Parley Delegations Reconcile Differences

CRIMSON Observer at the Conference

In the brief sober pause midway between Christmas and New Year's Eve, 358 delegates at the Chicago Conference sweated and politicked through a smoke-filled parliamentary maze. They knew what they wanted: no axe-grinding by existing youth organizations, no partisan domination by doctrinaire minorities, escape from the shadow of past failures in building a U. S. Students movement.

The theme song in the meeting rooms of the University of Chicago's Reynolds Club was hardly "Hearts and Flowers." Before sentiment crystallized, leaders of loosely organized factions jockeyed for the limelight and lined up issues. Ineffectual embryo Communists were on hand; so was a large groups representing Catholic colleges and groups. Looming larger than either was the University of Texas delegation with a concrete middle-course plan.

You cannot bait the new student organization now, for it produced a leadership which represents a cross-section of American students in the strictest sense. Chairman-elect Jim Smith, student body president at the University of Texas, heads an executive Committee including 30 regional chairmen and three representatives of an organizational council embracing every shade of political opinion and religious guidance.

To what extent should existing national campus units have a voice? Harvard's Douglass Cater, independent of blocs and probably the most imposing figure at the sessions (the declined the nomination for chairmanship), held this knotty question in the palm of this hand as leader of a round table on the precise nature of the organizational structure. The Texas plan demanded that all presently organized groups be barred: spokesmen from organizations as widely separately as the AVD and the parochial Newman Clubs of America asked inclusion as voting delegates. The resulting compromise called for the creation of a council of the 19 organizations which would wield 10% of the executive committee's voting strength through three joint delegates working side by side with the campus-electees.

An inking of how the new group the Texas suggest naming if "The American Association of College and University Students" will use the influence of the country's veteran-swollen 2,500,000 student population lies in its clear opposition to the quota system and its expressed intention of stimulating student government activity.

But ideological questions are not likely to diver it from the large view: When Southern delegates at Chicago objected to a resolution requiring interracial meetings, the most militant anti-discrimination advocates did not shout "Jim Crow."