Parietals Plan Receives Strong Student Backing

Early returns in a college-wide poll show undergraduates endorsing the Harvard Undergraduate Council's parietal proposal by a margin slightly under 19 to 1.

The HUC last week asked the Masters for new, greatly increased parietal hours--noon to midnight every day but Saturday and noon to 1 a.m. on Saturday.

The poll, begun yesterday in Eliot, Adams, and Quincy House, asked students simply to "agree" or "disagree" with the proposal. In the three Houses, 550 students agreed, 34 disagreed, according to HUC representatives.

The poll will continue today, in all eight resident Houses.

Daniel B. Magraw Jr. '68, president of the HUC, will forward the results of the poll to Dean Glimp before the Committee on Houses (the Masters and Deans Ford, Glimp, Watson, and von Stade) meets Wednesday to consider the parietal issue.

If the present trend of the poll continues, "it shows the appalling extent to which student opinion has been overlooked in the past," Magraw said last night.

The Masters and Deans last Spring refused to act on a parietal proposal almost identical to the current HUC plan although informal polls in several Houses showed students favored the extension by a huge majority.

Magraw said last night that the results of the poll will strengthen the HUC's case with the Masters and Deans. The Council has asked to meet jointly with the Committee on Houses to work out a solution to the parietal issue. There is no precedent for such a joint session, Magraw said.

The Committee on the Houses is expected to announce after its Wednesday session whether it will meet with the HUC.

Carl A. Baum '69, HUC representative from Adams House, made the only report of an irregularity in today's polling. The one student in Adams who "disagreed" with the parietal proposal, Baum said, went on to write that he regarded any parietals at all as an insult. Baum said other Adamsers refused to mark the poll because they found the HUC's proposal too conservative. Voting By House   Agree  Disagree Eliot  150  23 Adams  106  1 Quincy  294  10