SF AC's Future

ALMOST two months ago--before LBJ bowed out, before a bullet in Memphis changed the major issue in this country and in this University--the Student-Faculty Advisory Council began to talk about campus recruitment. Tomorrow the Faculty will decide the fate of SFAC's proposal on this issue.

When it was established after the Dow demonstration, the Council was charged primarily with formulating a recruitment policy so that the University could avert the kind of calamitous situation that evolved from the previous policy. SFAC held a number of meetings, discussed a number of issues, encountered President Pusey, and finally, just before it became a dead issue, started to discuss recruitment.

"In a sense," one member said yesterday, "we became a probate court after the March 31 speech and its after-math. We were supposed to formulate a policy on an issue that had become dead." The Council put in a lot of time on recruitment but, as shown by the discussion at their final meeting last Tuesday, SFAC members are interested in moving into different and perhaps more relevant areas of University policy. As such, the Council will not live or die by tomorrow's decision--in fact tomorrow's decision will not mean that much.

SFAC's restrictive recruitment resolution, in its final form, is the result of much debate, re-writing, and compromise. It began in late March as an informal motion by Charles S. Maier, instructor in History, who felt that students should have some say in who might be excluded from recruiting. If student sentiment was strong enough. Maier suggested, then the Deans could require recruiters to discuss their policies in public, and if sentiment was again strong enough, the appropriate deans could ask companies to postpone their visits. This proposal, Maier admits, was directly aimed at averting another Dow demonstration.

At the next meeting Alexander Keyssar '68 and Douglas Myers '68, the Leverett and Quincy representatives, extended Maier's suggestion by providing a mechanism by which students could express their sentiments. As it finally evolved, the mechanism that Rogers Albritton, professor of Philosophy, will present tomorrow to the Faculty is similar to that originally proposed by Myers and Keyssar. The Council calls for the banning of a recruiter if one-fifth of the undergraduates sign a petition, subsequently approved by SFAC, requesting such action. This petition would come after an earlier one-signed by 500 students--which would require a recruiting organization to discuss its policies in public.

But the resolution, in a sense, is too thorough. The urgency of averting another Dow demonstration has diminished considerably since the Council was formed. Recruitment is no longer the overriding concern of everyone at Harvard. If the Faculty votes down the SFAC resolution, the Council will probably continue. Very few members would even consider resigning. Most SFAC members hope that the organization next year will consider policy areas such as discipline, financing, course content, relations with the community. The work of the four SFAC subcommittees--practically non-existent during the recruitment debates--could well be continued and enlarged.

There is a definite role that the Student-Faculty Advisory Council can and should play at Harvard. A representative body of students and faculty members adds an important facet to the organizational structure of the community. It is unfortunate the Council had to spend such a large chunk of its first year formulating a policy on what was really a dead issue. SFAC should proceed to other important matters.