Brass Tacks Support The Supercouncil

AN ARDENT anti-aristocrat in Eliot House is a great supporter of Harvard's final clubs. The clubs. he insists, are a public service because "they keep the damn preppies out of everyone's hair."

A similar argument can be made in support of the proposed new Supercouncil-a central student government uniting all the students on all the newly created Faculty committees-that Harvard students will be asked to vote for at Spring registration. Harvard will, one assumes, continue to attract in each freshman class about 150 young men who plan on becoming President of the United States-the student council president from Minneapolis who was governor of Boys' State, or the Milton grad who plays squash with the Kennedys. With the death of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, the Harvard Radcliffe Policy Committee, and the Student Faculty Advisory Committee, are we resigning the Frank Raines of tomorrow to a life of pinball at Hazen's?

Actually we are not. Before the dust has settled on Widener Library's copy of the Fainsed Report, before you can say "Subcommittee of Six." we will have elected. willy-nilly, eleven students to the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life, five to the Committee on Undergraduate Education, seven to the Committee on Students and Community Relations. and perhaps four to the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. What the backers of the Supercouncil have in mind is to bind these students together into one group. It's not a bad idea.

HARVARD needs an elected central student government. All the new committees have Faculty members: none has even a majority of students. Furthermore, each is limited to a specific area of undergraduate concern. On the other hand, efficiency and the lack, even at Harvard, of enough presidential contenders would make it difficult to hold annual elections both for these Faculty committees and for some sort of separate student council. It is difficult enough to organize any student election here with a straight face, and legitimacy comes almost in inverse proportion to numbers. The fact that the Supercouncil would draw its members from an already established bureaucracy means it could more easily be taken seriously.

The Supercouncil would have no real power, but it would have almost direct access to the Faculty docket. It is impossible, of course to ever suppose that all Harvard students will speak with one voice. (Will we ever see Hillel's Jay Rothstein and SDS's Chency Ryan together on the bottom of a leaflet? Are there any Russian Jewish painters helpers?) But the Supercouncil could bring proposals to the Faculty with at least a limited claim of moral support from a substantial number of students-a claim that even now might carry some weight in certain Faculty circles.

At issue also is a $10 fee to be added onto the tuition bill. Five dollars of this would support the activities of the House Committee and the Freshman Council. The other five dollars would allow the Supercouncil to hire a secretary, print a few pamphlets every now and then, and make special grants to different undergraduate groups. The Homans Report on the Houses said. "There is no problem at Harvard that cannot be solved by money and liquor." The Radcliffe Union of Students already has an annual fee of $6. so this may actually be a bargain. Besides, we would not want to be accused of driving John Hanify to drink.

THERE is a story of two Psychology professors with adjacent offices in the upper reaches of William James Hall who spent several months studying each other through what each thought was a one-way-mirror. As the current round of investigations into causes, analyses of purposes, and suggestions for revisions merge into warm memories of a winter with plenty of kindling for the fireplace, the best reason for supporting a Supercouncil-a sort of monthly politico T-group-might be that we could be preventing a similar orgy of mutual criticism several years from now.