Revision Revived

On Monday night, the Student Council returned for the first time this year to an issue which must surely be a painful one in its history--rules for undergraduate organizations. It is not that the council has performed particularly badly in this field, but its labors have been extremely complicated and often frustrated by decanal doggedness.

Monday's session was encouraging, but not inspiring. The council supported five changes in the present rules, most of them for sound reasons, and neglected some others which are essential if the rules are not to remain a restrictive influence on undergraduate activity.

These are the council's proposed changes:

1. Drop the requirement that all organizations must leave a list of at least ten members with the Dean's Office and substitute a provision requiring groups to show, not give, such a list when applying to use Harvard facilities. This would do much to remove the fears of unorthodox political groups which have disbanded or lost members simply because students were unwilling to put their names on a political list which might conceivably be subpoenaed from the Dean's Office by government agents. It would also assure the Dean that he was not providing facilities for a group which did not include a reasonable number of Harvard undergraduates. Naturally, groups which were not afraid to leave lists in the Dean's hands could do so and avoid the trouble of providing a list every time they wanted to hold a meeting.

2. Replace the rule prohibiting groups from using the Yard with one that allows Yard gatherings or demonstrations "when such use will not interfere with classroom or office activities or the convenience of Yard residents." The Glee Club already uses the Yard for its spring concerts, and in other cases the burden of proof should be on the Dean's Office to show that a proposed gathering would be disruptive, rather than on the organization to show that it had an extra-special reason for wanting to use the Yard. Outdoor gatherings are good encouragement to expression at a time of undergraduate quiescence like the present, and the Yard is the most convenient and logical place for such spectacles.

3. Allow Harvard groups to hold joint meetings with outside groups when the purposes are "clearly educational." A strict application of the present rule would bar intercollegiate debates from College buildings, for example, and the council's suggested rule would adequately protect the University's tax-exempt status.

4. Abolish the special set of requirements for new publications. It hardly seems necessary for such a publication to be forced to reveal its proposed "policy" and "content" when it is already required, under the rules for all organizations, to demonstrate that it is strictly autonomous and not a tool of some outside group.

5. Repeal the present blanket Corporation ruling against groups' appearing on a commercial radio or television show, and allow them to appear whenever the Dean decides that such appearance will not be "harmful to the University." Here we feel that the council is standing on weak ground. It not only concedes the rightness of the University's desire to protect its "good name" by limiting the activity of undergraduate groups, but it also grants the University a new power--the power to pick and choose from all groups those which are so good that their appearance would add more to the "good name" than their commercial sponsorship would detract from it. The Corporation already has its cake and eats it when the Harvard Band appears on football broadcasts for the greater glory of Harvard University and Atlantic Hi-Arc gasoline. A group which can get a commercial radio or TV sponsor generally has something more to offer than its Harvard name, a fact that has not always been true of the football team, which the University itself subjects to commercial sponsorship at every home game. The present rule should not be amended in the way the council suggests, but should be replaced with a simple requirement that groups which obtain commercial sponsorship not represent their performance as officially sanctioned by the University. This presupposes a more dynamic conception of Harvard's "good name" than the simple desire for protection.

There were important issues which the council left unopened. One is the requirement of two faculty or alumni advisors for an organization, which has placed an extra, unnecessary hardship on certain political groups. Another is clarification of Radcliffe membership in College groups, to show just where responsibility for barring such membership belongs. A third is the requirement that all new organizations submit evidence of financial solvency, which conflicts with the rule that groups are fully responsible for their own finances and seems to imply a University guarantee for groups which pass the financial solvency test.

These are striking omissions. But if the Faculty Committee on Student activities will act favorably on the four reasonable suggestions which the council has made, the rules for undergraduate organizations will come a lot closer to the ideal of the greatest possible freedom for students of which the Dean has often spoken and for which the University has always stood.