Student Apathy, Antipathy Foul Committee Elections

The best-laid plans of Faculty committees to bring students into the Faculty bureaucracy are almost in ruins, because of student noncooperation. Right now it appears the permanent Committee on Rights and Responsibilities has been aborted by outright student antagonism, while the other three proposed student-Faculty committees are sinking in the marshmallow fudge of indifference.

NEWS ANALYSIS

The Faculty will vote on the CRR March 24. The Committee of Fifteen's proposal is for six students and eight Faculty members on the committee. Of the two Houses selected by lottery to send a representative to the CRR, Quincy House has voted not to do so, and Dudley (at a meeting attended by 50 people) voted to do so only if disciplinary hearings are made open to the public.

The Freshman Council has postponed elections for the one freshman member of the CRR until after the Faculty formally creates the committee. They are considering a legitimacy question on the ballot. At Radcliffe, only one girl has nominated herself for the CRR, and she says she will organize a referendum and resign if a majority of Radcliffe students feel the CRR is illegitimate.

There is no reason to suspect they won't. An H-R Policy Committee poll last week at the Harvard Houses found those who voted to be 3-1 against the revised Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, which the CRR would enforce.

Only at the Graduate School, which has two seats on the CRR, has there been no move to prevent the CRR election. Graduate students may nominate themselves for the CRR and two other Faculty committees by obtaining 25 signatures on a petition. So far, none has chosen to do so. Nominations close Friday.

Indeed raw apathy may ultimately be more deadly to the new student-Faculty committees than active antipathy. Last fall. Faculty members and student politicos hoped to have the four committees proposed by the Fainsod Report (on Houses and Undergraduate Life; Students and Community Relations; and Graduate and Undergradauate Education) asgoing concerns by Spring registration. Later, the elections were turned over to the House committees, and a February 23 deadline was established.

February 23 came and went, and only Leverett and Dudley had voted. (In Leverett, one man ran for each position and 40 per cent of the House voted.) Those in charge of running the elections in various constituencies met, constructed a labyrinthian procedure for nominations and election in each, and set a new deadline of today.

Two more Houses-Eliot and Kirkland-and Radcliffe have now held their elections. Winthrop's is today. The other Houses are in various stages of completion and confusion. Adams, Dunster, and Mather haven't even started nominations. "We've been hassling other things and haven't gotten around to these elections yet," said Mark Kaplan '71, chairman of the Dunster House Committee. In many cases, only one person ran for each seat.

What Is To Be Done?

The Faculty members for all these committees except the CRR have already been selected. Except for the CRR. it seems that student elections for these committees may be completed someday. Their problem, of course, will be to establish their legitimacy given the casual way in which they were compiled.

The CRR will be in worse shape. There appears to be no chance the Faculty won't approve it. At best the Faculty may vote to allow open hearings, in which case the CRR may start life with five of its six student members. At worst, it may end up with none. Members of the Committee of Fifteen have said it is unlikely there will be new CRR elections this year, and if any constituencies refuse to send representatives, it will mean just that many fewer students on the committee.

Which is all very fine in theory. But the first time the CRR is forced to mete out discipline, it may find that half a committee is worse than none.