SFAC Resolution Requests Faculty Meetings Be Open

The Student-Faculty Advisory Council passed a resolution yesterday calling for student attendance and participation at Faculty meetings.

The resolution asks that the Dean of the Faculty be permitted to open specific portions of Faculty meetings to any member of the University upon the request of any of the student government organizations or any Faculty Committee, including SFAC.

SFAC further asked that the Dean invite designated students to contribute to the Faculty discussion upon the request of any Faculty Committee, including SFAC.

In the last minutes of the meeting, SFAC passed a second resolution, proposed by John D. Fouts '69, requesting that the Faculty explicitly declare its intention not to reduce the scholarships of any of the Paine Hall demonstrators as a consequence of probation.

In a statement to be submitted to Dean Ford, SFAC requests that the new regulations concerning Faculty meetings, if passed by the Faculty, be applied specifically to the Faculty meeting on ROTC January 28.

Faculty Request

The Faculty had requested SFAC to consider the possibilities of student attendance and will discuss the resolution at the Faculty meeting January 21.

The student government organizations included in the resolution include the Harvard Undergraduate Council, the Harvard-Radcliffe Policy Committee, the Radcliffe Union of Students, and the Harvard Graduate Students Association.

"If students remain a passive audience at Faculty meetings, then no one will be playing to the gallery," Roger D. Thomas, a fifth-year graduate student in Geology said. "I doubt if any actor can play to an audience that doesn't respond," he added.

Disagreement

Harrison C. White, professor of Sociology was one of the few professors to disagree about the usefulness of opening Faculty meetings. "The Faculty is a collegial body with a real sense of community feeling," White said. "Anyone who thinks of the Faculty as tea and cookies or clubiness is missing the point," he added.

"I've never been on a Faculty where people are as directly concerned with the University as they are here," White said. "Any change in Faculty procedures might drive professors farther into their research," White added.

Kenneth M. Glazier '69, chairman of SFAC, said that student participation would require "great accommodation between the students and the Faculty. Students would be admitted to the meetings on a first-come-first-serve basis as far as space permitted," Glazier said.

"In some circumstances, like the ROTC debate, students would have to show complete emotional control," Glazier said. "The Faculty could reject the entire principle of student presence for one outburst," he added.