Vote 'Yes' For $60,000

A CIRCULAR PREPARED recently by student government officials describing the upcoming referendum on the proposals of the Dowling Committee includes this exhortation: "Student opinion will have a decisive influence on the outcome of the forthcoming deliberations of the Faculty and Corporation."

That these undergraduates, after a year of work within Harvard's institutional maze, still believe that the student body will have a "decisive influence" on anything is remarkable, not to mention incorrect. Historically, the University administration has ignored student opinion on issues like divestiture of South Africa-related investments or guidelines for accepting alumni gifts Students did once support a referendum demanding provision of toilet paper to the River Houses, and the University later complied. But administrators emphatically insisted, it wasn't the student survey but more direct tactics--the theft of massive quantities of toilet paper from Harvard buildings--that swayed them. The administration of this University looks at what students ask, decides if it is pleased and then makes up its institutional mind all by itself.

The same innocence marks, as we have said before, the entire proposal put forth by the Dowling Committee. It purports to give students power by giving them voice. But students can already make noise; the problem is getting somebody to listen. The only good that can come of this proposal is financial--it will award $60,000 to the student council, where perhaps it will be used to support groups that will actively confront the administration. For the money--and not in hopes it will mean real reform--we ask Harvard undergraduates to support the Dowling proposal in this week's vote.

A second, more intriguing question is also posed on the ballot. It asks whether students should be given more decision-making power. The answer, emphatically, is yes. Opponents of this proposition have argued publicly that students spend only four years at this University and hence are ill-suited to make decisions that will last beyond their tenure, and that administrators are smarter, and hence should be given all authority. The second contention would seem to answer itself--administrators who can invest in apartheid, or refuse to recognize that gay students here are victims of discrimination, for example, are surely not omniscient. And the first argument is just as weak--while individual students stay here only a few years, there will always, we hope, be students at Harvard. Their interests should be at the heart of University policy-making, and students can best represent themselves.

Though the vote on the second question is not binding either, it does allow at least an opportunity to show that we are not quite the sheep the men in Massachusetts Hall may think. It might be a beginning for reform more substantial that the faint-hearted efforts of the Dowling Committee.