AUTHORITY AND MINORITY REPORTS

Into eight conference rooms at Littauer Center on one of the first days of spring crowded some ten score students. Pads and pencil, which armed every pretty maiden and a few others, who were not so pretty as their painted political ideas, dispelled all conservative fears that a contest of postoffice or "goldfish gobbling" was about to begin. For almost six hours, Littauer was converted into a gigantic safety valve for youth and all its fears and ideas. Smoke-filled rooms, hushed giggles, and overflowing ash trays gave signs through the night that the conference was still there.

After the original deluge of student interest had been organized into well-charted panel discussions, the next day saw the whole conference reconvened in the new debutanted Littauer auditorium where there followed a tidal wave of voluble riot and disorganized debate. In vain did the group mentality strive to find the fruits of its previous well-ordered labor mirrored in the stormy session that questioned deficit finance, public spending, and even the protagonists' intentions. Roberts' rules were not enough to resist the tide of debate. Two chairmen substituted for each other as arbitrary Noah's Arks, and yet the debate reached a point where at one moment a resolution was voted out, in and out and in again, and then had to stand for redefinition. while time limits stretched and snapped like rubber bands.

Some people are wont to consider such fire and smoke as dangerous to democratic procedure. Others cough and cry a little and move on their blithesome way. But there is still another group that knows that conferences come and students may go but arguments go on forever. This group represents the advance guard of any community. It knows that smoke, fire and noise can be something as useful as they are dangerous. It realizes that nothing embryonic is a success or failure. It knows that indifference has never won any battles and that debate is healthy as long as we have real problems.

Unfortunately the Saturday session of the Conference instead of being the more popular and practical was a sad commentary on the Conference's powers of self-advertisement. Possibly next year, and there will have to be "a next year" if the conference idea is to go on, the leaders will see to it that the final group meeting either is guided by the faculty panel experts and not by student rapporteurs or will become merely a series of brief comparative reports and not a mass-meeting of pressure groups and lobby-lovers. This change would make for a novel experiment in a combination between the "dogmatism of experts" and the freedom of student thought which has never been achieved in collegiate conferences.