Student Seats

THE Harvard Undergraduate Council voted, during the week before vacation, to ask the Faculty to place three non-voting students on both the Faculty Committee on Houses and the Committee on Educational Policy.

These two Faculty committees make decisions which directly affect the lives of undergraduates, but students have only an indirect opportunity to influence their decisions. The Harvard Policy Committee considers academic questions, and passes resolutions and suggestions on to the CEP, while the HUC serves the same role for the Committee on Houses.

In the case of the HPC and the CEP, this relationship has worked well; in the case of the HUC and the Committee on Houses, it has not. In either case, however, more student-faculty cooperation would be fostered if representatives of both groups actually sat around the same table talking to each other.

No number of petitions or formal resolutions passed on to a Faculty committee can serve the same function as discussion between committee members and elected student representatives. The HUC proposal would institutionalize such discussion, which has occurred three times this year but did not before and might not in the future.

The HUC has not asked for voting rights, probably because it did not think it could get them. In the case of the CEP--which has shown a willingness to initiate changes--student voting would not make much difference. But in the case of the Committee on Houses, which has often been insensitive to the widespread dissatisfaction with Harvard's social setup, non-voting student seats might not be enough.