Behind Closed Doors

SHORTLY AFTER 2 p.m. today, more than a dozen men and several women will file into a huge conference room on the second floor of University Hall. After an obligatory round of backslapping and banter, the members of the Faculty Council will take their seats around a long wooden table, eyed from above by dozens of portraits of the men who have run Harvard for three-and-a-half centuries. No one else will watch them: Visitors aren't allowed, save those faculty members specially invited to discuss an issue of the day with the council.

That routine has marked each Wednesday afternoon at the University for the last dozen years. When Dean Rosovsky calls the council to order this afternoon at the start of the body's 1981-82 session, there will be no reason to assume its routine will be any different. Members of the council do come and go; roughly a third of its 18 seats turn over each year. Once in a while, a big change takes place. In 1973, for example, Henry Rosovsky replaced John T. Dunlop as Dean of the Faculty and chairman of the council. But for the most part, the Faculty Council remains, consolidating its power, institutionalizing its presence, quietly making the decisions that shape College life for today's students and determine what the Harvard experience will mean for students perhaps a decade down the road.

Next to the Corporation, whose meetings are also entirely closed, the Faculty Council may be the most influential body at Harvard. And powerful as the Corporation is on financial matters, its influence over the daily lives of undergraduates is relatively small.

The issues the council has discussed in the last several years show its ability to affect student life: the structure of undergraduate government, the need for a race relations foundation, the rules governing make-up exams, the language requirement, the value of a literature concentration, calendar and tutorial reform, and gay rights.

Those who have seen the University's schematic diagrams of where its power lies might be led to believe the Faculty is where the real action is. That's not quite true. On those occasions when Faculty meetings aren't cancelled because of "insufficient business," as three of nine were last year, the Faculty usually echoes the council's decisions of weeks earlier. One council member likes to call the Faculty "disposative, not consultative." Any way you translate that, it means the Faculty, too large to hold orderly discussions, ends up a rubber stamp for the council.

THE ULTIMATE IRONY about the Faculty Council is not that it so dominates student-related issues, but that the council was born of student calls for less remote, more democratic institutions during the tumultuous 1960s.

James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, has argued that despite student protest in the late '60s, "Whatever the students demanded, the Faculty got. If there was a realignment of power, the Faculty got it, not the students. "Nothing proves that ironic maxim more than the Faculty Council.

The council was created in the wake of left-wing student pressure to reduce the influence of the all-too-powerful coterie of the Dean and his advisors. Administrators, anxious to restore calm to campus, decided upon a system with the council and Faculty on top and student-faculty bodies like the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) and the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL)--a set-up likely to be effective in muffling protest while being not overly conciliatory to student demands.

Their tactics were right, probably more than they ever dreamed. CUE and CHUL remained visible for some time, but in recent years have faded into nothingness. When either body has tried to assert that it is more than a vestigial decision-making organ, the Faculty Council has put it emphatically back in its place.

WHEN CHUL overwhelmingly recommended a University-wide policy of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation last year, the council spurned that request. When CUE debated makeup exam policy for two months last year before tabling discussion--in part because they were told they could review all academic rules this year--the Faculty Council proceeded to revise makeup policy by forcing students with two or more make-ups pending to present their case before the Administrative Board. Formed because students rebelled against the Dean's ability to pick his own advisors, the council has gradually metamorphosed into an essentially unified body that is, effectively, an undemocratic arm of the administration.

THE ISSUES the council will rule upon from its University Hall perch this year will probably be, on the whole, less critical than some of those it has decided in the past. A proposal to stiffen the foreign language requirement is almost certain to appear--yet the only committee to have considered it before the council will have been an all-Faculty one that last met nearly a year-and-a-half ago. Since that time, no one seems to have given thought to the possibility of involving students in an issue of such obvious concern to them.

But that shouldn't come as any surprise. Formed to co-opt student protest, the Faculty Council succeeded admirably, even increasing its authority after student concerns shifted from communal good to individual advancement. The danger for students is that someday, they may wake up to find all their power usurped. The greater danger, for administrators, is that they may arise to find a student body angered by forays like those of the Faculty Council--and prepared to re-enact the struggles of the late 1960s against forces that today seem eerily the same.