ROTC Advising Proposed

The Faculty Council decided to appoint several of its members to advise the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the president on the future of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in a meeting yesterday.

The members will be assigned to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the ROTC issue, according to a University Hall source.

In 1990, the council approved a resolution recommending that the University stop accepting ROTC scholarship money if, after two years, the program continued to exclude gay men and lesbians.

The members have yet to be chosen and it is unclear exactly how much President Neil L. Rudenstine will utilize the council members, the source said.

The president and the Corporation, Harvard's senior governing board, have the final decision on whether the University will continue to accept scholarship money from ROTC. The president and the Corporation control contractual agreements between the University and other institutions, the source said.

The deadline imposed by the Faculty Council is set to expire this spring. But in an interview last week, Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles said that the resolution will not bind the current council and the faculty in its reconsideration of the issue.

The military's regulation which bars gay and lesbian undergraduates from participating in ROTC conflicts with Harvard's anti-discrimination policy which was adopted in the early 1980s.

In other news, the council said it will establish a small internal committee to advise the dean and FAS on how to develop a response to the Corporation's request that faculty members report their outside activities to their deans.

The request, made last spring, asks FAS to establish better mechanisms for faculty members to report their non-Harvard activities annually. Members have yet to be chosen, the source said.

In addition, Associate Dean of the Faculty Candace Corvey presented a slide show of FAS's current financial status to the council. The show was intended to inform the council of the severity of the budgetary situation so they could better advise the dean, said the source.