Faculty Council Elections Will be Completed Today

Balloting for the new Faculty Council ends today, and so far nearly 50 per cent of the Faculty has voted in the election. Results will probably be announced Friday afternoon.

Mail ballots for the Council must be received by 5 p.m. today by the secretary of the Faculty to be counted. The Council-which was established on the recommendation of the Fainsod Committee-will replace the Committee on Educational Policy and act as a Faculty steering committee and cabinet for the dean of the Faculty.

"Voting has been heavier than it was on the nominations," Glenn W. Bower sock '57, secretary of the Faculty, said yesterday. Three hundred and sixty Faculty members-about half-sent in ballots during the nominations last month.

Three-Year Terms

Those voting in today's elections, will choose 18 councilors from the 51 candidates nominated-four tenured and two non-tenured members from each of the three academic divisions: Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The councilors will serve three-year terms.

John T. Dunlop, acting dean of the Faculty, will serve as chairman of the Council, with Harvey Brooks, dean of Engineering and Physics, as vice-chairman.

The Fainsod Committee had recommended that Council members be appointed by the dean of the Faculty, and approved by the Faculty. The Faculty later voted to elect the Council directly and selected a committee headed by Kenneth J. Arrow, professor of Economics, to devise a proportional selection system.

The committee came up with a system similar to the one used by the Cambridge City Council to elect the Mayor. Each Faculty member is asked to rate as many candidates as he chooses in descending order of preference-from 1 to 51.

First-choice votes will be tabulated, and quotas established for each category. Those candidates whose votes exceed the quota will be declared elected. If no candidate is elected, the candidate receiving the least number of votes will be eliminated.

Votes for eliminated candidates will be redistributed to second-choice candidates. Ballots for elected candidates will be redistributed to second-choice candidates as fractions of votes.

A group of Nat Sci 110 students-supervised by William H. Bossert, Gordon MeKay Professor of Applied Mathematics-has devised a computer program for counting the votes. Votes will be fed into a computer Friday afternoon.

"We hope to have the results by Friday afternoon," Arrow said yesterday. "If this were done by hand, it could take four people three or four days to do it-and even then, the chances of error would be great."