Sociology Grad Students Will Request Voice in Deciding on Appointments

Graduate students in the Sociology Department decided Friday to draw up a proposal requesting that a graduate student be given a non-voting position on the Department's selection committee.

Their decision to opt for official representation on the committee resulted from graduate student dissatisfaction with what they considered the Department's failure to abide by an agreement made with graduate students last Spring.

The agreement required the selection committee to consult with graduate students before recommending junior faculty appointments to the Department.

Harrison C. White, professor of Sociology and chairman of the selection committee, told the students there was little chance that the Department would vote in favor of graduate student representation on the committee.

At Friday's meeting, the graduate students repeated their year-old cry that the selection committee, consisting of two junior and two senior faculty members, has ignored the opinions of graduate students.

Theda Skocpol, a graduate student in Sociology, voiced three additional complaints concerning the substance of the selection committee's decisions.

She said that the Department has not given adequate attention to the appointment of female junior faculty members, that it has displayed a bias towards quantitative sociologists in its last two appointments, and that it has de-emphasized candidates teaching qualifications.

White pleaded guilty to Skocpol's charges but explained the committee's failure to consult graduate students in its recent appointments as the result of unusual circumstances.

"We were struck twice by lightning and had two candidates whose qualifications were so outstanding that we had no question about recommending them," White said Friday.

Skocpol said that if the decisions were so obvious, the graduate students would have been "struck by lightning too".

The selection committee nominated Scott Boorman, a graduate student in Sociology, to the position of an assistant professor last month, two hours after a meeting with graduate students in which they had protested his nomination.

Concerned with the prospect of a similar situation occuring with the upcoming appointment of the Department's first head tutor representatives of the graduate students complained last Tuesday to George C. Homans '32. Chairman of the Sociology Department, that the Department had failed to consult them. Homans agreed on a Tuesday that the Department was guilty of "volating the spirit of last Spring's agreement."

At Homan's request the senior faculty members instructed White to consult with eradnat" students before recommending already made up his mind to recommend Mark Granovetter, a former graduate student here, for head tutor.

White said that although the committee has consulted with graduate students in both cases. Boorman's and Granovetter's merits were so clear, that the committee couldn't help but make up its mind in dependent of graduate student opinion.

Several graduate students described the members of the selection committee as "enlightened despots" who seem to be "struck with lightning every time one of their former students applies for a position."

Both Bootman and Granovetter were students of White