HCUA Committee Asks Late Football Parietals

There have been no "serious infractions" of parietal rules over the past five years on football Saturdays for which the Masters granted midnight parietals, the executive committee of the Harvard Council for Undergraduate Affairs will report Monday.

The committee's report, released yesterday, also discloses that "an abstract of the police records provided by Dean Watson" for the five-year period showed "no report or arrest of a Harvard student for drunkenness or disorder" on the six Saturdays.

Accordingly, the committee will ask the HCUA to "request that the Masters reinstate Saturday night parietals on football weekends beginning next Fall."

Dean Watson's "examination of the Administrative Board dockets for the two meetings following each of these games shows only two minor parietal infractions..., neither of which involved drunkenness or disorder," the report says.

"Therefore," it continues, "the present withdrawal of parietal privileges attempts to regulate Harvard students in an area where they have shown themselves capable of self-restraint and self-regulation."

The weekends referred to in the report are the Princeton weekends of 1959, 1961 and 1963, the Yale weekends of 1960 and 1962 and the University of Massachusetts weekend this Fall. Late Saturday parietals are customarily granted on Yale or Princeton weekends, and the Masters allowed them for the UMass weekend this Fall primarily because no House dances were scheduled.

Although the report stresses that late football parietals do not cause "wild parties and drunken driving," it also argues that lower attendance at House dances would do little harm.

According to the report, all the House Committee chairmen said they would be "willing to make up the revenue which might be lost by Saturday football dances by raising House card prices," because the amount saved by students through entertaining in their rooms would exceed the extra card cost.