Minority Votes

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I wish to comment on your recent story (October 30, 1981) reporting that Natasha Pearl, a member of the Committee to Review College Governance, "assailed" my statement that the proposal for automatic voting representation of minority groups on the new student council is inconsistent with the spirit of our report and that my statement is "disturbingly misleading." I believe our report was clear on the point of special minority seats on the Council. We wrote (and Ms. Pearl signed her name to the report) the following: "The Committee recommends that all students be invited to attend and speak at both Council and committee meetings but that only elected Council members vote" (emphasis added). This statement is found at the end of the second paragraph in the section of our report dealing with the Structure of the Council and Delegate Responsibility.

Our Committee discussed the issue of special seats for minority groups on the Council and the consensus of the Committee was that this was not a recommendation we wished to make. As I recall, no member of the Committee expressed strong positive feelings about such a proposal. We took no formal vote on this issue (as we did on other issues where opinion was sharply divided), and no one wrote a minority statement on this issue. Contrary to the statement attributed to Ms. Pearl in your story, this issue was not one on which our Committee was unable to agree and that we left for students to decide.