Harvard Racist?

To the Editor:

After hearing of the constitution committee's recent decision to give seven minority organizations automatic fractional voting privileges on the executive committee of the student council, I became disturbed by the implications of this action.

If such action is indeed necessary, because minority interests would not be served without it, then one or both of the following must be true:

1) The student body as a whole harbors inherent prejudices and wishes to reflect these biases by choosing representatives who are incompetent or blatantly unsympathetic to minority concerns;

2) The representatives chosen in good faith by the students, because of seemingly honorable characteristics, privately harbor these same prejudices and are likely to advocate these prejudices in force in council decisions.

If either of these generalizations is an accurate representation of Harvard's students, and I claim neither their truth nor their falsity, then there is a crisis of prejudice and partiality which needs to be addressed by the administration on a campus-wide level.

If the constitutional committee's action is valid, then I believe that it constitutes a direct mandate to President Bok, Dean Epps, and others, to investigate immediately the true "liberalness" of the undergraduate community, and to move from the findings of such an investigation in a direction of addressing and abolishing through education, in a specific sense, any biases or iniquties, whose ramifications would necessarily extend far beyond the bounds of the student council. Robert Coburn '85