion of recruitment.

Edwin E. Moise, James B. Conant Professor of Education and Mathematics, spoke in favor of the SFAC proposal. He said that the scheme was "an ingenious way of saying to students that we take the issue and them seriously." To have barred Dow would have been untenably selective, Moise argued, but he said that by voting down the resolution the Faculty "would be saying that who comes on campus is none of our business."

Five to One

The vote against SFAC's plan for limiting recruitment was four or five to one, Dean Ford said last night. A voice vote was decisive enough so that numbers on each side were not counted.

With another loud voice vote, the Faculty voted down a motion to table the rest of SFAC's scheme and went on to adopt it.

Handlin said last night that in his opinion the enforceability of the public discussions clause will never come to a test. "Dow certainly wouldn't turn down the free publicity of a public platform," he said, "and I don't think any 500 students will care enough to force a meeting."