No Improvement

IT IS NOT OFTEN that Harvard undergraduates do anything as a group, but we hope this week they will get together and soundly reject the proposed Undergraduate Council. While the new system will rationalize the procedure for placing representatives on student-Faculty committees and give those student members a method for articulating and carrying out a consistent policy, the gains in student access to issues and decisions are small.

The heart of the proposal models three reformed student-Faculty committees after the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE)--a group with a strong track record in passing its proposals. CUE's small size gives all student representatives a chance to influence Faculty members, who can then make the group's case to the Faculty Council and full Faculty. The proposed council would keep CUE and split the unwieldy and ineffective Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life into two CUE-like divisions. Instead of belonging to the Educational Resources Group as CUE student members do, representatives from the three committees would make up the new student council.

But in the new configuration, as in the old CUE power remains with the Faculty, with the students only strength being their persuasiveness. Farmers of the constitution would argue that they didn't spend two years of deliberation simply to rename existing committees; they and the Crimson majority hail the proposed council's budget as a significant innovation and the key to its power. Such emphasis is misplaced. A Faculty conversant with a billion-dollar endowment will not be impressed by a few thousand dollars in the hands of 100 students. The power of the purse must come from within Harvard's budget process, not from setting up an outside fund to provision efforts that, if done at all, should be undertaken by the University itself.

One-third of the refundable term bill surcharge would go to maintain the new student council bureaucracy, with another $5000 carmarked for social events, perhaps such as the Student Assembly's ill-fated Pousette-Dart concert two years ago. Indeed, the Student Assembly's largely futile attempts to interest students in College-wide activities suggest this money might better remain in students' pockets. House committees, either individually or cooperatively, already provide an acceptable and effective structure for sponsoring social activities.

The bulk of the money--perhaps as much as $35,000--would presumably fund minority, struggling, or generally less visible campus organizations. But Harvard itself nominally recognizes its responsibility to support such groups--as it should in an academic community that prides itself on its diversity of thought and interests--by providing the dean of students with discretionary funds for just such purposes. A powerful student council should tap these funds and challenge the dean's authority to dispense then autonomously, instead of asking students to pay a second time for what their tuition already entitles them to.

THE DOWLING COMMITTEE missed a chance to make clear reforms in the University's relationship to its students. It could have strongly urged abolishing the insidious and potentially coercive Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. It could have addressed departmental prerogatives, giving students more of a voice in tenure and tutorial decisions. It could have put students in control of funds that the dean of students now doles out. And it could have stripped centralized student government of the trivial and ultimately unsuccessful social activities that were its predecessor's only sphere of influence and that precluded the assembly from meriting a reputation as a serious deliberative body.

We urge the Dowling Committee or some new group to go back to the drawing board--for another two years if necessary--to institute real reform. And we urge students to prompt this by showing interest in the issue and voting against the proposal. The last time the college reformed its governance was 10 years ago in the wake of the student takeover of University Hall. If this proposal passes, students may have to rest content until the next upheaval or the next decade. In the meantime, administrators could shuffle student concerns through a new maze of bureaucracy. Until the administration agrees to give students more of a voice where policy is made--whether in departmental committees, deans' offices or the Faculty Council--students cannot afford to ratify their own impotence.