Undergrades Snubbed

Usually the campus most reliable supporter of student rights versus adults (administrators, the government, etc.), the staff overlooks a troubling aspect of the recent final club changes: They were imposed on students by graduate boards and administrators, over the objections of undergraduates.

The role of a graduate board (and the administration, for that matter) is to provide guidance and support to a given undergraduate organization, not take proactive and unprovoked measures to impose an agenda on unwilling students. Undergraduates, after all, are better-equipped to address their own day-to-day needs; student organizations are furthermore intended as arenas for undergraduates to learn and practice their decision-making skills--even if that means suffering the consequences of poor choices. The students should therefore set their own policies and decide what kind of final club they want to have, except on rare occasions of utter necessity--rare occasions of which this is clearly not one.

Whatever the staff's views on the final clubs, it should almost ever applaud violations of student autonomy, and it should therefore frown upon the graduate council's recent decision.