Political Shenanigans

WORD FROM University Hall and Radcliffe these days indicates the University may soon be holding a referendum on whether to continue funding the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS). Leaders of RUS have charged that University Hall is pushing for the referendum simply because RUS bothers them, because it raises issues the College doesn't want to deal with. The charge seems valid.

In its 14-year history, RUS has had a rather impressive record of lobbying the College for action on issues like rape security, tenuring women, and sexual harassment. On those issues, its voice has often been alone. If RUS at times seems overly vocal, that tactic is only appropriate, since these are the very issues on which the University is most secretive. For example, even when women are upheld in charging professors with-sexual harassment, the College has no official policy of telling the student involved what punitive steps, if any, it has taken. And there are many more rapes on campus than most students find out about.

All that irks University Hall, so it's not surprising College officials are pushing the referendum. Certainly the timing and motives of Dean of the College John B. Fox Jr. '59 seem suspect. RUS is, after all, a Radcliffe organization over which he has no responsibility.

Fox says the imminent appearance of Harvard's first centralized and funded student government justifies crippling RUS, so long the only voice of women undergraduates. But student government is in great confusion and students are unsure what shape, if any, the new government will take. It may well become the menagerie of megalomaniacs that its pathetic predecessor was. The fall, then, may be one of the worst times in recent memory to ask students to evaluate the need for RUS, especially since recently arrived freshmen are not yet aware of RUS' record.

They should be, for women on campus all owe a lot to RUS. When issues affecting women come up at University Hall, most women on campus do not even know about it. But RUS is often there with information, lobbying hard for women's interests.

Indeed, both men and women have a stake in the future of RUS. In the past years of lame student government, RUS has provided a steady supply of money for a variety of worthy student enterprises. It has helped the Black Students Association (BSA), for instance, and has also regularly helped underwritten such diverse institutions on campus as the Women's Clearinghouse and the annual Carribbean Club spring carnival. The Clearinghouse would sorely miss RUS; administrators recently eliminated the budget of the women's counseling and referral service.

Groups like RUS and BSA and others that represent minority constituencies often appear strident and unsympathetic to the student body at large. Most people, for example, know little about sexual harassment in Harvard classrooms, and tend to underestimate its importance. But this does not make RUS's mission any less crucial. If a suitable substitute ever emerges perhaps a referendum would be more palatable, but now, it seems a blunt tool to stamp out a University Hall gadfly.

RUS deserves a massive vote of confidence in any referendum University Hall chooses to hold. But it also deserves to be freed from the harassment of whimsical, politically timed referenda that University Hall dreams up to stir up a little trouble.