Faculty Needs To Care

Numerous people have decried the level of apathy on college campuses. Harvard certainly has been no exception.

The list of candidates for the Under-graduate Council regularly runs a few names short, and voter turnout has traditionally been low.

However, if the College's students are less than active, we may only be following the example set by our teachers.

Recently, in order to prevent the Faculty Council from becoming an appointed body, the rules for candidacy nomination had to be relaxed. So few nominations were received that Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles was forced to invite faculty members to stand for election on a regular basis.

Not only that, but faculty meetings are vastly under-attended--fewer than half of those who are eligible to attend do.

Why does it matter?

If those who will be affected by policies show little interest in being part of the decision-making process, the results are usually less than optimal.

Some of these meetings may be boring, and the Faculty Council does wade through a lot of minutiae.

However, the Faculty Council also makes decisions about such issues as grade inflation policies, the status of ethnic studies at the University, the guidelines for sexual harassment and the speech code on campus. It is here that controversial and difficult policies receive their most careful scrutiny and frank discussion.

The only other group that votes on these policies is the FAS as a whole, and they often act as little more than a rubber stamp to the decisions of the Faculty Council, which they trust to make sure the policies are reasonable. Given the poor attendance at meetings, the importance of a diverse and representative body intensifies.

This is clearly an important committee that demands a wide-ranging candidate list to function effectively. The faculty, not Dean Knowles, should be picking their own representatives. While it's good that the election procedure has been modified in time to prevent the council from becoming an appointed body, the level of apathy that spurred the change is still dangerous.

There is some reason to hope that apathy can be conquered. The Under-graduate Council recently decided to make elections for officers campus-wide, in an effort involve more students and become more representative of their constituency.

A few professors who regularly attend faculty meetings are asking some very tough questions about administrative growth and whether or not FAS funds are being sapped by a bloated bureaucracy.

However, these small strides forward cannot be seen as more than a temporary shot in the arm to a sleepy campus. Both students and faculty offer some great, truthful excuses for why they aren't more involved. We are all very busy people.

Thirty years ago, when apathy was at an all-time low on campus, students were not necessarily racing from extra-curriculars to classes to public service activities and back again.

The faculty were spending more time on campus and less flying all over the world giving guest lectures and lending their expertise on all kinds of issues.

Students should not be expected to give up activities, and faculty should certainly act as leaders in the world of academia. But being busy should not stop us from participating in the decisions that affect us most. The real reason we are not participating in community activities is that we do not see ourselves as citizens of the College.

Students and faculty alike have worked very hard to join this academic community. I suspect members of both groups celebrated when we received invitations to be a part of Harvard.

However, membership involves more than a beautifully embossed certificate. Now that we are a part of Harvard, we need to act like it. If we are really the leaders of today and tomorrow, we should prove that by starting at home.

Valerie J. MacMillan's column appears on alternate Thursdays