The Emergence of RUS

A story is going around about the president of RUS. She visited the dentist's, where he told her, "My God, girl, you've got to stop smiling so much--your teeth are beginning to buckle!"

Last spring, RUS didn't have much it could depend on besides the diplomatic smiles of Deborah A. Batts '69, its new president.

So this fall, the slowly-emerging realities of RUS may come as a shock to some Cliffies, especially when all they can remember of student government is their high school student council, which they probably never served, and RGA, which never won any claims to student support.

For the first time in a long time, Cliffies have a student government that promises them real dialogue with the administration, and a real focus for their demands and energies.

During last week's labor crisis with the kitchen help at Radcliffe, for example, RUS beat SDS to printing a fact-sheet on the dispute. Some students found themselves looking to RUS for announcements of new developments, while last year they ignored the weekly RGA bulletins.

Students are beginning to expect more from RUS too. They are suggesting RUS meeting as the place to bring up complaints about such long-standing issues as student jobs and parietals. Students are more aware--and less skeptical--of RUS as their own spokesman.

The College administration, too, feels that RUS is opening up unexplored lines of communication between students and the College staff. Non-voting student membership on administrative committees is relatively new and untried.

Under RGA, the only regular College committees that students could serve on were the Judicial Committee, which met only rarely, and the Radcliffe Policy Committee, which was really separate from the College's decision-making apparatus. A total of five students each year sat on these committees.

Now, fourteen students will have the opportunity to sit on eight committees being formed with members of the College staff. The committees range from Policy on Admissions and Financial Aid to the group that studies undergraduate life. Some of these student positions are already over-applied. The RUS executive board will select the committee members this week.

RUS has also invited administrators to join seven new student committees, from the Student Activities and Conferences Committee to the By-Laws Committee, which considers statutes for RUS.

Mary I. Bunting, president of Radcliffe, feels that this increased interaction between students and administration is a good thing. "We want all the input from students, as well as residents and employees, that we can have before we make decisions," she said last week.

She particularly praised RUS for their diplomatic persistence last spring, even though intransigence on the part of both the administration and the students then threatened to kill the new student government. "We never stopped communicating, and that was good," she said. "At a time when students want communication so much, when they isolate themselves, that's too bad."

The cooperation between RUS and the College Council almost ended before it began last spring, when the Council rejected four drafts of the RUS constitution. Cliffies had voted to abolish RGA during the winter, and were left without recognized representation until May, when a fifth version of the constitution was finally approved by both the Council and Radcliffe students.

The obstacle to quick administration approval last spring was RUS's insistence on regular, non-voting membership on the College Council, Radcliffe's highest decision-making body. This would have made communication easier and more direct than in the past, when they were limited to various student-faculty committees. Regularization of student participation in the Council remains one of RUS's top priorities.

"We could have had a formal agreement last spring," Debbie Batts said, "but that would have been a compromise." According to Miss Batts, the College Council was "unwilling" to approve a plan for regularization, and RUS was equally unwilling to put anything "softer" than that into a constitution that might be hard to change later.

Mrs. Bunting claims that the issue of student membership on the Council is less political than it is practical: setting down rules for something that has never been tried could be destructive. "I'm hopeful that they can come often," she said. "But I'm going to have to feel my way on this. I will invite students to participate when I feel it will be appropriate and useful for them to do so."

She described RUS as being in a kind of experimental stage. Its exact role remains uncertain in the administration's view. But Debbie Batts and RUS do not share this cautious attitude. They feel that students should have a voice in all areas of college government. They want to be part of the "input," and part of the decision-making as well. They want more openness and candor, not tokenism and condescension, from the administration, say RUS members.

What RUS seems to need even less, though, is bad faith--on the part of its members, students and the administration.

Last month, for example, when RUS was not invited to the first College Council meeting, most students considered it an omen of RUS's doom. The meeting was held before classes started in September, and Mrs. Bunting explained that RUS representatives had not been invited because students were not yet back in Cambridge. While no one should ignore the possibility of subtler reasons, no one except the College Council will ever be able to do better than guess at them. RUS members were "irritated, but not angry" at not being invited. Mrs. Bunting argued that the tension came from the speculation about the motives of the Council, not from the actions of the Council itself.

Some students still say that RUS should have been angry anyway, and that its difficulties are rooted in its conciliatory "politeness" toward the administration. They contend that a tougher stand on the part of students would break the administration's resistance to student demands.

In spite of what these students may hope, however, RUS will never replace the College administration, nor does it want to. "The College Council doesn't want to be dictated to," said Debbie Batts, "and we really don't want to dictate. It's very hard to impress people with the more subtle things we're trying to do."