Poor Representation

When the Jenner Committee came to Boston last spring, the Student Council created an ad hoc committee of undergraduate organizations to help determine student opinion of the investigations. Because the Council hesitated to take the responsibility of speaking for the College, it felt that such a committee would be sufficiently representative of undergraduate opinion to lend power to its statements. And although instrumental in the committee's creation, the Council relegated itself to a position equal to that of the other member organizations.

Once formed, the committee did nothing for over half a year; the issues were not immediate enough to warrant action. But this fall, when Senator McCarthy charted that the University was harboring Communist professors, the Council and other committee members rightly felt the time had come to act.

When a small group tries to speak for the student body, its representative-ness depends on the controversially of the subject. The first sentence of the motion prepared by the committee and passed by the Council last week was hardly controversial. "We approve," it said, "of the manner in which President Pusey has answered the recent charges by Senator McCarthy that there are Communists on the University's Faculty, and we have complete confidence in the fact that this University is absolutely, unalterably, and finally opposed to Communism."

If the committee of student groups and the Council stopped here, it could have reaped good publicity with this statement. But they extended themselves to a much more controversial principle: "We believe that the President and Corporation will preserve an atmosphere in which the right of a teacher to retain his position will not be questioned as long as he does not act unlawfully or immorally or does not use his position to distort facts or to insist upon the acceptance of his own beliefs as the only possible truths.' At first glance, this is innocuous enough. But theses ideas have inevitably been the preamble to a resolution against discharging teachers who are members of the Communist Party. Regardless of the merits of this stand, it is far from unanimous at the University. The Corporation, for one, disagrees.

Such a statement was not even satisfactory to all the member organizations on the committee. Yet the Student Council approved it, 10-2.

It is only common sense that they statement designed to express public opinion should emphasize areas of agreement and minimize any points obviously open to dispute. Because the Council did not do this, a statement that could have carried some weight was rendered inaccurate and consequently ineffectual. As it is, the Council has not only possibly mis-represented student opinion, but violated one of its own policies as well. For its only purpose in creating the committee was to improve its ability to express student opinion.

Despite the Council's action last night, this part of the resolution stands. It should be put up for student referendum or abandoned. And the next committee set up to broaden the Council's opinions should keep in mind the necessary limits of its own.