A New PBHA?

PHILLIPS Brooks House Association, despite its enormous size and diversity of programs, has undergone a conscious change in goals during the last five years, largely under the direction of its chief officers and several dynamic committee chairmen. What was once a social center for Victorian do-gooders has sharpened its aims to include specific educational and socio-economic programs at a neighborhood or institutional level. To implement these more expensive and sophisticated programs, PBHA has amended or altered its constitutions almost annually for decades.

Last year the officers looked at the whole constitution and decided it had a gaping deficiency: there was no formal procedure for evaluating whether a program that had been running for years was still valuable. The Executive Committee wrote a new constitution, which centralizes powers of review. After some heated discussion, the full Cabinet of PBHA ratified the new constitution shortly before Christmas. The PBHA Faculty Committee meets today to grant final approval.

The new constitution will permit more efficient planning and less stagnation. Under the old timetable, an outgoing Cabinet elected PBHA's new president so late in the year that he had little time and less perspective to choose officers and evaluate committees. Moreover, the officers did not choose committee chairmen until even later, with only reading period remaining for the chairmen to plan, staff, and fund their committees for the coming year.

Under the new system, however, a three-month period of program planning will precede an intensive annual review session each February. The new president and his executive committee, after further consultation with outgoing officers, will either accept or reject committee plans for the following year. The executive committee then appoints committee chairmen and coordinates solicitation and dispensing of funds.

THE president theoretically had most of these powers under the old constitution, but the unsystematic decision-making process kept his hands tied. The new constitution's efficiency, some Cabinet members worry, may allow one man too much power over appointments and programs. The Cabinet does have some restraining power, however; if a majority of its members disagree with an executive decision, it may tell the Graduate Secretary to assemble a judiciary committee. This committee, consisting of Cabinet members, officers, and Faculty, with no faction in majority, is to make the final decision.

Despite this safeguard, the new president of PBHA will have a freer hand than his predecessors to develop programs. There are potential dangers. A high-powered executive committee, for example, could eliminate a committee to which students devote only an afternoon a week. There is no reason to expect this sort of exclusiveness, however; officers in the past have been more concerned with a committee's practical goals than with the intensity of its efforts.

Under the new system, Executives will have to be wary of undercutting the committee chairmen's authority; otherwise, the initiative and energy of the chairman might dissolve. Theoretically, though, the Graduate Secretary's ultimate power through the judiciary committee and the elaborate planning and approval process should check any possible personal vendettas on the part of a president.

THE question of ideology, and politics, continues under the new constitution to string PBHA on a tightrope. A fine line between community organizing and political action in some Brooks House programs is impossible to draw. So far PBHA has had limited involvement or success in the realm of political activity. The use of the word "political" to describe PBHA's purpose in the new constitution pleases members who are defensive about the House's lingering fruit-basket image, but it could also endanger PBHA's financial tie with the University and its tax-exempt status as a charitable and educational organization.

A tempting open clause in PBHA's new by-laws empower the Cabinet, by majority vote, to take stands on issues which it considers to be of concern to the whole House. The Cabinet should clearly help families articulate and organize against a program such as the Inner Belt. Without organized pressure the Belt will probably run through neighborhoods where PBHA works without amply relocating the families. But if officers indiscriminately decide to give PBHA ideological stands on University, city, and national issues, the organization's political awareness could become self-destructive. Since only "insubstantial" political action is allowed charitable organizations by tax laws, PBHA must risk volatile stands only on those issues which directly involve PBHA programs.

In any case, it is a promising sign to see PBHA ruffle a few feathers by striking close to sources of political, economic, and educational inequity. The new constitution, administered by presidents as responsible as those in recent years, will increase the effectiveness of Brooks House as a center for social action and undergraduate education.