Law School Meeting the Faculty Halfway

THE LAW SCHOOL Faculty meets tomorrow to discuss, and probably to vote on, a report from the School's Committee on Governance which recommends increased student participation at faculty meetings and proposes the establishment of a student-faculty Law School Council. Despite the poor track record of "super-councils" at Harvard, it seems worthwhile that the Law Faculty approve the committee's recommendations if for no other reason than to test the effectiveness of a larger student role in faculty affairs.

The Governance Committee's report is the second bold step (by Harvard standards) directed at involving students in the decision-making process to come out of the Law School this spring. The first occurred in February when President Pusey solicited the committee's aid in determining Law students' views on finding a replacement for President-designate Bok as dean of the School. Even though student response to the Governance Committee's efforts to carry out Pusey's mandate was one of wariness-a wariness justified by token samplings of student views in the past-a mechanism was established to channel student opinion to the Administration.

Certainly, the fact that there was an obvious choice for dean lent a perfunctory air to the rigmarole of the selection process and diminished the importance of the Governance Committee's work as a gauge of administrative responsiveness. But it is hard to discount the fact that Bok met with the committee for nearly six hours before making a final decision on the dean; by doing so, he made it hard to summarily dismiss Pusey's (Bok's) first formal solicitation of student views about the selection of a University dean as mere tokenism.

Now the Law Faculty has the opportunity to match its former dean's move toward student involvement; the Governance Committee's recommendations are mild in comparison to what it could have proposed. The committee's report reflects a request from Bok (as Law dean) to address the problems of outlining student representation in faculty meetings and of establishing methods for selecting student members of Law School standing committees. In discussing the first and more interesting of the two problems, the Governance Committee touched on the possibility of granting students voting privileges at faculty meetings. Most of the ten student members of the committee favored this idea, at least in principle, and some felt it was the only form of participation that would "carry conviction to the student body at large." That may well be.

NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, the response to the idea among individual faculty members ran the spectrum of as the committee says, enthusiasm to acquiescence. But despite the fact that the committee found faculty members "willing to see eventual student voting participation," it chose-wisely perhaps-to recommend a more limited step. This does not mean the committee's consideration of the voting role was half-hearted, though. In fact, the committee went so far as to garner, through the faculty secretary, an opinion on the issue from the University's legal standby. Ropes and Gray.

Ropes and Gray concluded that the statutes of the University define "faculty" to include only Corporation appointees. "Under the foregoing provisions," the opinion states, "students are not included in the membership of the faculty. However, the Corporation, if it should deem it appropriate as a matter of policy to do so, could adopt a standing vote permitting any faculty to include in its membership students appointed by the Corporation for that purpose. Any student so appointed to a faculty could, as a member of the faculty, participate in its business."

Surprisingly, this definition may not entirely preclude the possibility of a student voting role. The student members of the Governance Committee last year discussed the issue with members of the Corporation, who said they were prepared to consider student voting participation in specific cases approved by the faculty. There are also informal devices for skirting formal action by the Corporation and achieving the practical effect of a student vote. For instance, the Law School's Administrative Board permits decisions to hinge on a vote of the entire Board, students included, in cases which its faculty members deem appropriate. And the Divinity School is governed, without the objection of the Corporation, by what the Governance Committee terms "a kind of Athenian democracy of faculty and students on a one-man-one-vote basis."

The committee says that "perhaps [the Divinity School] stand (s) closer to revealed truth that we do," but the Divinity School in any case is one of the University's smallest while the Law School is among the largest with over 1500 students. Student voting participation at the Law School would entail an incredible complication of mechanics, especially in determining the number of students who should have such a role, how they should be chosen, and whether they should be involved in deciding appointments. Perhaps the Governance Committee should have recommended a full voting role, but instead it preferred a "gradualist approach" where-by an increased number of students would attend faculty meetings on a regular and more participatory basis.

THE recommendation calls for ten permanent student representatives-chosen by the proposed Law School Council for one-year terms-who would attend faculty meetings as participants without voting privilege. The student representatives would also have the right to request reconsideration, within 24 hours after any meeting, of any action taken by the faculty other than appointments. Any matter for which the students request reconsideration would be placed on the agenda of the next faculty meeting.

There are, of course, problems with the recommendation. For instance, it provides a loophole whereby the student representatives can be excluded from meetings during consideration of appointments, when actions are being taken affecting named students who request that no other students be present, and "in any case in which the dean shall determine that the best interests of the School would not be served by the attendance of students."

There is also the danger that, without immediate student voting participation, the Law School Council and all its ramifications for long-range student participation at faculty meetings will ultimately fall into apathetic disrepair. But if students seriously desire an eventual voting role, they must recognize that a "gradualist approach" is essential and they must make it work-no faculty at Harvard is going to dole out its privileges to persons who have not first proved themselves to be potentially responsible voting members. In many ways, the Law School has become a testing ground for the rest of the University-the faculty should, in consideration of this, at least give the Governance Committee's interesting, and essentially harmless, recommendations a chance for survival by adopting the committee's report tomorrow.